By nature, bodies of water are shared spaces. In the Mediterranean, the same waters that wash the shores of Spain cool the beaches of Beirut; on the savannah, the watering hole quenches the thirst of zebras and lions alike; the Amazon indiscriminately irrigates the soil of Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Guyana, and Suriname. Throughout history, however, various groups have tried to lay claim to waters, from the Cilician pirates who dominated the ancient Mediterranean in the first and second centuries BC to the Spanish Empire’s claim of ownership over the Mississippi River in the eighteenth century.
Even where there is no territorial dispute, the different groups living beside bodies of water have historically referred to the ocean, stream, or lake by their own names. In Southeast Asia, the river spaning six countries from China to Vietnam has several etymologically-unrelated titles, including the Lancang and the Mekong. Over centuries, the Mediterranean has been known by many names, from the Arabic Al-Bahr al-Abyad al-Mutadd, or the White Sea, to simply Mare Nostrum, or ‘our sea’, by the ever-humble Romans. The thin arm of the Atlantic that divides the British Isles from its continental cousins is proudly called the English Channel by the British, while the French know it as La Manche.
While, in general, hydronomy is a conservative branch of nomenclature (the local name for a body of water is usually retained for a long time within that region), political and cultural shifts can give rise to new appellations. For example, the stretch of water to the east of Italy was known as far back as the sixth century BC as the Adriatic Sea. The name persisted through the centuries until Venice emerged as a Mediterranean superpower. Merchant ships crossing the water to deliver or dispatch wares to and from the city-state came to dominate the sea, which began to be known as the Gulf of Venice, a hydronym that appears on a map by twelfth-century geographer Al-Idrisi. And yet, many years later, when Napoleon conquered the Republic of Venice, the ‘Golfo di Venezia’ again faded away from maps and charts, where the ‘Adriatic Sea’ once again rose to prominence.
Before the globalism of the twenty-first century, the independent naming of waters posed fewer problems: a society was free to call a sea or river whatever it liked and to label it so on its maps and charts. As the world grew ever more interconnected, it became increasingly important that toponyms and hydronyms were internationally recognizable. For example, in the aftermath of the First World War, the cold waters of north-west Europe, long known in English as the German Sea, were swiftly renamed. Internationally, maps and charts adopted the more neutral ‘North Sea’ (‘Nordsøen’, ‘Noordzee’, ‘Mer du Nord’, ‘Nordsee’, ‘Nordsjön’).
Indeed, our own international age calls for global, uniform units, names, and standards with which all nations and peoples can act and interact. Thus, the International Hydrographic Organization, or IHO, works to standardize maritime measurements, navigation equipment, materials, and terminology. Although it does not have the power to rename a body of water officially, the IHO often receives petitions and pressures from various groups campaigning to have a sea, river, or lake recognized by a specific name. Prominent among these disputes is the ongoing contention between Japan and South Korea concerning the sea that separates them.
To the former, it is unquestionably the Sea of Japan, while the latter claim that this name is redolent of brutal colonialism and came to prominence only during the twentieth century. The IHO adopted the ‘Sea of Japan’ as the chosen hydronym for international nautical charts in a meeting of 1929, where Japan was in attendance, representing Korea as its colony. Later, the Republic of Korea made its own independent claims of the water to be recognized as the East Sea, bringing the issue before the United Nations. Various meetings of the U.N. and IHO over the past century have addressed the dispute, with the result that the Sea of Japan remains in official usage, while some maps and charts diplomatically choose to display both names.
A similar battle continues to be fought over the name of the one-thousand-kilometer-long body of water between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula. Modern Iran rejects any attempt to rebrand the Gulf, refusing entry to any aircraft that does not use the name ‘Persian Gulf’ on its in-flight monitors, and banning the sale of ‘The Economist’ in 2006 after it published an issue containing a map simply labelled ‘The Gulf’. The international community is largely in agreement, with the U.N. stating in 2006 that if “geographers and specialists were to select a name for this gulf, doubtlessly, they would find no better name than the Persian Gulf because Iran [Persia] is the largest country adjacent to this water body which possesses the longest coast”.
