Barbados

Portuguese explorers encountered Barbados around 1536, during their Atlantic crossings between Brazil and West Africa. The island was uninhabited when they arrived, the Arawak and Caribs who had once lived there having disappeared before European contact. The name they gave it, Os Barbados, meaning the bearded ones, described the indigenous fig trees (Ficus citrifolia) whose hanging aerial roots gave each tree the appearance of a shaggy, bearded face.

The fig tree is now called the bearded fig or the stranger fig, and it is the national tree of Barbados. Its aerial roots descend from the branches and take hold in the ground, sometimes surrounding and eventually strangling the host tree. The Portuguese saw hundreds of them along the coast, their trailing roots brushing the ground like long beards, and gave the island its collective plural name: the bearded ones.

England claimed Barbados in 1625 when Captain John Powell landed at what is now Holetown and raised a flag. Two years later, the first English settlers arrived, and within decades Barbados had become a sugar colony worked by enslaved Africans. The Portuguese name traveled unchanged into English usage. Unlike Jamaica and the Bahamas, Barbados required no orthographic adjustment, already written in a script English speakers could use without modification.

Barbados developed what historians call the Barbados model of sugar plantation slavery, a system later exported to the American South and the broader Caribbean. When the island gained independence in 1966 after more than three centuries of British rule, the government chose to keep the Portuguese name. In 2021, Barbados became a republic, removing the British monarch as head of state, but the trees that gave it its name still grow along the western coast, trailing their long roots.