Painting, tempera and gold on wood, of Saint Ursula and her virginal companions by Niccolò di Pietro, c.1410. Image of a richly dressed woman, wearing a crown and with a halo, flanked by two flags bearing the cross of St. George (signifying England) and twelve other women.
31 March 2021
The Virgin Islands are the easternmost part of the Greater Antilles island chain in the Caribbean Sea. Politically, different portions are currently administered by three distinct entities, Britain, the United States, and Puerto Rico. In the past, they were colonies of Britain, Denmark, and Spain. But Denmark sold its territory to the United States for $25 million, with the transfer occurring on 31 March 1917. And the westernmost portion of the island chain, which once belonged to Spain, is now part of Puerto Rico, and is therefore also a territory of the United States, although that portion of the island chain is not administered separately from Puerto Rico.
The Virgin Islands were so named by Columbus on his second voyage to the Americas in 1493, Santa Ursula y las Once Mil Virgines (St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins), after a story that originated in the medieval era and remained immensely popular for centuries—the hagiographic sub-genre of women who were martyred because they wished to remain virgins out of devotion to God was popular and prolific. The story of Ursula supposedly dates to the fourth century, but there is no solid evidence of either her or her virginal companions actually existing, and the story itself is not attested until the tenth century. (There is a fifth-century inscription regarding martyred virgins in Cologne, but it makes no mention of Ursula, the number of virgins, or any details of the circumstances of their deaths.) There are many variants of the Ursula legend, but the story’s basic structure is that Ursula was the daughter of a Christian king who did not want to be married to a pagan prince. She obtained a delay, but finally when she and her similarly virginal companions traveled to Cologne to meet her intended, they were killed by the Huns because of their faith. In many versions of the tale, Ursula is said to have been British. Ursula was removed from the Roman Catholic Church’s universal calendar of saints in 1969, although her feast day is still celebrated in some localities.
As to the number of her companions, a late ninth century calendar mentions Ursula among a group of eleven martyrs. And in the tenth century, the number was inflated to 11,000, probably through a misinterpretation of the Latin abbreviation XI MV (undecim martyres virgines, or 11 virgin-martyrs), which was taken to mean undecim milia virgines (11,000 virgins). The misinterpretation was either through error or because it made the story more sensational and gripping.
Columbus’s St. Ursula Island is believed to have been the island that is now known as St. Croix, but Columbus’s name never appeared on any map. The earliest English-language use of Virgin Islands I have found is from the 1671 Description of the Last Voyage to Bermudas in the Ship Marygold:
To make the Proverb good, He that doth run
The farthest way about, is neerest home.
Unto which purpose we our Course do take,
Some of the Charibby Islands for to make,
And cross (a) the Tropick Cancer, but the winde
Prov’d to us more auspicious and kinde
Than we expect, to our Port we incline,
So straight a Course as if it were a Line.
And the mention of the Virgin Islands appears in the related footnote:
(a) Thinking to cross the Tropick Cancer, and make Anguilla Sombrero, or some of the Virgin-Islands.
The original inhabitants of the Virgin Islands, the Arawak and Carib, were exterminated through enslavement and disease. In a way, it’s appropriate that the islands are named for martyrs, but unfortunately, the islands are named for the wrong, and perhaps even fictional, martyrs, and not the genuine ones who gave their lives in the European colonization of the Americas.
Sources:
Cusack, Carole M. “Hagiography and History: The Legend of Saint Ursula.” This Immense Panorama: Studies in Honour of Eric J. Sharpe. Carole M. Cusack and Peter Oldmeadow, eds. Sydney Studies in Religion 2. Sydney: U of Sydney Printing Service, 1999, 89–104.
Description of the Last Voyage to Bermudas in the Ship Marygold, London: Rowland Reynald, 1671, sig. B2. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.
Farmer, David Hugh. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, third edition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992, 473–74. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Harder, Kelsie B. Illustrated Dictionary of Place Names: United States and Canada. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1976.
Jane, Cecil. The Voyages of Christopher Columbus. London: Argonaut Press, 1930, 337. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Image credit: Niccolò di Pietro, c.1410. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain image.