CALIFORNIA'S NAME

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 42, 19 February 1937, Page 4

CALIFORNIA'S NAME

FROM ROLAND'S SONG

A CURIOUS STORY

The Song jof Roland, epic of the Dark Ages, mentioned a land named Califerne and scholars have never been able to identify it except as a needed rhyme for Palerne, the old French form of Palermo, says a writer in the "Christian Science Monitor." The name, however, seems to have sunk into the mind of an obscure Spanish romancero named Ordonez de Montalvo who exercised =' his ■ sentimental pen four centuries later, at the? time when Columbus and his successors were spreading dreams of El Dorado throughout Europe. Montalvo wrote, about the year 1500. a- florid romance called "Las Sergas de Esplandian" in which he described the mythical land of California, which is a Spanish form, etymologists say, of Roland's Califerne. It was located "at the right hand of the Indies, very close to—the Terrestrial Paradise," and was peopled by dusky amazons ' whose "weapons were all made of gold and so was the harness of the wild beasts they tamed to ride. No otner metal but gold" was found in this wondrous place and the sheen of it dazzled the eyes of an avaricious age. CAPTIVATED EUROPE. Montalvo's novel increased Europe's gold fever and went through many editions, yet it was such trash thatj Cervantes gave it first. place in the' holocaust ■ wherein the curate and the ] barber destroyed the books that were befuddling the mind of Don Quixote. In J862, Edward Everett Sale unearthed this novel,' long * forgotten, pounced on the name California, and promptly assumed. that here was the original source of the much-disputed name to whose musical sound and glamorous connotation a great State owes a great debt. Subsequent investigations have borne out Dr. Hale, and his view of the-name's origin is now generally accepted. Perhaps California should erect a monument to the unknown French troubadour and the Spanish romancero, with the Boston clergyman sculptured at the base, for its name has been, and is still, an asset of incalculable money value. It unfailingly suggests romance and. it can hardly be mispronounced. Excepting New York, it is the only American State name, as I have learned by experience, which is known in. every village and hamlet of Europe. In roaming over the Monterey Peninsula from the city itself to the Del Monte forest and Carmel-by-the-Sea, I am daily impressed with the inexhaus-' tible riches of association which this peninsula possesses. It has the herit-: age of three flags, three civilisations, j which it cradled, and in' addition to that it has the great legacy left by the founder of the whole mission chain, this padre presidente who for more than a dozen strenuous years made his headquarters at the San Carlos Mission just above Carmel's beach and river, THREE TIMES CAPITAL. Monterey was the first Spanish capital of Alta California, the first Mexican capital (after the Mexican Republic took over the reins in • 1822), and the first. American capital. Here, in a building erected in 1849, by a-New England minister the State Constitution was drafted.'-The city' lost its status as capital and, apparently .without envy in its heart, was content to. carry on .as a small town while -California grew great. ,A cradle does .not necessarily grow with its occupant. Partly because it has let .the modern, world rush by on its inevitable course. Monterey has managed- to■.-retain., to an extraordinary degree,^ .the., appeal; of old-Spain in new America., Many of. the old adobes still .stand,, and,, tjjeir contours are as graceful, as those .".'of Nature herself. ■ -■ : .' As if the history of the city and its beauty was not enough to give it a great place in the western sun. Monterey is spiced by special associations. One of its houses, still standing, was j built from timbers of a trading ship I that went ashore in 1833. just below the custom house. -This ship was named the Natalia, but nineteen years earlier it had been a French sloop, and in it Napoleon Bonaparte escaped. from v Elba for his crowning adventure of the Hundred Days. The decks he trod are floors and walls of a present dwelling. Robert Louis Stevenson lived for a time in Monterey, working for a journal called the "Alta Californian" at a salary of two dollars a week. Like every visitor before and since, he loved this region and all it stood for. Like most of them, of us, he wrote down his enthusiasm. Perhaps best of'all he loved the "thrilling roar of the Pacific which hangs over the coast and the adjacent country like smoke above a battle." He loved the • waves that "come in slowly, vast and green, curve their translucent necks, and burst with a surprising uproar, that runs, waxing* and waning, up and. down the long keyboard of the beach." At that keyboard I am looking. To that thrilling roar I am listening.