5 Country Names That Are Stupid When You Know the Backstory

Then, having served out his exile like a good little Viking (and in what could possibly have been a dick move in payback for sending him away in the first place), Erik returned to Iceland in search of warm bodies to help defrost his newfound land. The problem is, how do you convince others that your icy rock is "totally a great place to live, you guys, like really?" Simple: You give it a nice, warm-sounding name. So, he came up with Greenland, "Because men will desire much the more to go there if the land has a good name."

And it totally worked, because around 500 people returned with him to establish two separate colonies. The fact that they didn't haul ass straight back across the sea at the first sight of a slavering polar bear tells us that Erik the Red's fangs must have been the scarier of the two.

Perhaps one of the most interesting tidbits describes "a most noble and beautiful Island, and one of the greatest in the world, for it is about 4,000 miles in compass." The inhabitants of this tremendous atoll ate nothing but camels, and the place was veritably crawling with "leopards, bears, and lions," as well as "more elephants than in any country in the world." Polo called this fantastic place "Madeigascar," and his description is so vivid, you'd almost believe he visited the island himself. (He didn't.)

CoreyFord/iStock/Getty Images
"... and unicorns! Shit-tons of unicorns!"

The Crazy Reason Behind the Name:

You know what Madagascar has lots of? Animals that are found in no other place on the planet, most notably stripy-tailed ones that like to move it, move it. You know what they have not a single, solitary one of? Fucking elephants. For that matter, they have no leopards, no bears, and no lions, and if you asked a native what camel tastes like, he'd probably crotch-punch you for being some kind of pervert.

In short, much like the public pool in which you played his eponymous game a kid, Marco Polo was full of shit. He was, in fact, mistakenly assigning Madagascar the description (along with a bastardized version of the name) of Mogadishu, a town on the coast of Somalia nearly 1,500 miles to the north on the African mainland.

Via Google Maps
Here be camel-eaters.

A Portuguese explorer -- who, unlike Polo, actually set foot on the island -- tried to name it St. Lawrence two centuries later, but by that time it was too late. Polo's misnomer had stuck. Even the native Malagasy people, whose language doesn't combine the letters "sc" and ends all words in a vowel, had taken to calling the island "Madagasikara," whereas before they had simply referred to it as "This All" or "This Whole." Admittedly, though, when you're referring to your homeland as something that could easily be confused with "this hole," it's badly in need of a new name -- inaccurate or not.

And when generations of treasure hunters searched around Israel and failed to find this hoard that would turn Smaug green with envy, well, they just kept looking farther and farther away. How far, you ask?

The Crazy Reason Behind the Name:

How about east of Australia, otherwise known as damn nigh 9,000 miles from Israel?

The idea came about when Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, a 16th century Spanish government official living in Peru, became fascinated by the Incas. He steeped himself in their rich legends and history, but he just couldn't quite believe that these natives could have built such a prosperous and civilized society, because racism. So he theorized that the Incas had actually come to the New World from Terra Australis Incognita, a mythical land then thought to exist in Earth's Southern Hemisphere (and that would eventually come to be known as Australia, after people discovered that it was less gold-rich myth and more venom-rich horror novel). Others had previously speculated that Ophir, the place mentioned in the Bible as the source of King Solomon's gold, lay somewhere in that same vicinity -- put two and two together, and boom! King Solomon's gold must have come from a land down under.

Paramount Pictures
The script for a Crocodile Dundee prequel damn near writes itself.

His theory was so convincing that he managed to put together an expedition in search of some mythical riches and bitches. The explorers sailed west from Peru for over two months, being inappropriately diddled by uncooperative winds the entire time, until they finally made landfall, not on Australia, but on a string of islands to its northeast. They of course found precisely one fewer hoard of gold there than they'd hoped to, but word of their expedition had become so popular that everyone back home started calling those islands the Solomons, and the rest is history.

The Crazy Reason Behind the Name:

Well, three other explorers arrived at the same spot not long after that and rated it a resounding "meh." When Alonso de Hojeda, Amerigo Vespucci, and Juan de la Cosa landed on some islands around the land described by Columbus, they found it sorely lacking in the "big-ass apple tree with a talking snake in it" department. What they did find, however, were lots of natives living in these:

Peter & Jackie Main, via Wikipedia
Maybe Venice also had a problem with giant, terrifying swamp mosquitoes.

Once they were able to take a break from dodging arrows and generally trying to avoid ending up in a giant pot with diced carrots and onions (according to the explorers, the natives were cannibals), they turned to each other and said, "You know what? This place totally looks like Venice." So the mainland was named Veneziola -- literally "little Venice" -- and the name has survived ever since.

OK, so they may have been a bit homesick, seeing as how they decided to sail back to Europe right after that. Also, they were just arriving from Colombia with their pockets full of emeralds, so they were probably feeling pretty generous as they daydreamed of going home to greet their throngs of explorer groupies (which we assume were a thing back then). Even so, the absurd leap they had to make to see some ramshackle huts inhabited by (alleged) cannibals and make a connection to one of the largest and most prosperous cities in Europe makes us think there was some sort of scurvy-induced dementia going on.

The Crazy Reason Behind the Name:

It would be, except for the fact that, depending on whom you ask, either those letters were forgeries or Vespucci was the Renaissance explorers' answer to Thomas Edison (i.e., a lying douchebag who leeched the credit from others to bolster his own fame and fortune). Apparently even Waldseemuller had second thoughts as to the authenticity of Vespucci's (or Vespucci's forger's) story, as he removed all references to America from his later maps. By that time, though, it was too late -- other mapmakers had already adopted the name.

Via Wikimedia
"Sorry, Leif Erikson, but getting your name on a globe is a marketing game."

But wait, it gets more complicated! Others theorize that the word "America" was already in common use before Waldseemuller stuck it on his map -- he just assumed that Vespucci's first name was the source of the word, when in actuality it came from "Amerrique," an Indian tribe in Nicaragua that both Columbus and Vespucci had infected and enslaved -- er, visited. Some even think that Vespucci fudged his first name from Alberico to Amerigo just to make it sound more like the common name for the New World and ensure his lasting legacy.

But wait, there's one more! Still others theorize that the name didn't come from either "Amerigo" or "Amerrique," but from Richard Amerike, a 15th century businessman who didn't discover jack shit, but who threw piles of money at other people so they'd do it on his behalf. And if you think about it, that seems like a pretty fitting ancestral origin for modern America.

Even though the proponents' points could certainly raise an eyebrow, serious historians (you know, ones with impressive beards) don't give much credence to either the "Amerrique" or the "Amerike" theory, instead sticking with the tried-and-true forger-or-asshole origin. No matter which story you buy, one thing's for certain: Damn, there sure were a lot of people whose names smacked of freedom back in the olden days.

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