Who're you calling a turkey? The origins of the bird's name

When Thomas Harriot, the English scientist, was on Roanoke Island in 1585, he recognized the big bird he knew well from England. Rather than use the native Algonkian name for the animal, he recorded it as the name it was called back home, "turkey cockes" and "turkey hennes."

So that means when the English first came to America, they were familiar with the turkey? Yes, that's right, and logically, it has to do with the Turks.

The turkey's circuitous route to the American Thanksgiving table is more a souvenir of the rough and tumble trade wars and colonization of the New World than Pilgrim feasts with Indians, according to a North Carolina scholar.

"When our people arrived here, they already knew what tobacco was," said Larry Tise, an East Carolina University history professor. "They already knew what corn was. They knew what turkeys were."

In an article published this week on the History News Network Web site, Tise writes that the birds taken back to Europe by Christopher Columbus in the late 15th century were spirited to the heart of the Ottoman Empire, where skillful Turkish farmers perfected breeding the tame, big-breasted fowl.

By 1577, he wrote, the turkey, superior in taste and reproduction ability, became the principal food bird in the British empire.

"It's very confusing," Tise said in a telephone interview. "We know that the Aztecs had turkeys and they were domesticated. We know that an explorer took a turkey to Spain."

The Aztec huexoloti - the early name for American turkey - acquired its moniker, in part, because of Columbus' quest for a trade route for Christian Europe that circumvented sometimes hostile Islamic lands. Failing that, he brought back American treasures - corn, beans, peanuts, peppers, potatoes, tobacco - and huexoloti.

Embroiled in war with much of Europe, Tise said, Spain took pains to keep its imported goods out of the hands of its enemies. The ports may have been closed, but there was no stopping the robust seafaring trade in the Mediterranean. Contraband food and animals likely moved from Spanish ports, he wrote, to points of call in North Africa and the Middle East.

The turkeys raised in Turkey were superior to the scrawnier wild American turkeys, ravenous scavengers that could devastate cultivated crops. English settlers brought Turkish turkeys with them to Jamestown in 1614 and to Massachusetts prior to 1629.

Tise said he was inspired to dig deeper into the origins of the turkey in a fit of fever last Thanksgiving, when he went on a flu-crazed binge of research. As he pulled bits and pieces together, the links between war, trade and commerce became clear. It was only then, in rereading Harriot's "A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia," published in 1590, that he came upon Harriot's reference to turkey.

Bingo. He now knew why the traditional American bird has its foreign name.

"It helped to explain what I had already come to understand," he said. "That was the proof. It was wonderful to go back and see exactly how Harriot used the term turkey."

Catherine Kozak, (252) 441-1711, cate.kozak@pilotonline.com