Azores

In 1432, Gonçalo Velho Cabral sailed west under orders from Infante Dom Henrique and found the first of a chain of volcanic islands rising from the Atlantic 1,500 kilometers from Lisbon. When Portuguese navigators charted the full archipelago over the following two decades, they recorded birds of prey circling the basalt cliffs. They called the islands Ilhas dos Açores, Islands of the Goshawks, from açor, the Portuguese word for the northern goshawk, Accipiter gentilis.

The identification was wrong. The birds were common buzzards, Buteo buteo, a species the Portuguese knew from the mainland but apparently confused with goshawks at sea. No goshawk has ever been native to the Azores. The name thus preserves a misidentification that is almost charming: nine islands permanently labeled for a bird that had nothing to do with them.

The word açor carries a long Latin inheritance. It descends from astur, the Latin name for a hawk, which Roman writers used to describe birds associated with Asturia, the region of northwestern Spain now called Asturias. Pliny the Elder recorded astur in his Natural History, describing a particularly fierce hawk from that region. The word passed into Ibero-Romance as astor and then açor as Portuguese phonology evolved its characteristic sibilant sound.

In 1439, the royal decree of Afonso V formally authorized settlement of the Azores, and the name Ilhas dos Açores became official. Columbus stopped at the islands in 1493 on his return from his first voyage to the Americas, making the archipelago a landmark in European discovery. The islands went on to serve as a waystation for Spanish treasure fleets, a relay point for transatlantic telegraph cables in the nineteenth century, and a NATO air base in the twentieth. But the buzzards circling the cliffs above Pico and Faial have no knowledge that their misidentified ancestors gave nine islands their permanent name.