BENCHMARKS - Maphead - page 51

The residents of Dildo, Newfoundland, have been more stalwart in the face of world at-
tention. The town believes it was named for one of the Spanish ships or sailors that first
explored the rocky coast. “ I feel sure that we've been here longer than artificial penises
have been around,” says Dildo's assistant postmistress, Sheila White. Locals seem filled
with Dildo pride, in fact; every summer, during Dildo Days, the traditional boat parade is
led by Captain Dildo, a wooden statue of an old fishing-boat skipper. In the 1980s, a Dildo
electrician named Robert Elford circulated a petition trying to change the town's name to
something like “Pretty Cove” or “Seaview,” but his neighbors poked fun at his crusade,
and he soon gave up. But many other towns near Dildo have changed their names to avoid
the sniggers of outsiders: Famish Gut is now Fair Haven, Cuckolds Cove is now Dunfield,
Silly Cove is now Winterton, and Gayside is now Baytona. The new names in these stories
are always tragedies; they sound like the made-up settings of comic strips or soap operas.
Something important is lost when an authentic bit of history is replaced with a bland town-
meeting consensus.
You'dthinkthatthelabelsonmapswouldbetheeasiestbitstogetright,butthestruggles
andcompromisesoftheBoardonGeographicNamesbeliethatidea.Namesaren'tneutral;
they come with agendas. In 1614, John Smith coined the name “New England” for the
North American coast he was exploring; his map of the area pointedly left off any Nat-
iveAmericansettlementsorplace-names.Instead, everyplacegotacozy —andcompletely
arbitrary—British name: Ipswich, Southampton, Cape Elizabeth. Most of Smith's names
never caught on, but one of his choices was adopted by the Mayflower pilgrims when
they founded their colony there six years later: Plymouth, a spot that the Wampanoag
Indians, then as now, actually called “Patuxet.” As late as 1854, Commodore Matthew
Perry steamed into Tokyo Bay and returned to Washington bearing a map of Edo, with all
the parts of the harbor given suspiciously un-Japanese names like “Mississippi Bay” and
“Susquehanna Bay.” On the map, some islets in the Uraga Channel have even been labeled
“Plymouth Rocks.” “Look!” the maps say, all wide-eyed and innocent-like. “These places
must be ours! Why else would they have our names on them?”