Countries Named After People

 

Distinctly tropical

I recently discovered that the Seychelles were named after Jean Moreau de Séchelles, a Frenchman, who never set his gallic, garlicky, eyes upon the islands that bear his name. 

The Seychelles were named in his honour because he happened to be the minister of finance when the islands were acquired by France in 1756. He had been in the post for a whole two years, and then he had a stroke and was replaced. His life was not extraordinary or eminent and yet he is on the map. He is a sovereign state. He has a seat at the UN. 

Anyway, I thought I'd make a list of countries that are named after people. 

There needs to be a caveat that there are a fair few countries that are sort of reverse-named. For example, the Czechs invented a mythical chieftain to explain their name. It's not the mythicism that I object to, only that that's not the origin. Similarly, everybody agrees that Ireland comes from a word meaning fertile, it was much later that as fertility goddess was invented as an origin myth.

All of the following were deliberately named after somebody, even if that somebody might not have existed. For example, the biblical King Solomon may not have existed, but the Solomon Islands are definitely named after him. 

I'll group them by the nationality of the person after whom they are named:

Spaniards:

The Dominican Republic is named after Dominic de Guzman, better known as Saint Dominic. He was born in Caleruega in Northern Spain in 1170 and founded the Dominican Order of monks. The capital, Santo Domingo is also named after him. Dominic moved to Bologna in 1218 and died there a few years later. His bones are in a church in Italy, his name is in the Caribbean.

The Philippines were named in 1542 after Philip II of Spain. He enjoyed a bloody mary, who was Queen of England at the time. But they didn't have any children. 

St Vincent and the Grenadines is (are?) named after Saint Vincent of Saragossa, who's feast day it happened to be when Columbus found the place. St Vincent was born in Huesca in Northern Spain in the third century AD and gruesomely martyred. If you enjoy ogling left arms, his is on display in Lisbon Cathedral. If you enjoy throwing live goats out of church towers (and who doesn't, secretly?), then that used to be the way they celebrated St Vincent's day in the town of Manganeses de la Polvorosa. 

Israel/Palestine/Judea

El Salvador is named after the saviour of us all, Jesus of Nazareth. There's a whole book full of amusing facts about him that you can get in bookshops and churches. So I shall move on.

Trinidad and Tobago. Trinidad is Spanish for Trinity, which is the composed of God the Father, the Holy Spirit (both of whom are of No Fixed Abode), and Jesus of Nazareth (see above). Tobago is probably named after tobacco, which was smoked there. So the name is really Trinity and Tobacco, which makes it sounds rather like a church that sells cigarettes on the side.

Antigua just means 'old' in Spanish. Columbus named it after the chapel of Santa Maria de la Antigua (Old Saint Mary) in Seville Cathedral, or possibly after the mural there of the same name. Mary was the mother of Jesus and terribly popular, I wrote about her here. 

St Kitts and Nevis. We'll start with Nevis, which sounds like an English surname, but is in fact a church in Rome. It's a corruption of Nuestra Señora de las Nieves meaning Our Lady of the Snows. There's a very iffy legend that the church of Santa Maria Maggiore was founded in the fourth century after an August snowfall on the Esquiline Hill in Rome. Why you'd name an island after a church named after a meteorological oddity, I do not know. But we'll chalk it up as another one for the Virgin Mary. 

St Kitts was named San Cristobal by Columbus, and it would have stayed that way, but the English took it over and translated San Cristobal to Saint Christopher. They then got very familiar and called it St Kitts. St Christopher was an early Christian martyr and lived with the burden of probably not existing. His name just means Christ-carrier, so you could almost chalk him up as another score for Jesus. According to legend, he was a Canaanite, which is why he's in this section.

São Tomé and Príncipe was named by the Portuguese after St Thomas the apostle, of doubtful reputation. The Principe bit was after Afonso, Prince of Portugal, who died aged 16 in a horsey accident. 

