Why would anyone accord to a comparatively obscure navigator who did not discover the continent nor even set foot on it till some years after its discovery the honour usually reserved for royalty - and which they did not give to Columbus/Colon?  I still feel a lingering doubt; if named for Vespucci why would they not call it “Vespuccia”?  Waldseemuller must surely have known of the practice of restricting the usage of personal names to royalty, and I wonder why he chose to support the idea that people in this case - and as far as I can discover only in this case - ignored what could almost be called a rule.  Pity that we can’t ask him about it!

Robert Scott Ross and the OED now trace the figurative sense to the radical journalist William Cobbett, whose Weekly Political Register thundered in the years 1803-35 against the English political system he denigrated as the Old Corruption. He wrote a story, presumably fictional, in the issue of 14 February 1807 about how as a boy he had used a red herring as a decoy to deflect hounds chasing after a hare. He used the story as a metaphor to decry the press, which had allowed itself to be misled by false information about a supposed defeat of Napoleon; this caused them to take their attention off important domestic matters: “It was a mere transitory effect of the political red-herring; for, on the Saturday, the scent became as cold as a stone.”

This story, and his extended repetition of it in 1833, was enough to get the figurative sense of red herring into the minds of his readers, unfortunately also with the false idea that it came from some real practice of huntsmen.