by Edward Ellis, Special Correspondent
John Lawson, one of New Bern’s co-founders, is thought by some authorities – including the NC Gazetteer – to be the guy who gave the Trent River its name. In the very early 1700s, stalwart Brit explorer Lawson borrowed the moniker of one of the familiar rivers of his native land.
But what was it called before that?
We can prove indigenous people had been stomping all over this place for 7,000 years, and there’s no reason to doubt they might have been doing so for twice as long. They had to call the 87-mile-long blackwater artery something. In 1657, long before Lawson’s sojourn here, mapmaker Nicholas Comberford identified it as the Quoracks River.
Where Comberford harvested the data for his important chart is a matter of debate and speculation. But the map – today housed within the New York Public Library – appeared at a moment when Virginian settlers were looking for elbow room to the south. As a matter of fact, Comberford entitled his map The south part of Virginia, now the north part of Carolina.
By his own account, Comberford was the son of an Irish jailer. After immigrating to London, he apprenticed with a mapmaker and became a central figure of a group called the Thames School. Located in the center of England’s maritime commerce, these cartographers gathered intelligence from sailors, captains, merchants, travelers and explorers. His 1657 plat is a lovely work of art covering the New World from lower Virginia to just below Cape Lookout and delineating the Outer Banks. One professor who studied the matter lauded Comberford’s original sources and detail, calling it the best map created before the establishment of the Carolina colony.
The colorful chart positions the river so vital to New Bern’s development. It’s where French Huguenots settled in 1708, with Swiss and Germans following two years later. More sheltered than the Neuse, the Trent became the place for wharfs, docks, warehouses, shipbuilding, and business. Steamships once plied its waters, which today deliver world-class recreation and vistas.
Though possibly poetic on native lips, Quoracks doesn’t exactly roll off the modern tongue. It sounds like a subatomic particle or, perhaps, a laundry room product. Thus, we hereby offer sincere appreciation to John Lawson for gifting us the name Trent instead.