From mankind’s earliest days, newcomers have heard natives speak about towns, hills, rivers, directions, and emotions and, in order to survive or get along, they spoke the new words and kneaded them into their dialect. As time passed, the spirit of the original meaning lived on like a word shadow.
This is true in modern Great Britain where ancient Celtic tribes mixed with Romans, Saxons, Normans, and more. The Welsh people have claimed to be the true and first human inhabitants of that kingdom. Their DNA reveals that the Welsh are indeed an old race of mankind. Their language, too, echoes ancient rhythms.
I mention this because I am descended from the Welsh, as are many Americans. The Welsh claim that an ancestor of ours was the first European to come to America in the 12th century. Madoc, a bastard son of King Owain of Gwyned, left Wales after his father’s death and ensuing fight among the King’s children over hereditary rule. After a while abroad, the Prince returned to tell of his adventures in a new world and persuaded some Welshmen to return to America with him. A group sailed away again in 1171. An epic poem points to their landing in the area of present day Mobile Bay, Alabama, from whence they moved into the central United States and were absorbed by native tribes. Proof of the Welsh presence in North America has been offered in the form of legends about towns with European-looking streets and stone houses similar to Welsh castles. The story goes that the stone houses were built by a tribe of white people. It is said, too, that the Mandan Indians, who were called white Indians, were quick to pick up the Welsh language. Of course, it is hard to verify this since the Madans were virtually wiped out by a nineteenth century smallpox epidemic.
Of course, today we know that great numbers of native peoples live in cities in the Americas before 1492. In the century between Christopher Columbus and John Smith, these advanced American cultures were attacked by armies of non-native bugs set lose by the coughs and sneezes of European explorers. The native American population plummeted and their cities decayed. The so-called Indians that survived in smaller tribes, like the Mandans of the Midwest and the Algonquians who lived around the rim of the Chesapeake Bay, were remnants of former well-developed native American civilizations.
All of this is to say that we have no idea how the Chesapeake Bay got its name. I have always heard that “Chesapeake” meant, roughly speaking, “great shellfish bay.” This is the definition I found on the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s website, and I have never had any reason not to believe them.
Until recently. I read John Smith’s Chesapeake Voyages, 1607-1609 by Helen C. Rountree et al, and I stand corrected. I respect Helen’s thoroughgoing, lifelong research on early American topics and if she says it’s so, who am I to disagree? I am merely a born-again amateur historian, a college history major and short-time museum curator. I went to the dark side in the 1980s with everyone else who thought an M.B.A. degree was a golden ticket. It never suited me and so here I am scribbling. A few years ago, I shared the podium with Helen at a King’s Daughters’ authors’ event and I sensed that she fairly bristled at the occasion of sitting next to the likes of me. (Perhaps I'm oversensitive?) I talked about my local history book on Gloucester County and she talked about her book, Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown. I wanted to tell her how much I admired her well-researched and written book, Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries, but the time never seemed right. A missed opportunity.
In any case, in the John Smith book she says this: “Most Algonquian place-names in the region cannot be translated today, even though a few of them (e.g. Pamunky, Piscataway) appear repeatedly up and down the Atlantic coast. The meaning of the name of the great bay itself is uncertain. Philip Barbour wrote that it meant ‘country of people on the great river’ which accords with the English of the Roanoke colony originally hearing the name in connection with the Chesapeake Indians, not with the bay at all. The Spanish called the great estuary Bahia de Santa Maria (St. Mary’s Bay), and their sometime guide Paquinquineo (Don Luis) called the region he knew Ajacán. But nobody recorded the native names (probably plural) for the bay.”
I feel especially good about repeating her words because the “great shellfish bay” translation is the meaning most familiar to anyone with more than a passing interest in the Chesapeake Bay. I worry that the John Smith’s Chesapeake Voyages book may not be widely read. It was produced for the 400th Anniversary of the Jamestown landing, and the hoopla that the event inspired also inspired lots of competing merchandise and collectibles. I almost didn’t bother with it myself, but I’m glad that I did. I especially liked the chapters that described in detail the natural world that John Smith and his band gazed upon on their voyages. The vivid descriptions of nature, along with the painstaking remake of Smith’s voyages by following his log while paddling in a similar boat, explored by co-authors Wayne Clark and Kent Mountford, make the world of the Chesapeake Bay, if not the meaning of the word in particular, come to life.
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation says that the Europeans heard the natives refer to the bay as "Tschiswapeki." However, on the map viewed by most as the most accurate of the sixteenth century (above, courtesy the U.S. Library of Congress), the proper noun is spelled “Chesepiooc.” The map, published in 1590 in a volume about new-found lands, includes several renderings based on drawings of the New World by John White. The map brings together White’s well-known work with additional images picked up from other sources. It is a well-done hodge-podge, but lends credence to the theory that the Chesapeake moniker had less to do with the body of water than it does with the native tribe known to use the name. Note on the De Bry map that Chesepiooc is written on the area of land. Chesepiooc sinus (sinus being Middle English from the Latin for cavity or hollow) appears on the waterway.
Soon after the Virginia Company settlement, John Rolfe developed a strain of sweet tobacco that was a hit in the Old World. Virginians had struck their gold. Wannabe landowners and planters arrived in droves and took up tracts all around the shoreline of the Chesapeake Bay and its tributary streams. The Bay geography was perfect for English ship captains and merchants, who moved around the bay and its streams from one farm to the next to fill their ships with hogshead barrels full of weed.
And so, in the words of Rountree, “By the end of the seventeenth century, the English had won the population contest.” Disease and force of arms had won the day. “There remain today only a few native speakers still fluent in one of the Algonquian languages of the Chesapeake region—the Oklahoma descendants of the Leni Lanape (Delaware). All the other Indian people in the region now speak English.”
We may never know exactly what Chesapeake means. Embedded in our language is this word and other “Algonquian-derived names: hickory, persimmon, and pecan.” These and many other native words have been absorbed and are used daily by those of us newcomers who love to tramp through the woods and wetlands and paddle or sail transfixed by the scent, hue, and breeze of our Chesapeake Bay home.
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