In antiquity, both ‘Sinus Arabicus’ and ‘Sinus Persicus’ were used to describe waters in the Middle East; however, the former described not the water now known alternatively as the Arabic or Persian Gulf, but rather the Red Sea. It is true that throughout history, the Gulf has been strongly associated with Persia, but that has by no means been its exclusive appellation. Various mapmakers and geographers throughout the centuries have labelled it with hydronyms as disparate as the ‘Mare de Balsera’, ‘Mare di Mesendin’, ‘Mare el Catif’ and even in one brazen article in the ‘Times Journal’ in 1840, the ‘Britain Sea’! Indeed, the earliest use of the term ‘Arabic Gulf’ can be found in the second, and far more valuable, edition of Fracanzano da Montalboddo’s travelogue, ‘Itinerarium Portugallensium’, in which the ‘Sinus Persicus’ of the 1507 edition has become ‘Sinus Arabicus’. And yet, there is no doubt that the rise of Arab nationalism in the 1960s brought the name back to prominence.
In response to the ongoing debate over the Gulf’s name, Google showed itself to be genuinely diplomatic, with a spokesman for Google Earth tactfully clarifying in 2008 that the program intended to “display the primary, common, local name(s) given to a body of water by the sovereign nations that border it… If different countries dispute the proper name for a body of water, our policy is to display both names”.
But Google’s involvement in hydronomic hysteria was far from over. When President Trump announced his intention to rename the Gulf of Mexico the ‘Gulf of America’ in his second inaugural address, the proposal was met with the predictable range of support, disgust, and general snickering. Just a week later, in an executive order, Trump confirmed that “the Gulf will continue to play a pivotal role in shaping America’s future and the global economy, and in recognition of this flourishing economic resource and its critical importance to our Nation’s economy and its people, I am directing that it officially be renamed the Gulf of America”.
Many people turned to Google Maps as the cartographic authority of the day to see how this decree would affect the world’s most-used map. To general surprise, the company confirmed that it would be updating its application to show the oceanic basin between Mexico and the USA as the ‘Gulf of America’, but only for American users, and only once official government sources had been updated to bear the new name. “Everyone in the rest of the world [will] see both names”, they claim.
Although the body of water has held a variety of names (early maps and explorers’ accounts refer to ‘Gulf of Cortés’, the ‘Gulf of New Spain’, the ‘Bay of St. Michael’, the ‘Gulf of Florida’ and even on one map the ‘Chinese Sea’!) there is no precedent for its new nationalistic hydronym. The term Gulf of Mexico, which was first found on a 1561 world map by Giacomo Gastaldi, has been the standard appellation for the basin for almost half a millennium.
GASTALDI, Giacomo, Carta Marina Nuova Tavola, [1561].
President Trump’s actions of January 2025 call into question the legitimacy of unilaterally renaming geographic features. Certainly, the ‘Gulf of America’ does not constitute the leader’s most egregious use of power, and the act will not take effect anywhere outside of US borders. Still, it nonetheless points to a disregard for international expectations and cooperation and a determination to isolate and elevate the United States of America. While toponyms and hydronyms have the potential to carry emotional, cultural, and political meaning, it takes much more than the name of a sea or mountain to make a country great (again).
Bibliography
Choi, Yearn Hong, ‘From Poetry to Ethics: Mapmakers on Naming of the Sea Between Japan and Korea’, in ‘The Journal of East Asian Affairs’, 2009, pages 115-144.
Faričić, Josip, Orietta Selva, and Dragan Umek, ‘Geographical names of the Adriatic Sea on medieval and early-modern maps and nautical charts’, in the ‘Journal of historical geography’, 82, 2023, pages 68-80.
Government of Japan, ‘”Sea of Japan”, The One and Only Internationally Established Name’ in ‘We Are Tomodachi’, 2019.
Levinson, Martin H., ‘Mapping the Persian Gulf naming dispute’, in ‘ETC: A Review of General Semantics’, 68, no. 3., 2011, pages 279-287.
This piece was taken from Daniel Crouch Rare Books, on crouchrarebooks.com
Daniel Crouch. Specialist dealer in rare, vintage, and antique maps, atlases, plans, sea charts, and voyages dating from the 15th to the 19th centuries. Our carefully selected stock also includes fine prints, globes, and scientific instruments.
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