Silver coin struck by Laurens van Teylingden to commemorate the capture of the Spanish silver fleet by Dutch admiral Piet Heyn, in 1628 off Matanzas Bay in Cuba. It’s the only known representation of California Island on a medal. COURTESY STANFORD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES / PUBLIC DOMAIN PDM 1.0 DEEDAmerican Caliphate
Though the name “California” can be traced to a specific novel, its etymology remains disputed. In the novel, the island is ruled by Queen Calafia. Her job title suggests a derivation from the Arabic caliph (“ruler”)—“California” would thus mean something like “Caliphate.”
Another theory pinpoints the name’s origin to “Califerne,” a place mentioned in verse CCIX of the medieval Song of Roland (and also deriving from “caliph”), while a third one posits a derivation from Kar-i-Farn, Persian for “Mountain of Paradise.” One more: calit fornay, Old Spanish meaning “hot furnace.”
As early as 1539, an expedition by Francisco de Ulloa demonstrated that the area (near the southern tip of present-day Baja California, Mexico) was a peninsula after all. But fiction proved stronger than fact. Even though the earliest maps do show California attached to the mainland, the name for the place stuck.
‘Facies terrae americana in luna conspecta’ (‘The American face of the Earth, from a lunar perspective’): map by John Seller, part of his ‘Atlas Coelestis’ (London, ca. 1700). The island of California is the smaller mistake on this map—there’s also a giant southern continent almost touching the southern tip of South America. COURTESY STANFORD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES / PUBLIC DOMAIN PDM 1.0 DEED
Spanish vs. English
But the idea of the island of California proved pretty tenacious too. After an 80-year period of continental attachment, California started to appear on maps as an island, from 1622 onward and far into the 18th century.
California’s insular revival is generally ascribed to Antonio de la Ascension, a Spanish clergyman who had sailed along North America’s West Coast in the early 1600s and yet, contrary to the evidence, claimed California was an island.
Perhaps this was to invalidate the English claim on the continent. In 1579, Sir Francis Drake had landed at a place he called “Nova Albion” (today known to be Point Reyes, California), and claimed the region for England. If Drake’s landing could be situated on an island, De la Ascension seems to have thought, Spain’s claim to the mainland itself would remain undisputed.
Map published in 1772 by Augsburg cartographer Tobias Lotter, based on earlier work by Guillaume de l’Isle. Rather than choosing between a peninsular or an insular version California, it hedges its bets by blanking out the northern part of the narrow ‘Californian Sea’. COURTESY STANFORD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES / PUBLIC DOMAIN PDM 1.0 DEED