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| 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.
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