Magindano
C.A. Gibson-Hill’s brief note traces the historical usage of the obsolete variant “Magindano” for the Philippine island Mindanao, identifying Captain Thomas Forrest as its likely originator.
Summary
Gibson-Hill addresses a concern raised in C.E. Wurtzburg’s 1954 biography of Sir Stamford Raffles regarding the precise position of the name Magindano in the island’s nomenclature. He establishes that the standard form Mindanao (or Mindano) was used by early writers including Combes (1667), Dampier (1686), and all eighteenth-century authors up to Dalrymple. The variant Magindano was introduced by Captain Thomas Forrest (1775–1776), who offered an etymological gloss deriving it from Mag (related to), in (country), and dano (lake). Forrest’s form was adopted by Milburn (1813) and John Hunt (1812), and persisted in Singapore newspapers for roughly fifty years, though Crawfurd and Wallace used the older form. Gibson-Hill concludes that subsequent writers reverted to the original Mindanao, and that the variant was almost certainly launched by Forrest, whose terminology shows other personal variations (p. 184).