El Graduado
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George Monnat, Jr. posted the following on another thread that I was tempted to hijack:
"I read your yellow and history books while traveling for work this week, so the first thing I noticed on that map (here, he meant Franco's map of Cozumel) was them saying Cozumel is Mayan for Island of Swallows. The Republic of Texas annexation attempts blew me away. Do you think that would've been a good or terrible thing?"
For those who didn't know, the Republic of Texas sent two naval ships, the Brutus and the Invincible, to Cozumel in 1837, one year after it declared its independence from Mexico. While on the island, the Texas commodore planted the Texas flag and claimed the island for the Republic of Texas 'to the cheers of the island's inhabitants,' the commodore's report says. When the two ships got back to Galveston and sent word back to the president of Texas and.... well, read my book The True History of Cozumel and find out!
If the annexation had stuck, how different would Cozumel be? The US Virgin Islands (St. Thomas, St. Croix and St. John) would be one example of which way Cozumel could have gone. Puerto Rico is another.
Personally, I think Cozumel would have always marched to its own drummer, no matter who the Federal Government was that tried to impose their rule on the island. I recently found a document dated April 1848 in the Spanish archives that is an interview that a Spanish Naval Comandante held with the Caste War refugees on Cozumel in March of 1848. He said the refugees told him that they wanted Spain to annex the island, and if they were turned down, they would ask the US to annex them.
As far as Cozumel meaning Land of Swallows, I made my argument in my book of how Cozumel got its name and what it meant: "The 19th century Mayanist, Juan Pío Pérez Bermón, tried to paste together words he found in the Calepino de Motul to come up with an equivalent of 'Cozumel Island.' His manuscript (which he wrote in the first half of the 1800s) was later finished by others and published as the Diccionario de la Lengua Maya in 1877. The finished work says: 'The island of Cozumel has this name that means the same as ‘island of swallows:’ u peten cuzam, and since the conquest degenerated by poor pronunciation to cozumel; it should be cuzamil, as the Indians say, deriving it from swallow, in the sense of cuzam or cuzmin'
However, Juan Pío Pérez Bermón’s source for this tidbit, the Calepino de Motul, (otherwise known as the Motul Mayan-Spanish Dictionary) written in the years between 1580 and 1610 by Fray Antonio de Ciudad Real, actually does not say that. What happened was that Pérez simply took three different entries from three different pages of the Motul dictionary and stuck them together to invent his Mayan equivalent of 'Cozumel Island.' In the calepino, Ciudad Real defines peten as 'island, or province or region or district,' ah cuzam as 'swallow,' and luumil, as 'land or country where one is born'.
The truth may actually be that the name of the island was derived from the name of one of the local gods of Cozumel, Teel Cuzam, who Diego López de Cogolludo (in his 1688 book, Historia de Yucatán) says 'has shins like that of a swallow' (teel is the shin in Maya; cuzam is the swallow). In any event, the early sources in which the name of the island first appears are a varied lot and may not help much in determining the origin:
Coçumel in a Spanish royal decree dated 1518
Acuçamil in Francisco López de Gomara’s 1552 Historia General de las Indias
Cuzmil in Fray Diego de Landa’s circa 1566 Relación de las cosas de Yucatán
Cu Camil and Cusamil in Juan Josef Hoil’s 1781 Chilam Balam de Chumayel"
Any other versions of the story about where the name came from are just people speculating based on later versions and translations of these and later works. There is no early Mayan text or inscription still in existence that explains it.
"I read your yellow and history books while traveling for work this week, so the first thing I noticed on that map (here, he meant Franco's map of Cozumel) was them saying Cozumel is Mayan for Island of Swallows. The Republic of Texas annexation attempts blew me away. Do you think that would've been a good or terrible thing?"
For those who didn't know, the Republic of Texas sent two naval ships, the Brutus and the Invincible, to Cozumel in 1837, one year after it declared its independence from Mexico. While on the island, the Texas commodore planted the Texas flag and claimed the island for the Republic of Texas 'to the cheers of the island's inhabitants,' the commodore's report says. When the two ships got back to Galveston and sent word back to the president of Texas and.... well, read my book The True History of Cozumel and find out!
If the annexation had stuck, how different would Cozumel be? The US Virgin Islands (St. Thomas, St. Croix and St. John) would be one example of which way Cozumel could have gone. Puerto Rico is another.
Personally, I think Cozumel would have always marched to its own drummer, no matter who the Federal Government was that tried to impose their rule on the island. I recently found a document dated April 1848 in the Spanish archives that is an interview that a Spanish Naval Comandante held with the Caste War refugees on Cozumel in March of 1848. He said the refugees told him that they wanted Spain to annex the island, and if they were turned down, they would ask the US to annex them.
As far as Cozumel meaning Land of Swallows, I made my argument in my book of how Cozumel got its name and what it meant: "The 19th century Mayanist, Juan Pío Pérez Bermón, tried to paste together words he found in the Calepino de Motul to come up with an equivalent of 'Cozumel Island.' His manuscript (which he wrote in the first half of the 1800s) was later finished by others and published as the Diccionario de la Lengua Maya in 1877. The finished work says: 'The island of Cozumel has this name that means the same as ‘island of swallows:’ u peten cuzam, and since the conquest degenerated by poor pronunciation to cozumel; it should be cuzamil, as the Indians say, deriving it from swallow, in the sense of cuzam or cuzmin'
However, Juan Pío Pérez Bermón’s source for this tidbit, the Calepino de Motul, (otherwise known as the Motul Mayan-Spanish Dictionary) written in the years between 1580 and 1610 by Fray Antonio de Ciudad Real, actually does not say that. What happened was that Pérez simply took three different entries from three different pages of the Motul dictionary and stuck them together to invent his Mayan equivalent of 'Cozumel Island.' In the calepino, Ciudad Real defines peten as 'island, or province or region or district,' ah cuzam as 'swallow,' and luumil, as 'land or country where one is born'.
The truth may actually be that the name of the island was derived from the name of one of the local gods of Cozumel, Teel Cuzam, who Diego López de Cogolludo (in his 1688 book, Historia de Yucatán) says 'has shins like that of a swallow' (teel is the shin in Maya; cuzam is the swallow). In any event, the early sources in which the name of the island first appears are a varied lot and may not help much in determining the origin:
Coçumel in a Spanish royal decree dated 1518
Acuçamil in Francisco López de Gomara’s 1552 Historia General de las Indias
Cuzmil in Fray Diego de Landa’s circa 1566 Relación de las cosas de Yucatán
Cu Camil and Cusamil in Juan Josef Hoil’s 1781 Chilam Balam de Chumayel"
Any other versions of the story about where the name came from are just people speculating based on later versions and translations of these and later works. There is no early Mayan text or inscription still in existence that explains it.
