Byzantium of Konkan

In the year 667 BC, the ancient city of Byzantium was founded by Greek colonists at the conflux of Sea of Marmara, the Golden Horn and Bosphorus. This city, would later acquire numerous names over the course of history, instrumental in changing the course of Europe, Africa and Asia plenty of times. Augusta Antonia, New Rome, Roma Constantinopolitana, and Constantinople before finally changing it's current name in 1930 to Istanbul. But this post, isn't about Istanbul or even about Türkiye. But, it's about the name 'Byzantium' and how it got sailed to the most oddest locations from Europe - to the Konkan coast of western India. 

When the Europeans started mapping the Indian subcontinent, they gave some Hellenized names to Indian towns. Bharuch was written as Barygaza, Ponnani in Kerala was Tyndis, and a list of places whose current names are hard to decipher - Brama, Hipocura, Chersonesus etc. It was in the same fashion, that old maps find a place on the Konkan coast, called as Byzantium (or Byzanteion / Byzantine). This theory is stated by the Pleiades Project and by historians S. Tripati, A.S. Gaur and S.N. Bandodkar (1998). 

But how did a 'Byzantium' land on the Konkan coast? Neither was/is Vijaydurg in any way resembling Istanbul, nor was there any direct linkage between the two towns. There are numerous speculations but none have concrete answers. The ancient Greeks used the word 'Chersonesus' to describe the area around Goa, which has a literal meaning of 'peninsula'. But that logic cannot be applied to Vijaydurg here, as it wasn't technically a peninsula. The local towns of Bharukachha (modern day Bharuch) and Muchhiripatnam became Barygaza and Muziris. By this logic, Vijayadurg must be having some name that may have been Hellenised as Byzantine. But there was another theory proposed by W.H. Schoff in 1924, that Byzantium may correspond to the Karnataka town of Banavasi (in Uttara Kannada district) which had it's former names Vaijayanti or Vaijayantipura or Jayanthipura, which can be misread in Hellenistic way as Byzantium or Byzanteion. But at the same time, Banavasi isn't a port so either a port area close to Banavasi was labelled as Byzantium, or it's Vijayadurg itself with some unexplained reason as why it was called as Byzantium. 

But old maps says otherwise. A 1865 dated map by Karl Spruner von Merz recreates the Ptolemic map of Asia and mentions Byzantium straight south to Musopalle and north of Tyrannosboas, denoting Jaigad and Malwan (both in today's Sindhudurg district). Many of these Hellenistic names actually had literal Greek meanings and so as they saw the town's geography, they gave these names. But Byzantine is an exception and as described above, it has multiple meanings to it's placement in India. There is another theory that states these Hellenistic names were basically geographical placeholders and cartographic reference points. Having said that, a Byzantium in India with no connection the the actual Byzantium city is actually pretty interesting. 

Going a bit more with the Karl Spruner von Merz map, it's important to point out the literal translations of some places the map had deciphered and published, back in 1865. 

Calcutta, Belize: Indian Settlement History and Origins

The nineteenth century was, in many ways, an age of rapid political upheaval. Across the world, maps were being redrawn as empires weakened, nations emerged, and rebellions, wars, and technological shifts altered long-standing orders. Some of the era’s strangest outcomes were born from this turbulence: freed African American slaves founding a republic on the coast of West Africa, Belgium privately ruling the Congo, Indian soldiers serving in police forces as far away as Shanghai, more than ninety percent of Paraguay’s male population perishing during the War of the Triple Alliance, and Algeria being absorbed directly into France. Global politics was volatile, and because empires and societies were not as interconnected as they are today, such anomalies did not appear unusual at the time. This post examines one such peculiar nineteenth-century outcome that continues to exist today: the settlement of CALCUTTA in BELIZE.

At first glance, it seems odd for Belize to carry the name of an Indian city, but a closer look makes the connection clearer. The Kingdom of England established the Crown Colony of Jamaica and its Dependencies in 1655, a colonial structure that expanded westward to include British Honduras by around 1670—territory that largely corresponds to present-day Belize. The same administrative network later extended to the Cayman Islands and the Turks and Caicos Islands, both of which remain British Overseas Territories even today. Until 1884, British Honduras was governed directly from Jamaica, and it was during these decades of Jamaican control that an unexpected Indian dimension entered the region’s history. While the wider system of indentured labour had already begun transporting Indians to overseas colonies, it was the aftermath of the 1857 Indian Rebellion that decisively altered British imperial policy.

After the rebellion was suppressed in 1858, many Indian revolutionaries were officially classified as convicts by the British state. Along with their families, they were deported across the empire to distant colonies including Mauritius, Singapore, the Andaman Islands, Hong Kong, Burma, Ceylon, the Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca, Aden, Fiji, Trinidad, and Guyana. In the same period, several hundred Indians were transported to the narrow northern coastal stretch of British Honduras, where they were settled at the Corozal Plantation. This estate lay at the extreme northern edge of the colony, close to what is today the Mexico–Belize border, barely ten to eleven kilometres away. The sugar estate came to be known as 'Calcutta', largely because Calcutta was the Indian port from which many of these individuals had been shipped.

This means that a place named Calcutta exists today barely eleven kilometres from Mexico.

This movement marked only the first phase of Indian settlement in the region. A second wave arrived in 1872, when indentured labourers were transferred from Jamaica to this small settlement under promises of improved living conditions. A third group arrived from neighbouring Guatemala, where Indians had previously been employed on coffee plantations in the Cuchumatanes, often referred to locally as the Café Mountains. Notably, unlike most Caribbean sugar colonies dominated by European planters, several of the sugar estates in this region were operated by American owners. Calcutta was also not the only site of Indian settlement; communities expanded into nearby estates such as San Andrés, San Antonio, Estrella, Carolina, and Ranchito, as documented by researchers Sylvia Gilharry Perez and Kumar Mahabir.

