The naming of America

[Ace42X]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/discovery/exploration/americaname_03.shtml

[Ali]

Have you read Made in America (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/0380713810/ref=dp_proddesc_0/002-9900447-7324813?%5Fencoding=UTF8&n=283155), by Bill Bryson?

Fascinating. Full of corrections to commonly-held historical fallacies, explains why American English differs from real English and lots of other interesting stuff.

For example: The image of the spiritual founding of America that generations of Americans have grown up with was created, oddly enough, by a poet of limited talents (to put it in the most magnanimous possible way) who lived two centuries after the event in a country three thousand miles away. Her name was Felicia Dorothea Hemans and she was not American but Welsh. Indeed, she had never been to America and appears to have known next to nothing about the country. It just happened that one day in 1826 her local grocer in Rhyllon, Wales, wrapped her purchases in a sheet of two-year-old newspaper from Boston, and her eye was caught by a small article about a founders' day celebration in Plymouth. It was very probably the first she had heard of the Mayflower or the Pilgrims. But inspired as only a mediocre poet can be, she dashed off a poem, "The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers (in New England)," which begins

The breaking waves dashed high
On a stern and rock-bound coast
And the woods, against a stormy sky,
Tneir giant branches toss'd


And the heavy night hung dark
The hills and water o'er,
Men a band of exiles moor'd their bark
On the wild New England shore


and carries on in a vigorously grandiloquent, indeterminately rhyming vein for a further eight stanzas. Although the poem was replete with errors--the Mayflower was not a bark, it was not night when they moored, Plymouth was not "where first they trod" but in fact marked their fourth visit ashore--it became an instant classic, and formed the essential image of the Mayflower landing that most Americans carry with them to this day.*

The one thing the Pilgrims certainly didn't do was step ashore on Plymouth Rock. Quite apart from the consideration that it may have stood well above the high-water mark in 1620, no prudent mariner would try to bring a ship alongside a boulder in a heaving December sea when a sheltered inlet beckoned nearby. If the Pilgrims even noticed Plymouth Rock, there is no sign of it. No mention of the rock is found among any of the surviving documents and letters of the age, and indeed it doesn't make its first recorded appearance until 1715, almost a century later.1 Not until about the time Ms. Hemans wrote her swooping epic did Plymouth Rock become indelibly associated with the landing of the Pilgrims.

Wherever they landed, we can assume that the 102 Pilgrims stepped from their storm-tossed little ship with unsteady legs and huge relief They had just spent nine and a half damp and perilous weeks at sea, crammed together on a creaking vessel small enough to be parked on a modern tennis court. The crew, with the customary graciousness of sailors, referred to them as puke stockings, on account of their apparently boundless ability to spatter the latter with the former, though in fact they had handled the experience reasonably well.' Only one passenger had died en route, and two had been added through births (one of whom ever after reveled in the exuberant name of Oceanus Hopkins).

They called themselves Saints. Those members of the party who were not Saints they called Strangers. Pilgrims in reference to these early voyagers would not become common for another two hundred years. Even later was Founding Fathers. It isn't found until the twentieth century, in a speech by Warren G. Harding. Nor, strictly speaking, is it correct to call them Puritans. They were Separatists, so called because they had left the Church of England. Puritans were those who remained in the Anglican Church but wished to purify it. They wouldn't arrive in America for another decade, but when they did they would quickly eclipse, and eventually absorb, this little original colony.

It would be difficult to imagine a group of people more ill-suited to a life in the wilderness. They packed as if they had misunderstood the purpose of the trip, They found room for sundials and candle snuffers, a drum, a trumpet, and a complete history of Turkey. One William Mullins packed 126 pairs of shoes and thirteen pairs of boots. Yet they failed to bring a single cow or horse, plow or fishing line. Among the professions represented on the Mayflower's manifest were two tailors, a printer, several merchants, a silk worker, a shopkeeper, and a hatter--occupations whose indispensability is not immediately evident when one thinks of surviving in a hostile environment.3 Their military commander, Miles Standish, Was so diminutive of stature that he was known to all as "Captain Shrimpe"4--hardly a figure to inspire awe in the savage natives, whom they confidently expected to encounter. With the uncertain exception of the little captain, probably none in the party had ever tried to bring down a wild animal. Hunting in seventeenth-century Europe was a sport reserved for the aristocracy. Even those who labeled themselves farmers generally had scant practical knowledge of husbandry, since farmer in the 1600s, and for some time afterward, signified an owner of land rather than one who worked it.

They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigors ahead, and they demonstrated their incompetence in the most dramatic possible way: by dying in droves. Six expired in the first two weeks, eight the next month, seventeen more in February, a further thirteen in March. By April, when the Mayflower set sail back to England,* just fifty-four people, nearly half of them children, were left to begin the long work of turning this tenuous toehold into a self-sustaining colony.


*The Mayflower, like Plymouth Rock, appears to have made no sentimental impression on the colonists. Not once in History of Plimouth Plantation, William Bradford's history of the colony, did he mention the ship by name. Just three years after its epochal crossing, the Mayflower was unceremoniously broken up and sold for salvage. :p It goes on to say that, if it weren't for some Native Americans, who helped them and just happened to speak English, they would all have perished!

