Note 104 — THE FYRST PART OF THE NAUIGATION INTO THE NORTH SEAS.

De Weygats ofte Strafe de Nassou. This name has given occasion to much curious criticism. The Dutch, not unnaturally, have sought its explanation in their own language, in which waaien means “to blow”, “to be windy”, and gat is “a strait” or “passage”; so that waaigat would be “a passage wherein the wind blows strongly”. And it is indisputable that this name has, on various occasions, been so applied by the seamen of that nation. Thus, we find a Waaigat in Baffin’s Bay, one in Spitzbergen, and another by the Straits of Magellan; and even the roads between the Helder and Texel have, from an early period, borne the same name. See “Prize Essay on the Netherlandish Discoveries,” by R. G. Bennet and J. G. van Wijk, in Nieuwe Verhandelingen von het Provincial Utrechtsche Genootschap, etc., vol. vi (1827), p. 41.

Others, instead of the Dutch waaien, have taken the German weihen as the root, and thus made weihgat to mean the “sacred straits”.

J. R. Forster, in his Voyages and Discoveries in the North (Engl. edit.), p. 273, contends, however, that the name is of Russian origin, and explains it as follows:—“Barentz found afterwards in Nova Zembla some carved images on a head-land near the straits, in consequence of which he called it Afgoeden-hoek, the ‘Cape of Idols’. Now, in the Sclavonian tongue, wajat means ‘to carve’, ‘to make an image’. Wajati-Noss would, therefore, be the ‘Carved’ or ‘Image Cape’; and this seems to me to be the true origin of the word Waigats, which properly should be called Waja­telstwoi Proliw, ‘the Image Straits’.” So convinced was Forster of the correctness of his conjecture, that in another part of his work (p. 413) he did not hesitate to assert that the Russians themselves give to the Afgoeden-hoek the name of Waijati Nos; and this strange derivation of the word Waigats has found supporters not only among foreign, but even among Russian writers. See Barrow, p. 137; Berch, p. 30.

But Lütke, who has fully investigated the subject, adduces as proof against these fanciful etymologies, first (p. 30), that the name recorded by the Dutch themselves is Waigatz [Weygats], and not Waigat, the Russian termination tsch being changed by them into tz, in the same way as in Pitzora for Petschora, etc.; secondly, that the name Waigatsch properly belongs to the island alone, and not to the straits; thirdly, that this name was known to the Englishman Burrough in 1556, nearly forty years before the first voyage of the Hollanders; and lastly (p. 31), that the Russians have never called the Cape of Idols Waiyati Nos, but always Bolwánskyi Muis, from bolwàn, a rough image.

Lütke adds that the true derivation of the name in question is as difficult to be determined as that of Kolguew, Nokuew, Kildin, Warandei, etc., which are probably the remains of the languages of tribes now extinct. But, at the same time, he directs attention to Witsen’s assertion (which appears to have been altogether overlooked by previous writers), that the island of Waigatsch received its name from one Iwan Waigatsch—“het Eiland Waigats, dat zijn naem heeft van Ivan, of Ian Waigats;”—a derivation which is very probable, and certainly far more reasonable than any of the etymologies above recited. ↑