Amid a name controvesy, the Gulf remains historically, economicaly and ecologically important

WMNF News: Beach dunes — Dunes on Sand Key along the Gulf of Mexico. By Seán Kinane/WMNF News, Sept. 2009

Davis will be the keynote speaker at the Florida Humanities Festival in Sarasota on March 22 where he will talk about the history and the culture of the Florida Suncoast.

A partial transcript is below.

Listen to the full show here:

Watch this interview:

Partial transcript of this interview:

SK: Let’s get this question out of the way. Is it the Gulf of America or the Gulf of Mexico? What have you thought about that recent controversy?

Jack Davis: Well, I’ve thought a lot about it, and you know it’s both. It depends on one’s opinion. There are a lot of people that are real happy with the name change. And there are those who are not so happy.

I think I fall into the second camp. I grew up on the Gulf of Mexico — in the Tampa Bay area, and I have a lifelong, intimate relationship with it. And there’s just something special about.

You know, writing the book was a labor of love and it’s just — to me — there’s something special about that that name. And I love the X in the middle of Mexico, and it cast my mind back to my childhood when I, you know, thought about pirates and buried treasure, and X marks a spot, and that X marks a spot that that I truly love.

SK: So how did the Gulf of Mexico get its name? And when did that name first appear on maps?

Jack Davis: Well, it first appeared on maps, the best of our knowledge, sometime in the 16th Century, or the 1500s. And it’s uncertain whether it came from some Spanish official or explorer – slash conquistador, or from a cartographer.

Maps are changing a lot, particularly in those days — particularly of the New World, as more new land is being discovered by Europeans, of course, well known to indigenous people had lived on those lands for thousands, tens of thousands of years — anywhere from 8 to 10 to 12,000 years and so we don’t know exactly who came up with that name. At one point the Gulf of Mexico was called the Gulf of New Spain, and Mexico was referred to by the Spanish as New Spain for quite a while.

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