Place Names of Atlantic Canada

Olaf Uwe Janzen is an associate professor of history at Sir Wilfred
Grenfell College, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

This is an attempt to present the toponymy of all four Atlantic
provinces within the covers of a single book. Hamilton has taken a large
sampling of nearly 63,000 place names, organized them by province, and
briefly explained the origin of each name. An introductory chapter shows
how the region’s history and culture can be traced through its
toponymy, while a closing bibliographical essay makes clear just how
well-trodden a path Hamilton has followed and how persistent our
fascination with the origins of regional place names has been. Hamilton
acknowledges his debt to W.F. Ganong, Edward Seary, and others who
pioneered the scholarly study of place names, and he cheerfully invites
corrections and revisions.

Corrections there certainly will have to be, judging by the degree to
which “received wisdom” guided the author through the place names of
Newfoundland, the province I know best. He gives too much credit to
Channel Islanders for south-coast names that actually date back to the
French period before 1713. “Bay d’Espoir” was originally “Baie
de Désespoir” (not Bay des Esprits) in the 1600s, so that today’s
pronunciation (“Bay Despair”) is ironically closer to the original
meaning than is today’s spelling. James Cook is not responsible for
much of the toponymy of Newfoundland’s west coast; the French knew the
Bay of Islands as “la Baie des Trois Оles” long before Cook, while
Guernsey, Lark, Pearl, Tweed, and Humber were names bestowed upon the
landmarks of the Bay of Islands in 1764, before Cook ventured into the
region; Broom Point is almost certainly named for Jonathan Broom, a
merchant active on the west coast in the 1760s; and so on. Also,
Hamilton occasionally gets his history wrong: the Barbary pirates never
crossed the Atlantic; settlement was not illegal in Newfoundland; the
American ship Mercury was not captured on the Labrador coast by the
Antelope in 1780; Louisbourg should properly be described as a fortified
town, not a “fortress,” and was certainly not impregnable; and Sir
Wilfred Grenfell College is not “affiliated” with Memorial
University of Newfoundland—it is part of that university.

These are only a few of the errors I detected. If the other chapters
have as many, then the author has a job ahead of him before the next
edition appears.