OP ARTS AND SCIENCES. 213 



Gosnoltl made his voyage, so memorable in the history of New Eng- 

 land, to the shores of Massachusetts. Gabriel Archer, one of his com- 

 panions, wrote an account of it. In this he says, ' I commanded some 

 of my companie to seeke out for crabbes, lobsters, turtles, &c., for 

 sustayning us till the ship's return.' He uses the same word in one 

 other passage. In these two passages we have probably the first 

 occurrence in print of the word turtle with this application. But John 

 Brereton, another of the same ship's company, who also wrote an 

 account of Jhe voyage, addressed to Sir Walter Raleigh, does not use 

 it, and speaks of the ' whales, tortoises, both on land and sea, scales, 

 cods,' &;c. Tortoise alone is found in the accounts of voyages to 

 America immediately afterwards ; viz. in Gilbert's to Virginia (1603), 

 Waymouth's to Penobscot (1605), and Nicol's to the West Indies 

 (1605).* But in 1610 turtle recurs in two independent narratives f of 

 the wreck of an English ship at Bermuda, in consequence of which 

 a company of English gentlemen and sailors, bound to "Virginia, were 

 detained on this hitherto uninhabited island for nine months. One of 

 the narrators, William Strachey, who was one of the company, writes : 



' Then the tortoyses came in The tortoyse is reasonable toothsom 



(some say) wholesome meate One turtle {for so we called them) 



feasted six messes We should find five hundred [eggs] .... in 



* These, and the subsequent accounts of English intercourse with America, before 

 1625, are found in Purchas's Pilgrims, printed in that year. But Purchas, speak- 

 ing in his own person, uniformly adheres to " tortoise." — In tracing the history of a 

 word, one must resort to original writers. Captain Southey, in his " Chronological 

 History of the West Indies" (1827), quotes substantially these early voyagers, 

 but, with the habitude of a modern sailor, in more than one instance he substitutes 

 for tortoise another name, unknown in their day; and the remarkably accurate Dr. 

 Holmes, in his "Annals of America," o?!ce (under 1593) lapses into the anachro- 

 nism of " turtle-fat" for " oil of tortoises." Perhaps he was put off his guard by 

 having become familiar with this compound term during several years' residence, 

 in early life, near the coast of Georgia. 



t Memorable for their effect on Shakspeare's imaginatfon when he created 

 Prospero's Island. — The Spanish pronunciation of the name of Juan Berinudez, the 

 first discoverer of the island where the English ship was wrecked, is exactly rep- 

 resented in Shakspeare's " still-vexed Bermoothes " (the th being soft) ; which ac- 

 counts for the uncouth appearance of the name. Neither this, nor the corrupted 

 form Bermudas, has any plurality in it. The first boy born in the wrecked com- 

 munity was christened Bermudas, from which a feminine was made for the first-born 

 girl, Bermuda. 



