View of the entrance to Bahía de San Juan, Puerto Rico with the Castillo San Felipe del Morro, a fortification built between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, in the foreground
14 April 2021
The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States in the Caribbean. Part of the Greater Antilles island chain, Puerto Rico consists of the eponymous main island and several smaller islands.
The Taino name for the island was *bo-rĩ-kẽ (land of the home people), and the island and its people are still occasionally referred to by the Spanish derivatives of that name, Boriquén and Boricua.
European contact with the island began when Columbus landed there in 1493, during his second voyage. He dubbed the island San Juan Bautista (St. John the Baptist) and the bay now known as Bahía de San Juan as Puerto Rico (Rich Port). Over time the name San Juan became associated with the island’s capital and the name Puerto Rico, became associated with the entire island.
Puerto Rico starts appearing in English by 1580, when it appears in a translation of Nicolás Monardes’s Ioyfull Newes Out of the Newfound World (Historia Medicinal de las Cosas que se Traen de Nuestras Indias Occidentales que Sirven en Medicina), a botanical reference work:
A little whiles past, certaine wild people going in their Bootes to S. Iohn De puerto Rico, to shoote at India[n]s, or Spaniards, if that they might find the[m], came to a place and killed certain Indians, & Spaniards, & did hurt many, & as by chaunce there was no Sublimatum at that place to heale them, they remembred to lay vpon the wounds the Ioyce of the Tabaco, & the leaues stamped. And God would, that laying it vpon the hurtes, the griefs, madnes, & accidents wherwith they dyed, were mittigated, and in such sort they were deliuered of that euill, that the strength of the Uenom was taken away, and the wounds were healed, of the which there was greate admiration.
The island remained a colony of Spain until 11 April 1899 when it was ceded to the United States during the settlement of the Spanish-American War.
Porto Rico was a common spelling in both English and Spanish and until 1932 the official name of the U.S. territory. One can still see that spelling today, although usually only in material from earlier in the twentieth century or earlier.
Sources:
Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.
Granberry, Julian and Gary S. Vescelius. Languages of the Pre-Columbian Antilles. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama Press, 2004, 9, 69–70. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Monardes, Nicolás. Ioyfull Newes Out of the Newfound World Wherein Are Declared the Rare and Singular Vertues of Diuers and Sundrie Herbs, Trees, Oyles, Plants, [and] Stones (Historia Medicinal de las Cosas que se Traen de Nuestras Indias Occidentales que Sirven en Medicina). John Frampton, trans. London: Thomas Dawson for William Norton, 1580, fol. 36v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2020, s.v. Puerto Rican, n. and adj.
Photo credit: Francisco Jose Carrera Campos, 2009. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.