CALIFORNIA’S NAME

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 375, 5 March 1937, Page 3

CALIFORNIA’S NAME

A CURIOUS STORY

FROM ROLAND’S SONG

“Close to the Terrestrial Paradise.”

..The Song of 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 Palerne. 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 Columibus and his successors were spreading dreams ot 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 of the Indies, very close to —the Terrestrial Paradise,” and was l peopled by dusky amazons whose “weapons were all made of gold and so was the harness ot the wild beasts they tamed to ride. No other 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 that Cervantes gave it first place Tn the holocaust wherein the curate and the barber destroyed the books that were befuddling the mind of Don Quixote. In 1862, Edward Everett Hale unearthed this novel, long forgotten, pounced on the name Californio, and promptly .assumed that here was the original source of the much-disputed song to whose mutual 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, vfith 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 1 have learned by experience, which it' 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 inexhaustible riches of association which this peninsula possesses. It

has the heritage of three flags, three civilisations, which it cradled, and in addition to that it has the great lagacy 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 con-

tent to carry on as a Email 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 itt inevitable course. Monterey hatmanaged to retain, to an extraordinary degree, the appeal of old Spain in new America. Many of the olu abodes still stand, and their contours are as graceful as those of Nature herself.

At if the history of the city and its beauty was not enough to give it a great place in the western sun, Monterey is tpiced by special associations. One of its houses, still stand ing, wlas built from timbers' of a trading ship that went ashore in 1833, just below the custom house. This ship was named the Natalia, but 19 years earlier it had been a French sloop, and in it Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from Elba for bis crowning adventure of the Hundred Days. Th. decks he trod are floors -and walls oi 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 enthuslasip. 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.