518 U. S. BOARD ON GEOGRAPHIC NAMES 



To this Board shall be referred all unsettled questions concerning geo- 

 graphic names which arise in the Departments, and the decisions of the 

 Board are to be accepted by these Departments as the standard autliorily in such 

 matters. 



Department officers are instructed to afford such assistance as may be 

 proper to carry on the work of this Board. 



The members of this Board shall serve without additional compensa- 

 tion, and its organization shall entail no expense on the Government. 



Benjamin Harrison. 



Executive Mansion, September 4, 1890. 



The policy of the Board was fully set forth in its first report, pages 6-10, 

 published in 1892; it also formed the subject of an article by Mr Henry 

 Gannett, chairman of the Board, which appeared in The National Geo- 

 graphic Magazine for July, 1896, and dealt at some length, and in an 

 exceedingly interesting manner, with the various difficulties encountered 

 by the Board in the performance of the important duty intrusted to it. 



As originally organized, the Board consisted of representatives, ten in 

 number, of the Geological Survey, the Coast and Geodetic Survey, the 

 Hydrographic Office, the Corps of Engineers, U.S. A., the Light-House 

 Board, the Department of State, the Post-Office Department, and the 

 Smithsonian Institution. Nearly all its original members were engaged 

 in geographic work of one sort or another, and their high professional 

 standing undoubtedly lent great weight to their decisions. The rulings 

 of the Board have with unimportant exceptions been fully sustained by 

 public opinion, and the only criticism that has been heard has been called 

 forth by that strict regard for consistency which has characterized the 

 Board in all its decisions. In the various Executive Departments its 

 rulings have had all the force of law. 



Among the earliest of its decisions was the one determining the spell- 

 ing of Puerto Rico, in which the Board adhered to its policy of adopting 

 the orthographic form in local use. For the following six years Puerto 

 Rico was the only form recognized in any of the Executive Departments. 

 It was a report from the United States Consul at San Juan, Puerto Rico, 

 that was published by the Department of State only a few days before the 

 blowing up of the Maine; it was to Puerto Rico that United States mails 

 were dispatched up to the breaking out of the war with Spain ; it was a 

 map of Puerto Rico that was subsequently issued by the Military Informa- 

 tion Division of the War Department; it was a bulletin on the Trade of 

 Puerto Rico that was published by the Department of Agriculture less 

 than six weeks prior to the acceptance by Spain of the President's terms 

 of peace. 



With the outbreak of the war, however, American newspapers, with 

 few exceptions, began to accustom the public to the form Porto Rico, 

 and it was only a short time before this spelling made its appearance in 

 the correspondence and publications of two of the departments. When the 

 final Treaty of Peace was made public it was found that, either through 

 ignorance of the fact that the Board on Geographic Names had made a 

 ruling on the subject or by one of those inadvertences on the part of an 

 engrossing clerk that have been known to invalidate entire acts of Con- 

 gress, the form Porto Rico was the one used in that copy of the treaty, 