As for where America got its name America got its name from, of course, a Florentine named Amerigo Vespucci, but no one is sure why he got the credit. Letters were circulated in 1504-1505, claiming that he had been captain of some expeditions across the Atlantic, and had discovered the "Nuovo Mundo." This was untrue; he was only a passenger or lowly officer at best, and anyway hadn't been the first over here, but a mapmaker in France caught hold of these letters, and decided to name the continent after the guy. (He translated it into Latin, "Americus," then made it feminine. He also considered "Amerige.")

[sam i am]

EVERY country has myths and legends about it's founding. Rome was believed to have been founded by Romulus and Remus, suckled by a wolf.

Russia was founded by the defeated Rus tribe of peoples, forced out of Ukraine, but became "Mother Russia" and a holy symbol of the ongoing Orthodox Church upon the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453.

Istanbul was founded on the site of the old Greek town of Byzantium, and it's city walls were supposedly laid out by Constantine the Great, a Roman Emperor who converted to Christianity and walked the ground following a vision of a Cross in the sky.

Name me one country that DOESN'T have some kind of foundation myth or legend attached to it that serious historians can demolish with modern archaeologoical evidence and perusal of primary and secondary sources from the time near the founding.....

[Funkaloyd]

East Timor.

[Ali]

EVERY country has myths and legends about it's founding. Rome was believed to have been founded by Romulus and Remus, suckled by a wolf.

Russia was founded by the defeated Rus tribe of peoples, forced out of Ukraine, but became "Mother Russia" and a holy symbol of the ongoing Orthodox Church upon the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453.

Istanbul was founded on the site of the old Greek town of Byzantium, and it's city walls were supposedly laid out by Constantine the Great, a Roman Emperor who converted to Christianity and walked the ground following a vision of a Cross in the sky.

Name me one country that DOESN'T have some kind of foundation myth or legend attached to it that serious historians can demolish with modern archaeologoical evidence and perusal of primary and secondary sources from the time near the founding.....Damn funny when they do!

[sam i am]

East Timor.

hahahaha....good try.

I'd be willing to bet a dollar that they have some kind of foundation to their claim that is sheathed in some kind of myth or legend from "ancient" times about their "right" to have a homeland now.....

[YoungRemy]

sorry , but America was named after Amerigo Vespucci

[Documad]

sorry , but America was named after Amerigo Vespucci
That's what I learned in school.

I've also never heard that poem about Pilgrims.

[Vladimir]

Yeah, my history books says Amerigo Vespucci (http://www.studyworld.com/Amerigo_Vespucci.htm) is the namesake. He first visited the New World in 1497-1498, sent by the Medici family bank IIRC.

[Ali]

So America was really named by a Frenchman?

:p

Freedom Fries, indeed.

[Calimero jr.]

Amerigo Vespucci was Italian ;)

[Jasonik]

...a mapmaker in France...decided to name the continent after the guy

[Ali]

Amerigo Vespucci was Italian ;) what he said

[checkyourprez]

a lot of people wanted to name the continents columbia (for guess who). that woulda been weird huh.

but then again it wouldnt because we'd be used to it, and find it weird they wanted to name it america.

[Ali]

a lot of people wanted to name the continents columbia (for guess who). that woulda been weird huh.

but then again it wouldnt because we'd be used to it, and find it weird they wanted to name it america.What would Columbia be called, then?

[ms.peachy]

Have you read Made in America (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/0380713810/ref=dp_proddesc_0/002-9900447-7324813?%5Fencoding=UTF8&n=283155), by Bill Bryson?



I love his books. I'm reading The Lost Continent now, which is a bit of an older one (1989, I think?) but is equally full of little known facts and curiousities about small cities across the US.

When we were moving to the UK, someone gave me Notes from a Small Island as a going-away gift and I loved it. Just re-read it a few months ago now that I've been here a few years, and it's about a thousand times funnier still.

[Ali]

I love his books. I'm reading The Lost Continent now, which is a bit of an older one (1989, I think?) but is equally full of little known facts and curiousities about small cities across the US.

When we were moving to the UK, someone gave me Notes from a Small Island as a going-away gift and I loved it. Just re-read it a few months ago now that I've been here a few years, and it's about a thousand times funnier still.My favourite Bryson, too! Has such a good Take on the English, which is all the funnier if you've gone through the same process as he. Other faves are Notes from a Big Country (the story where he's trying to get something out of the loft and the step ladder falls away, leaving his legs dangling and what his wife says to him just crack me up) and Down Under, where he describes cricket... the only game which lasts five days and can still end in a draw!!!

I've just finished his opus, A Short History of Nearly Everything (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/0767908171/ref=cm_cr_dp_pt/002-9900447-7324813?%5Fencoding=UTF8&n=283155&s=books)... absolutely brilliant!

[ms.peachy]

Haven't gotten to either Down Under or Short History yet. I am sure I will in time though.

The part that cracked me up in Notes from a Big Country was the part where he was talking about how none of the kids from his kids' schools walked to or from school, "apart from the the four that constantly bitched about it in Yorkshire accents".

[checkyourprez]

What would Columbia be called, then?


America?

i really have not a clue. Something spanglish id bet.

[sam i am]

What would Columbia be called, then?

North and South Columbia?

The US probably would have been called Turkeyland, if Franklin had his way :p