Columbus and place names

He was the man who discovered the Caribbean (not that he knew where he was; all he knew was that he hadn’t fallen off the edge of the world, although that could conceivably happen just over the next horizon). There is also a view that Columbus was a ruthless man, single-mindedly looking for gold rather than having any more philanthropic purpose, who squashed any opposition that came his way (e.g. Amerindians) with his large number of troops and sophisticated weapons.

One privilege assumed by discoverers is the right to name things. The fact that his own name exists only in the country Colombia may point to a certain modesty on his part. A Venezuelan revolutionary, Francisco de Miranda, proposed calling the whole of the ‘new world’ Colombia, but somehow the idea didn’t catch on and the explorer’s name was grabbed by a country which was to become famous for its cocaine production and a former international goalkeeper called Rene Higuita, known as The Scorpion because of his trick of allowing the ball to go over his head before flicking it back over with his heels.

The Spanish were more interested in Trinidad than in Tobago, so the former has a Spanish name (English translation: trinity, presumably the Holy Trinity). This wasn’t one of Columbus’s more creative moments; when he sailed into the shallow waters of the northern tip of South America, he apparently thought it looked a bit like Venice (Venezie in his native language - he was Italian, although his voyages were funded by Spain), so he named it Venezuela.

The origin of the name Tobago, meanwhile, is as obscure as its most bloody-minded inhabitants could ever wish for. To read the findings of Dr Arie Boomer, the eminent Dutch cultural historian, is to pick your way through a jungle of theories from which just one thread emerges: it’s something to do with tobacco. Nobody knows for sure if it was the plant or some y-shaped tube through which the natives inhaled herb smoke to achieve a trance in which they could visit their ancestors in the spirit world. Or possibly something else entirely; such is the way with matters which are not properly documented, i.e. written down, and while in Columbus’s time some people could write, they didn’t have access to word processors or the internet through which to pass on facts for posterity.

The museum at Fort King George is, like all good museums, a priceless source of information about the past which most of us ignore in our obsession with the present. But in 400 years’ time researchers will be infinitely better resourced to find out what happened in the 20th and 21st centuries. Perhaps everyone will have access to non-invasive implants containing all the available information on a subject of their choice, so learning will require no effort. A teacher/digital librarian will simply load into the recipient’s brain everything that is known about local history. In the meantime, researchers do their stuff and the rest of us skim it for nuggets that look like fact.

Some of Tobago’s place names have been mangled in pronunciation and had to be reclaimed: you can see how Lower Quarter could turn into Locwater and Mount Dillon into Mundayland, just as the Bahamas developed from the Spanish baja (pronounced baha) mar, meaning low or shallow water. If the TT version of English is allowed to develop unchecked, things are going to go the same way.

Even in the future there will be anomalies, though. Such as ‘why, in a country in which people drove on the left hand side of the road, was there one small street where you had to drive on the right?’ For the benefit of future students, and indeed drivers in 2013 who have never been down Post Office Street in Scarborough, the reason is… no, it doesn’t make sense. It’s just a fact that could have been avoided by making Post Office Street one-way, but when you’ve driven up it once or twice it doesn’t feel that strange anyway. There’s even a weird logic to it if you don’t look too closely, and it’s something you just accept, as is the fact that if a road is called Post Office Street, one thing is for sure: there is no post office down there. Not anymore. Used to be, probably. Look it up if you like, and good luck to you.