NEW AMSTERDAM GARDENS 71 



locked bay, presented to the imaginative savage a 

 veritable summing up of all earthly beauty. So he 

 called it just that "Wonderful (or Majestic or 

 Noble) Place of Surpassing Beauty" which is the 

 free rendering of the compound. Its spelling would 

 be more nearly correct without the aspirate that is, 

 Ma-na-ata. It is quite possible, however, to under- 

 stand the anxiety to emphasize that soft and elusive 

 third syllable, which led to the inserting of the h. 

 The discoverers, taking no chance of its being lost, 

 put this rough letter before it, to drag it out of its 

 gentle somnolence. 



The red men who lived in the region would of 

 course be "Ma-na-atas" to the strangers; it is hardly 

 probable that few ever knew or thought or cared 

 whether the name was actually the name of the tribe 

 or not. It served to identify the people as well as 

 the place, to the whites; that was sufficient. As for 

 the old map makers, they took pains to show that 

 this was the term which the Indians applied to all 

 the section round about and one, more painstaking 

 and conscientious than the rest, or less certain of his 

 guess, possibly, spelled it in two ways on the op- 

 posite sides of the river. Or possibly the Indians did 

 make a distinction between the island and the main- 

 land by a change in the termination of the word, so 

 that "Ma-na-ata" referred to the latter, while "Ma- 



