What's in a name?

UNESCO Courier, May, 1997 by Luis Mizon

The Yahgan were a people living in Tierra del Fuego ("land of fire") who used to ply up and down the coast in their small boats and build themselves makeshift shelters on islands or on the banks of inlets. The last of them, a woman who was born in 1887 and died in 1983, wrote, "I am the last survivor of the Wollaston islanders. There used to be five Yahgan tribes, each from a different place but all speaking the same language. Before I could walk, I had been as far as Cape Horn, strapped to my mother's back. Everybody called me Rosa, because that was how I was christened by the English missionaries, but my real name is Lakutia the kipa. Lakutia is the name of a bird and kipa means woman. All Yahgans are named after the place where they were born, and my mother gave birth to me near Lakutia Bay. That's how it is done among our people: we are given the name of the place that welcomes us to the world."

It is several centuries, however, in Chile and elsewhere in Latin America, since geographical names told the simple tale of people living in symbiosis with their environment. Instead they speak of the clash of two peoples and two cultures fighting over the same territory. Indigenous names and European names of coastal features and mountains are associated with different memories. Today these names intermingle in a landscape into which the indigenous population wanted to melt while the Europeans simply wanted to take possession of it.

* Leaving their mark

For the explorer who comes from afar, the land is like a new-born baby, as yet nameless. The names bestowed on places by the European navigators and explorers who began arriving on the southern coast of Chile in the sixteenth century have political or religious connotations, or else express a sense of beauty or were even inspired by passionate love. Only seldom did the newcomers keep the indigenous name.

The annexation of the Araucan lands, followed by their exploration by naturalists and their colonization, gave rise to a new series of terms and appellations. The vast territory inhabited by the Indians who provided Alonso de Ercilla, in the sixteenth century, with the inspiration for his epic of the conquest, La Araucana, lay roughly between the Pacific, the Andes and two rivers, the Bio-Bio (or Malleco) to the north and the Tolten (or Calle-Calle) to the south. These lands were gradually integrated into the territory of Chile in the nineteenth century, the process being completed by 1883. There are still many Araucans today, but the indigenous populations of the clusters of islands that stretch from the Isla de Chiloe to Cape Horn have become almost entirely extinct.

Between Cape Horn and the main island of Tierra del Fuego, the place-names are sometimes English (the Wollaston, Picton, Lennox, Button, Gordon King and Scott Islands), sometimes French (the Hermite and Bertrand Islands and the Pasteur Peninsula), or Spanish (Caleta Hernandez, Santa Rosa or Mejillones), with a few Yahgan Indian names thrown in, such as Bahia Tekenika, Canasaca or Wulaia. Thus, one name may be concealed behind another. Onashaga was the Yahgan name of the Beagle Channel and Yakashaka was that of the Murray Channel, at the mouth of the Strait of Magellan.

As for Valparaiso, the leading port on the Pacific side of the continent before the construction of the Panama Canal, its Spanish name means "Vale of Paradise". This was the place where, in the great days of sail, mariners who had passed the Strait of Magellan or rounded the Horn making for the Pacific coast of South America dreamed of dropping anchor.

* Acts of possession

History sometimes seems to have hesitated over the choice of a name, even to the point of rejecting the one proposed by the discoverer. Magellan, for instance, having entered the strait that was to bear his name on the first day of November, decided to call it All Saints' Strait, but it subsequently became known by other names - Straits of Patagonia, Victoria and the Moluccas, or again Dragon's Tail Strait - but in common parlance it remained the "Strait of Magellan ".

A similar process is associated with the naming of Cape Horn. Although the first person to have mentioned it seems to have been Sir Francis Drake, who entered the Strait of Magellan on 20 August 1578, the first sailors to round the Cape, on 29 January 1616, thus connecting the two great oceans, were the Dutchmen Jacques Le Maire and Willem C. Schouten. They named it Cape Hoorn after the village where Schouten was born. Spanish captains later wanted to rename it San Ildefonso, but Spanish sailors were content to change "Hoorn" to "Hornos" (Spanish for "ovens"), perhaps in the hope of lending a little imaginary warmth to cliffs that are forbidding and icy, despite forming part of the "Land of Fire".

The naming of a place is both an individual and a collective act. To name is to possess. Every newcomer thus leaves the imprint of his language and the signs of his passage. Alonso de Ercilla, one of the discoverers of Chiloe, an island with an Indian name, expressed very well the keen powers of observation and the underlying sense of pride of the discoverer who leaves his mark upon a place. In Part Three, Canto XXVI of La Araucana, he dwells at length on the exploration of Chiloe and some of the neighbouring islands, inhabited by Indians. The Indians, he tells us, "were filled with amazement and wonder at the sight of these strangers [white-skinned, fair, hairy and bearded] with a different language and different clothing".