Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [34]
The residents of Dildo, Newfoundland, have been more stalwart in the face of world attention. The town believes it was named for one of the Spanish ships or sailors that first explored the rocky coast. “I feel sure that we’ve been here longer than artificial penises have been around,” says Dildo’s assistant postmistress, Sheila White. Locals seem filled with Dildo pride, in fact; every summer, during Dildo Days, the traditional boat parade is led by Captain Dildo, a wooden statue of an old fishing-boat skipper. In the 1980s, a Dildo electrician named Robert Elford circulated a petition trying to change the town’s name to something like “Pretty Cove” or “Seaview,” but his neighbors poked fun at his crusade, and he soon gave up. But many other towns near Dildo have changed their names to avoid the sniggers of outsiders: Famish Gut is now Fair Haven, Cuckolds Cove is now Dunfield, Silly Cove is now Winterton, and Gayside is now Baytona. The new names in these stories are always tragedies; they sound like the made-up settings of comic strips or soap operas. Something important is lost when an authentic bit of history is replaced with a bland town-meeting consensus.
You’d think that the labels on maps would be the easiest bits to get right, but the struggles and compromises of the Board on Geographic Names belie that idea. Names aren’t neutral; they come with agendas. In 1614, John Smith coined the name “New England” for the North American coast he was exploring; his map of the area pointedly left off any Native American settlements or place-names. Instead, every place got a cozy—and completely arbitrary—British name: Ipswich, Southampton, Cape Elizabeth. Most of Smith’s names never caught on, but one of his choices was adopted by the Mayflower pilgrims when they founded their colony there six years later: Plymouth, a spot that the Wampanoag Indians, then as now, actually called “Patuxet.” As late as 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry steamed into Tokyo Bay and returned to Washington bearing a map of Edo, with all the parts of the harbor given suspiciously un-Japanese names like “Mississippi Bay” and “Susquehanna Bay.” On the map, some islets in the Uraga Channel have even been labeled “Plymouth Rocks.” “Look!” the maps say, all wide-eyed and innocent-like. “These places must be ours! Why else would they have our names on them?”
Somehow the unsettled Maine coast is full of charming little
English villages. Also, as a special bonus: no Indians!
It’s hard for Americans to understand the patriotism that can get bound up in place-names. We’re a young country. We’re also accustomed, in our cockeyed cowboy fashion, to everything else revolving around us, so we can afford to let slide the fact that, say, the Gulf of Mexico isn’t called the Gulf of America. (Although, according to John Hébert, that is the pet issue of one frequent complainant to the Board on Geographic Names.) If America Ferrera announced tomorrow that she was changing her first name to “Canada,” we’d be okay with it. We’d get on with our lives. But elsewhere in the world, toponymy is national identity. The imported Western atlases I saw on Korean shelves as a kid always had the words “Sea of Japan” blacked out on the Asian maps and the traditional Korean name, “East Sea,” hand-lettered below. Greece got so angry about the name of the newly independent Republic of Macedonia (historically, Macedonia was a region of northern