[GANONG] INDIAN PLACE-NOMENCLATURE 193 
Micmac which has led Gatschet into one of his rare errors in saying that the word is 
Micmac (Op. cit., 22). 
OTHER EXPLANATIONS.—One of my correspondents at Passamaquoddy has 
informed me, on the authority of certain Indians, that the name is MENOUANOOK, 
containing the root of WOUAN (pronounced as one word) which means EGG, and 
he interprets the name as meaning PLACE WHERE THEY GO TO GET GULL’S 
EGGS. But this explanation requires a forced pronunciation, and leaves the first 
part of the word unexplained. 
A very different origin has been given for Grand Manan. Thus, Thomas Baillie, 
in his excellent Accownt of the Province of New Brunswick, 1832, 118, makes it signify 
GREAT ST. MARY’S ISLAND. Baillie was Surveyor General of New Brunswick, 
and took this explanation, I have no doubt, from a very important Report on Grand 
Manan made by the Surveyor Donald McDonald in 1806, a document which is still 
in the Crown Land Office at Fredericton. In this Report the name is given as 
GREAT MARY ISLAND. Now MacDonald, in preparing his report, had visited 
Campbello Island where David Owen was then Proprietor. Among David Owen’s 
papers preserved until recently at Campbello is a list of explanations of place-names 
prepared by him (These Transactions, XII, 1906, ii, 55), which list is dominated by 
the obscession that our principal Indian place-names were derived by the Indians 
from the French, as various examples later to be given in these papers will illus- 
trate. On this basis he makes MANAN an Indian rendering of MARY, referring to 
the Virgin, and hence GRAND MANAN, an Indian rendering of a French GREAT 
MARY. Absurd though this explanation may be, it is really no worse than a good 
many others which are current. 
SUMMARY.—The name MANAN, of Grand and Petit Manan, is certainly of 
Maliseet-Passamaquoddy-Penobscot Indian origin, a corruption of MUN-AN-OOK’ 
and means ISLAND PLACE, or simply THE ISLAND (used as a proper noun), 
the prefixes having been added by the French to distinguish the two. 
