A tom turkey, Meleagris gallopovo, displaying during mating season
23 November 2020
Through a series of mistaken identities, Meleagris gallopovo, which graces many an American Thanksgiving table, shares the name turkey with its cousin species Meleagris ocellata. The common turkey ranges from Mexico to southeastern Canada, while the oscellated turkey is confined to the Yucatan in Mexico.
The name turkey comes from a conflation with another bird of the of Galliformes order, the guineafowl. That bird, which is native to Africa and hence its name, comprises a number of species in the family Numididae. Although they are rather distant cousins, the guineafowl and the turkey resemble one another and can be easily confused by laypeople.
Guineafowls were given the name turkey because the bird was introduced to Western Europe by Turkish merchants in the mid sixteenth century. In 1541, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer promulgated a protocol on what should be served at official meals which refers to turkey cocks, a probable reference to guineafowl:
It was also provided, that of the greater fyshes or fowles there should be but one in a dishe, as crane, swan, turkeycocke, hadocke, pyke, tench; and of lesse sortes but two, viz. capons two, pheasantes two, conies two, wodcockes two.
A helmeted guineafowl, Numida meleagris, at Serengeti National Park, Tanzania
A few years later, in 1542, the second edition of Thomas Elyot’s Bibliotheca Eliotae makes an unambiguous reference to guineafowl as turkeys:
Meleagrides, byrdes, whiche we doo call hennes of Genny, or Turkie hennes.
When European explorers encountered the North American bird, they gave it the name of the similar-looking bird they were familiar with. There are two references to turkeys in Richard Eden’s 1555 translation of Peter Martyr d'Anghiera’s Latin Decadas del nuevo mundo (Decades of the New World). Both of these references occur in the marginalia. The first of these is a reference to the birds found along the shores of the Gulf of Paria, in what is now Venezuela. The text reads:
With the golde and frankensence whiche the presented to owre men, they gaue them also a greate multitude of theyr peacockes,bothe cockes and hennes, deade and alyue, aswell to satisfie theyr present necessitie, as also to cary with theym into Spayne for encrease.
And in margin is printed:
Peacockes which wee caule Turkye cockes.
And later, describing an incident near Cozumel in the Yucatan, Eden writes:
Owre men wente and they came accordynge to their promisse and brought with them eyght of their hennes beynge as bygge as peacockes, of brownyshe coloure, and not inferiour to peacockes in pleasaunte tast.
And again, there is a marginal note which here reads:
Turky hens
In both cases, d’Anghiera’s original Latin uses pavo or peacock—like the peacock, the turkey has multi-colored feathers and a fanned tail, so there is a vague resemblance. Eden does a word-for-word translation in the main text but adds the marginal notes to indicate that it is actually a different bird. But just as d’Anghiera conflated the newly discovered bird with the peacock, Eden conflated it with the guineafowl.
That’s how a series of mistakes led to us eating turkey on Thanksgiving.
Sources:
Anghiera, Pietro Martire. De rebus oceanicis & orbe nouo decades tres. Basil: Ioannem Bebelium, 1533, 38, 72. Internet Archive.
Constitutio Thomae Cranmeri (1541), in Wilkins, David. Concilia magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, vol. 3 of 4. London: R. Gosling, 1737, 862. Hathitrust Digital Archive.
Eden, Rycharde. The Decades of the New Worlde. London: William Powell, 1555, 79r, 158v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Elyot, Thomas. Bibliotheca Eliotae, second edition. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1552. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. turkey, n.2, turkey-hen, n., turkey-cock, n.
Image credit: Turkey: unknown photographer, c. 2009, public domain image; guineafowl: unknown photographer 2007, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.