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TEREALIS, @ \ e\TERRA co ny pm, PCANADA &~ 2 Nes e2=A B¥ oesc e ee ye sene ?t s BRE ee [Bats \ B PARA aS y — -naneEt es sNS Sets oe cope neabs, asi ei a, te, a?t xe eeys Be ee te 9 ee Ppetcees a aeaeeBtar e Baptizing the New World BAPTIZING THE NEW WORLD W hat’s in a Name? bye Angel Delgado-Gomez PROVIDENCE: RHODE ISLAND THE JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY MM:xX 2010 © COPYRIGHT THE JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY ->>o<<- THE JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARYIS | AN INDEPENDENTLY FUNDED AND ADMINISTERED INSTITUTION FOR ADVANCED RESEARCH ag IN HISTORY AND THE HUMANITIES LOCATED AT BROWN UNIVERSITY THE LIBRARY HOUSES ONE OF THE WORLD’S weea e: a OUTSTANDING COLLECTIONS OF EARLY AND RARE sa AMERICANA PRIOR TO 1825 ee CORRESPONDENCE SHOULD BE DIRECTED TO: RiaEtiatee - THE JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY Ata BOX 1894, PROVIDENCE =o s RHODE ISLAND O29Q012 - aeeee ee e COVER IMAGE: ABRAHAM ORTELIUS’ MAP Americae sive novi orbis, nova descriptio AMSTERDAM, 1592 Os ats Sc daca a al ee a an RE Ne TARE Bp Sth Pdh thE SCAChC CcCh SEts CS S || 6 <4 <4 <<< 54 <4-<4-<4 <0 FOREWORD The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point. —GABRIEL GARC{A MARQUEZ Cien atios de soledad (1967) S Shakespeare tells us in .4 Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of the great purposes of the poet’s pen is to give “to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” That principle cer- tainly applied to the name-givers of the New World, who, if not always poets, were nevertheless guided by a keen instinct for the evocative and descriptive. We do not always know who originated these words and phrases, entered authoritatively into the empty spaces of maps, sometimes over places that did not even exist. But we cannot deny their impact. The naming of the New World was nearly as important as its discovery, and helped to heighten the reality of lands that seemed other- worldly in every sense. Sometimes the names fit their sur- roundings perfectly—Florida was and is a flower-lover’s para- dise. At other times, the chosen geographic term was, to put it mildly, euphemistic. How else to describe the ambitious name claimed by a group of squabbling dissenters and misfits, mostly cast out of the world’s other places, when they gathered here in Providence? [5] With impressive scholarship, literary flair and a writer’s respect for the name-givers who wrote their way onto the maps, Angel Delgado-Gomez has retold this story for the John Carter Brown Library. The talk that led to this publication was delivered in Madrid, on the occasion of the annual meeting of the Lefty Lewis Cabal, in October 2008. That distinguished group of supporters, and all of the Associates of the JCB, are the mainstays of a Library eternally dedicated to the study of the great discoveries and their never-ending impact. TED WIDMER The Beatrice & ‘ulio Mario Santo Domingo Director & Librarian Fohn Carter Brown Library [6] S3 e e-prbrcbre fa> r>>e a ee ert yeh ot & BAPTIZING THE NEW WORLD | HE FINDING of the New World, more than any | other event, brought a challenge of unparalleled propor- | tions to the notions held by the inhabitants of the Old. Trav- | els through Africa or Asia could of course shake many long- established ideas and images about those lands, but at least the existence of those continents had long been integrated in the body of geographic knowledge established by the Greeks and Romans. This was not the case with the islands found by Co- lumbus in 1492, for which no verifiable reference could be ob- tained. The discovery of new lands in the Western Atlantic Ocean in 1492 brought encounters with a vast continent much larger than Europe itself, inhabited by peoples radically dif- ferent from any that the Europeans had seen, read about, or even imagined. The Spanish, first—and later the Portuguese, the French, the English, and many other European groups— eventually engaged in the most colossal enterprise of explora- tion, conquest, city-founding, and state-founding in history. A good number of rival nations set about claiming an ever- larger share of the new territories as colonies or provinces of their own. The vast toponymy of the New World includes physical features such as territories, islands, gulfs, mountains, [7] rivers, and so on, as well as new social territories such as cities, provinces, and indeed countries. We will survey one key and yet neglected aspect of this complex process of discovery and assimilation. It concerns the names given to the many physical as well as social and political realities of the New World. We will focus on these names, attempting to define and analyze the meaningful patterns of this peculiar baptism of new lands, so as to reveal the intentions and perceptions that people such as sailors, colonists, conquistadors, politicians, churchmen, and others had in mind when choosing and disseminating those nFeeie e eS place names. o> >e<<- By way of a prologue to this question, let’s look at the name, or rather the names, given to the new-found land as a whole. The goal of Columbus, known as Admiral of the Ocean Sea, was to reach the East by sailing west; so when he reached the Ca- ribbean he thought he must have been close, if not to Cathay (China), then at least to the big island of Cipango (Japan). Ap- propriately, then, he referred to the newly discovered lands in. general as “the Indies”—that is to say, the islands near India.! Columbus never meant to discover, and never in fact acknowl- edged having discovered, any unknown territory, so this reluc- tantly bestowed and thoroughly ambiguous term inaugurated an extraordinary season of name-giving lasting some hundred years. 1. Columbus’ contemporaries had practically no knowledge or even sim- ple basic information about India, China, or the Orient. Columbus trusted the old writings of Marco Polo, who had traveled there some two hundred years before, and who must have relied on hearsay or second-hand information from Arab and Turkish sailors. [8]