Over time, the settlement grew and Indian cultural influences initially spread through food practices, domestic customs, and community life. Today, only a small percentage of Corozal’s Calcutta village identifies as East Indian. The town of Corozal itself has an earlier origin, founded by the Cruzo’ob Maya—refugees who fled south from Yucatán during the Caste War of 1848. Within the span of just over a decade, two very different displaced communities settled within minutes of each other: Maya refugees from Mexico and Indians transported from South Asia. Unlike many other Indian diaspora settlements, however, Calcutta’s residents no longer speak Indian languages. Spanish, Creole, and regional tongues dominate daily life, while Awadhi, Bhojpuri, and Hindi appear to have disappeared within a few generations. Even so, individuals of East Indian descent later entered government service, education, transport, and local politics, and a handful of family-run businesses and restaurants continue to reflect this heritage.

The settlement’s name has remained unchanged. Today, Calcutta appears clearly on maps, with the Philip Goldson Highway running through it. It lies between Xaibe and Ranchito to the north and San Joaquin to the south, roughly four kilometres from the coastline of Corozal Bay, which opens into the Caribbean Sea. The New River flows a short distance to the south, marking the closest major waterway. Below are two maps: one showing the present-day settlement of Calcutta, and another drawn from an 1857 map of British Honduras, based on the work of Henry Darwin Rogers and Alexander Keith.

Lake Chimay Myth: The Lake That Never Existed

The phase between the 1200s and the mid-1800s saw Mediterranean seafaring Europeans, followed by Renaissance and early-modern cartographers from France, England, Holland, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Italian kingdoms, begin mapping what they considered the 'unexplored' regions of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Australia. In the process, they introduced several inaccuracies and errors: California was shown as an island, an imaginary southern continent was marked as Terra Australis Incognita, and the Japanese islands were depicted as distorted, oversized landmasses. One such enduring error was Lake Chimay—an imaginary lake placed around today’s Assam region, in the valley of China’s Yunnan province. It was believed that several rivers of northeast India, northern Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Yunnan originated from a single water body called Lake Chimay. First appearing in 1554, the lake continued to be reproduced on maps until the early 19th century, when it was finally understood to be nothing more than a cartographic myth.

Yunnan province borders the northern reaches of Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam and lies roughly 200 kilometres from India’s closest village in Arunachal Pradesh. Rivers such as the Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Dharla, Mekong, Red River, Chao Phraya, along with several others in the Upper Assam valley and Myanmar’s Kachin State, all flow through this broader region. For centuries, it was believed that this vast imagined lake was the source of all these rivers. The first cartographer to map it was Giacomo Gastaldi in 1554—an Italian cartographer who worked with Ptolemaic traditions and relied heavily on accounts from European and Asian travellers. The practice continued, with successive maps reproducing this fictitious lake and adding towns and river names that appear almost comical in today’s context. A map dated 1705 by Guillaume de L’Isle marks rivers named Laquia, Caipoumo, Casa, and Asa. While it is difficult to identify these precisely today, the Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Dharla, and Chao Phraya were believed to originate from this lake. The Brahmaputra, or Tsangpo, rises from the Angsi Glacier near Lake Mansarovar and Mount Kailash in Tibet; the Irrawaddy originates in Myanmar’s Kachin State and drains into the Andaman Sea; the Dharla flows from the foothills of Sikkim and joins the Brahmaputra in northern Bangladesh as the Jamuna; and the Chao Phraya flows from Nakhon Sawan in Thailand and empties into the Gulf of Thailand. European cartographers had not traversed or mapped the Himalayas or the regions east of them and therefore made this erroneous assumption. In reality, none of these river sources are even remotely close to one another, making the eventual collapse of the Lake Chimay myth inevitable.

The reality behind Lake Chimay began to emerge through 17th-century Jesuit missionaries during their journeys to spread Christian teachings in China and Macau. In 1685, when Aurangzeb ruled Mughal India, the Kangxi Emperor (Shengzu of Qing) ruled Qing China, and King Narai ruled Ayutthaya in present-day Thailand, a French Jesuit missionary, Father Guy Tachard, discovered that the size and position of Siam were not as European cartographers had assumed. Mapmakers had placed Siam about 24 degrees too far east—a displacement of nearly 2,500 kilometres. When Tachard reached Siam, he realised that Asia was significantly smaller than it appeared on European maps. This revelation made it impossible to reconcile the supposed position of Lake Chimay, and although Tachard did not explicitly deny the lake’s existence, it no longer fit within his geographical understanding. Earlier Jesuits, such as Martino Martini and others, had already noted multiple variations in the lake’s supposed outlets and argued that rivers like the Red River and the Chao Phraya had different sources. Such observations began to sow doubt among Europeans about the lake’s existence and accuracy, though it continued to appear on maps with conflicting information about the rivers flowing from it.

Guillaume de L’Isle was among the first to seriously question the authenticity of Lake Chimay in the early 1700s, though he continued to depict it on his maps. By the 1730s, however, Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville—another French cartographer—accurately mapped Tibet, Yunnan, and the entire river system of the region, leaving no place for Lake Chimay. By the early 19th century, the lake had disappeared entirely from European maps. The mythical lake had a long and curious life—imagined by Europeans and ultimately dismissed by them. Below is a recreation of Guillaume de L’Isle’s 1705 map depicting Lake Chimay.