You know I don't know for sure. My closest guess would be because apparently when Vespucci was in Venezuela he encountered some Iguanas, and he was both impressed and seemingly afraid of them. He didn't know what they were at the time, but he wrote a fairly extensive description about them in one of his letters
""Here we saw that they were roasting a certain animal like a serpent, except that it had no wings, and its appearance was so horrid that many of us wondered at its fierceness. We walked to their houses or sheds, and they had many of these serpents alive, fastened by their feet and with a cord round the snout, so that they could not open their mouths, as is done to pointers, to prevent them from biting. Their aspect was so fierce that none of us dared to go near one, thinking they were poisonous. They are the size of a young goat, and a fathom and a half long. They have long and thick feet, armed with large claws, the skin hard and of various colours. The mouth and face are like those of a serpent. They have a crest like a saw, which extends from the nose to the end of the tail. We concluded that they were serpents and poisonous, yet they eat them. "
*Bearing in mind that I'm pretty sure serpent did not always mean snake, and rather used to mean something closer to a creature more like a wyvern in nature
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