The Solomon Islands were named that by Spanish explorers in the sixteenth century. It is unclear why, but it seems certain that they are named after the Israelite king who probably flourished in the early tenth century. 

Italians

St Lucia is named after Saint Lucy of Syracuse, which is in Sicily. If she existed, she was a virgin and martyr under the Diocletian persecution, just like St Vincent. By coincidence, her body, for a while, was, allegedly, kept in the church of St Vincent in Metz. It's like a get-together. The island was named by Spanish sailors, nobody's sure when.

The United States of America are named after Amerigo Vespucci. Well the 'America' bit is, and that's good enough for me. Amerigo Vespucci was an early Italian explorer, who himself named Venezuela after Venice, because of the obvious similarities. I wrote about him here. 

Colombia is named after Christopher Columbus. It didn't get that name till the C19th, and Christopher Columbus never visited the place. So the namer of so many islands, has become the name of the mainland.

Bolivia is named after Simon Bolivar, the revolutionary leader. In fact, it was originally the Republic of Bolivar, but they changed their minds a couple of months later. Bolivar was still alive and had visited the place. 

British

The Marshall Islands are named after Captain John Marshall from Ramsgate in Kent. He and his friend Captain Thomas Gilbert were part of the First Fleet taking convicts to the brand new penal colony of Australia in 1788. Afterwards they decided to do a little exploring on the way to China. John Marshall tried to name some islands Lord Mulgrove's Range, but somehow they ended up being named after him. 

Kiribati. Meanwhile Thomas Gilbert named the Gilbert islands. The Gilbert islands have inhabitants who's language is called Gilbertese, and the way you pronounce Gilbert in Gilbertese is Kiribass, and you spell it (for some reason) Kiribati. So the nation is named after Gilbert, you just wouldn't know it. 

Dutch/Deutsch

Mauritius was an uninhabited (if not undiscovered) island that was grabbed by the Dutch in 1598 and named after their king: Maurice, Prince of Orange. I'm going to put him down as German because he was born in Dillenburg, which is firmly inside Germany. He did, though, drive the Spanish out of the Netherlands, which makes him rather cosmopolitan. Ultimately, his name derives from Morocco and Mauritania, which I explained in detail here. 

He never visited Mauritius.

Croatian

Once upon a Roman time there was a stonemason called Marinus who lived on the island of Rab in what's now Croatia. Like St Vincent and Saint Lucy he fled the Diocletian persecution in the late 3rd century, but for some reason he decided to flee to Italy and found a monastery, which seems a trifle foolhardy.

Many historians doubt his existence. But the site of his monastery is now the microstate of San Marino.

Omani

There's a tiny little island off Mozambique called Mozambique. The Portuguese liked it so much that they named the mainland after it. But the island itself was called that because, when Vasco de Gama arrived there in 1498, it was ruled by an Omani merchant called Mussa Bin Bique. 

Eswatini

King Mswati II (1820ish to 1865) did an awful lot of military stuff against neighbouring tribes. The country he created was called Swaziland, and is now called Eswatini. 

Peruvian

Peru was named after a chap called Biru, who may have been a regional king. However, one version of the story was that he was a perfectly ordinary local chap whom the Spanish conquistadors mistakenly thought was a king when they arrived in 1522. I prefer the latter version of the story.

And there we have it. The least controversial blog post to mention Israel and Palestine this week. Only two people were natives of the country named after them. Jesus and his mum are tied as most influential with two countries each. And Biru, or whoever he was, lives on.

And of course, Rhyme and Reason, my BRAND NEW BOOK comes out on Thursday. You can order it here. 

It's a Bloody Mary morning

Wilfred Owen and Jessie Pope: A Much Maligned Lady

 

More maligned than malignant

I've been writing a new book: a short, simple, light-hearted history of English poetry. And I've nearly finished. It ought to be out by Christmas and will probably be called Rhyme and Reason, although things are still to be finally decided.

