marquesas

Marquesas

marquesas

Spanish

“These islands were named for a Spanish noblewoman who never saw them.”

On July 21, 1595, the Spanish navigator Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira sighted a cluster of volcanic islands rising sharply from the South Pacific, the first European to reach them. He named them Las Marquesas de Mendoza in honor of García Hurtado de Mendoza, the Marqués de Cañete and Viceroy of Peru, who had funded the expedition. Some accounts extend the honor to the Viceroy's wife, the Marquesa de Cañete, making these enormous basalt peaks the permanent trophy of a patron who remained in Lima.

Marquesa is the feminine form of marqués, the Spanish adaptation of the French title marquis, from the Old French marchis, meaning lord of the marches. The medieval march was a border territory, a contested zone between kingdoms, and the lord who governed it held a rank just below duke. That Germanic root, marka, meaning boundary or border mark, is cognate with the English word march in the sense of a frontier. The islands' name carries, buried within it, a Germanic word for a line drawn in the ground.

The native Marquesan people, who had inhabited the islands for roughly 2,000 years before Mendaña arrived, called their home Te Fenua 'Enata, the Land of Men. Their navigational ancestors reached these islands from the Society Islands around 300 CE, and from the Marquesas, Polynesian voyagers pushed north to Hawaii and east to Easter Island. The name Mendaña gave them, honoring a colonial official in Lima, had no relationship to the islands' actual history or to the people who made them a center of Pacific navigation.

France established a protectorate over the islands in 1842, and today they form part of French Polynesia. Herman Melville spent three weeks in the Marquesas in 1842 after deserting his whaling ship in Nuku Hiva, and his novel Typee, published in 1846, introduced the islands to a wide readership. Paul Gauguin died on Hiva Oa in 1903 and is buried there still. The Spanish title of nobility that Mendaña bestowed in 1595 has outlasted the Viceroyalty of Peru by two centuries, still attached to islands that in every real sense were always Te Fenua 'Enata.

Related Words

Today

The Marquesas are among the most isolated inhabited islands on earth, roughly 1,400 kilometers northeast of Tahiti. About 9,000 people live there across six populated islands, maintaining a Marquesan language and culture that produced some of the most powerful monumental sculpture in the Pacific. Those tiki figures influenced Picasso and the surrealists when photographs reached Europe in the early twentieth century. The name the world uses is a Spanish bureaucratic honorific; the name the people use is Te Fenua 'Enata, which they have used since before Spain had a Viceroyalty of Peru.

Every island name carries its colonizer's logic somewhere in its syllables. The Marquesas carry a feudal title from medieval Europe's borderland system, channeled through a colonial capital in the Andes and attached to islands in Polynesia by a navigator who spent perhaps three weeks there. The Marquesan people remained. 'The land names the people who stay, not the people who name it.'

Discover more from Spanish

Explore more words

Frequently asked questions about marquesas

What does Marquesas mean?

Marquesas is the Spanish feminine plural of marquesa, meaning marchioness, a title of nobility. The islands were named Las Marquesas de Mendoza in 1595 by Spanish navigator Mendaña in honor of the Viceroy of Peru and his wife.

Where does the word marquesa come from?

Marquesa comes from Spanish marqués, adapted from French marquis, which derives from Old French marchis, meaning lord of the marches. The root is the Germanic word marka, meaning boundary or border territory, the same root as the English word march in the sense of a frontier.

What did the native people call the Marquesas?

The Marquesan people called their islands Te Fenua 'Enata, meaning the Land of Men in the Marquesan language, a name they had used for roughly 2,000 years before European contact in 1595.

When did the English form Marquesas become standard?

The English form anglicizes the Spanish feminine plural marquesas. It became standard through French colonial cartography after France established a protectorate in 1842 and has been the international English name since the nineteenth century.