On the naming of ‘New South Wales’
Captain Cook named the whole Eastern portion of Australia ‘New South Wales’ when he arrived there in the HMS Endeavour, 22nd August 1770. Nobody knows why he did so. It certainly wasn’t because the place, as above, looked anything like actual South Wales. And actually it seems he first named it ‘New Wales’, only later opting for New South Wales. Why new Wales? Why the south? John Cawte Beaglehole:
The obvious guess is that as there was already a New Britain and a Nova Scotia, New Wales might not come unnaturally to Cook’s mind. There was also Carteret’s New Ireland, but Cook did not know that yet. But then there was a New Wales — named also New South Wales — in existence on eighteenth century maps: what corresponds to the present north Ontario, abutting on Hudson’s Bay… It looks as if Cook settled on his name, New Wales; remembered that it was already taken; then, forgetting that New South Wales was also taken, inserted South to make the distinction. [J C Beaglehole (ed) The Journals of Captain James Cook on his voyages of discovery. 1: The voyage of the Endeavour, 1768–1771 (Cambridge: for the Hakluyt Society at the University Press (1955), 388]
Trevor Lipscombe is not persuaded: ‘having spent several recent summers charting Newfoundland and parts of today’s Canada, and having a professional interest in charts, one might expect that Cook would have been aware of both these names, bestowed in the early 1600s.’ Lipscombe thinks the ‘Wales’ part was put in Cook’s mind because he had been thinking of the Prince of Wales:
On the same day, Cook, who had been sprinkling royal names in the area including York Cape, had named Prince of Wales Isles which might have brought Wales to mind. It has also been suggested that the addition of ‘south’ may have been a reference to the southern hemisphere, as if ‘New’ was not enough. [Trevor Lipscombe, ‘The origins of the name New South Wales’, Placenames Australia (Dec 2020), 3]
Maybe. But here’s another consideration. It’s true that what is now New Britain in Canada was originally named New Wales; but it is no longer called New Wales. In fact, three locations originally named or proposed to be named New Wales — in Canada, Pennsylvania and Australia — are no longer called New Wales. Could this be because it’s just not a very good name? I mean in terms of its connection of phonemes, its pronunciation: the two ws butting together. Hard to say it as New Wales without over-enunciating, which is a pain: in use the name would rub down into Newells, and that’s a surname, not a place name. Inserting the ‘South’ separates out the New and the Wales, and makes the whole thing more distinct in expression, three stressed syllables. Some names work, some don’t. Cook’s instincts perhaps recognised that.