While writing, I've found several things that won't fit in the book, but which, having done all the research I thought I'd put on record; and this neglected blog seems just the place to do that.

Today, for example, I've been chasing down something that I thought I knew about Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen. 

I remember being taught this poem at prep school, where Mr Wincott told the class that there was a lady poet in London who was writing verses telling people that it's "sweet and good to die for your country", or to use Horace's original Latin: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. 

Wilfred Owen's poem, we were told, was a brutal riposte from the actual soldiers - those who had fought and suffered - against the jingoistic women of London who were handing out white feathers and saying that war was lovely. 

I had a brief glance at Wikipedia, which told me that this was completely true, that the poet's name was Jessie Pope, and that the first draft of the poem was explicitly dedicated to her. The dedication was then changed to "a certain poetess", and finally dropped. 

So I thought that it would be jolly good for my book to print one of her poems next to his. Some of Jessie Pope's verses are available on the Internet, but they're all light-hearted rhymes and none of them fitted the bill. So I strolled over to the British Library this morning and got out Jessie Pope's War Poems (1915).

I've just finished reading the whole thing (it's not long) and there's absolutely nothing about it being sweet and good to die for your country. The rhymes are patriotic and encouraging: yes. They're very anti-German, but in a light-hearted sort of way, and there's actually one poem praising the a particularly honourable German naval captain called Karl Von Muller, in limerick form. 

But sweet and good to die for your country? Or anything like that? It's not there.

The last poem in the book is the most serious, and the closest I could find to anything like dulce etc. But it doesn't say that death is sweet. It simply mourns a soldier dead. Here it is [click to enlarge]:

Perhaps, I thought, it was another lady poet, and Wilfred Owen had got confused. So then I started trying to track the phrase in any poem from the relevant period. I found it. Twice. 

There are two poems praising dying for your country both titled Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori. And they both fit the bill perfectly.

The first is from 1916 and can be read here. 

The second is from 1917 and can be read here. 

But here's the thing. Both of those poems are by actual soldiers: Major Sydney Oswald and Corporal Harold John Jarvis. They're not by jingoistic women back home who Don't Understand War. They're by serving men who definitely do. 

What happened to the idea of the soldiers all being disgusted by Jessie Pope?

Jessie Pope's War Poems actually starts with a fan letter from a soldier reprinted in facsimile. Or it says it does. Here is the frontispiece:

The writing is pretty hard to decipher; but, after close inspection:

Dear Sir,

Some days ago I saw in your Continental edition some verses by Jessie Pope entitled "NO"

I would be very glad if you could send a marked copy of your English edition with those verses in it to 

Mrs Knight

3 Horsleigh Villa's

Star Lane 

Ash. Surrey

The verses were much admired by us all out here & I want you to send them to my wife for me, as they will be such a "buck up" for her, and bucking up means so much to those at home as well as for us. Really, they need it more, as after all, theirs is the most wearying suspense. 

I enclose you a couple of stamps I bought from home in payment, and at last find them useful. 

If you will do this for me I shall be very grateful

Yours faithfully

Syd G Knight [illegible]

I was immediately suspicious. It all looked too good for Jessie Pope. Was this just a sales ploy on the part of the publisher? Did a Syd G Knight of Surrey even exist? 

I decided to check up.

He did exist. And he made it to the rank of major. What's more he won the Military Cross. He survived the war and died in 1950. He was cremated in Woking (as mentioned in the Aldershot News). 

So what happens to the idea of Wilfred Owen speaking for all the Tommies against the women of London?

Well, he thought he was doing so. But he seems to have been entirely mistaken. The tommies liked Jessie Pope, and though there were poems claiming it was sweet and good to die for your country, they were written by soldiers. 

Why Wilfred Owen thought that about Jessie Pope, I don't know. But he was wrong.

My chapter on War Poetry just got a bit shorter, which is probably a good thing.

Here, by the way, is that poem that Sydney G Knight wanted his wife to read.