Thanksgiving - Why Turkey?

Hugh Peskett, Editor-in-Chief, Burke's Peerage & Landed Gentry

Turkey is an important part of the Thanksgiving Dinner, but what do we know about them, and why is a very American bird named after a country where eastern Europe meets western Asia? It is all a series of mistakes.

A hundred years before the Virginian settlers reached Jamestown or the Pilgrim Fathers reached Plymouth, a new breed of poultry reached English farm-yards from Turkish-ruled North Africa, which were called “Turkeys”. Actually they were a species found wild in West Africa (then named Guinea), but they were popular on English farms such as that of my own ancestor who died in 1570 leaving 30 turkeys in his will. These were not turkeys as we now know them, but what are now called “guinea fowl”, though they look just like the birds on the label of “Wild Turkey” bourbon.

This is what happened. The early English settlers found wild birds living in the American woodlands which looked very similar to the “turkeys” they had left behind, so that is what they called them. But they were a different species, the North American wild turkey. The turkeys at your Thanksgiving dinners are descendants of yet another, similar, species of American turkey, domesticated in Mexico and first known to Europeans in 1518. The wrong name stuck to the American birds when they were imported into England – one of the first to do so was Captain John Smith, hero of the Pocahontas story, in 1624 – while the older species were re-named guinea fowl.

So when you eat your Thanksgiving turkey, remember it is a Mexican bird named by mistake after a European/Asian country, and start counting all the words and phrases which include the word as a result – turkey hop, talk turkey, cold turkey, turkey shoot, etc.

The old native Mexican name for them was “huexolotl”, supposed to sound like a turkey's gobbling sound, I am told. Who am I to argue with that?