I'll drink some Triple Sec in your honour and to you Rickard!
Thanks
Peter
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rickard A. Parker" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2012 7:11 PM
Subject: The 'Dry' and 'Salvages' of 'Dry Salvages'


> With quite a bit of Googling and pasting snippets I have come up with a
> reasonable facsimile of what T.S. Eliot's cousin, the historian Rear 
> Admiral
> Samuel Eliot Morrison, had to say about the name of the rocks, the Dry 
> Salvages:
>
> We may first dispose of T. S. Eliot's theory that the 'Dry' of 'Dry
> Salvages' is a translation of the French 'Trois.' This particular ledge 
> has
> a dry part, out of water at high tide. 'Dry' is a not unusual designation
> along the Atlantic coast for ledges bare at high water, to distinguish 
> them
> from others which, like the Little Salvages, are covered twice daily. Dry
> Bank and the Dry Tortugas off Florida are examples; and there are numerous
> 'Dry' ledges off the Maine coast. Moreover, 'Dry' appears on no map in
> connection with The Salvages until 1867, when any derivation from trois
> would be farfetched. But how about Salvages? This is the older spelling of
> Savage, the l recording that it is derived from the late Latin salvaticus,
> meaning 'woodland' or 'wild.' One finds it in Shakespeare ('Doe you put
> trickes vpon's with Saluages and Men of Inde?' Tempest, II.ii.6o); in 
> Thomas
> Fuller's Holy and Profane State of 1642 ('Let us not be naked Salvages'),
> and in George Withers' Britain's Remembrancer of 1628 ('When late the
> salvage bore'). This salvage spelling lasted later in New England than in
> Old England. The Laws of New Plymouth of 1677, page 187, mention 'Captive
> Salvages,' and James Franklin's newspaper The New England Courant of 7 
> June
> 1725 reports, 'We have through the favour of God, destroyed more of the
> Salvages.' But the spelling savage, as often found in Shakespeare as
> salvage, became increasingly popular after 1600, and there can be no
> reasonable doubt that it represents the common pronunciation of the word.
>