NEW AMSTERDAM GARDENS 
7i 
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 k. 
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- 
