Searching Out the Scandaroon...

In a word, a scandaroon is/was a carrier pigeon, used especially to carry messages for English merchants from an English factory/transshipment point at Scanderoon, on the Mediterranean coast of present-day Turkey, to inland markets (such as Aleppo, Syria). This would have been during the heyday of the Levant Company, from about 1600-1800. But there is much more to say about how the bird got its name. This essay tells you a little about that. Let's begin with the place name...

The Place

The current Turkish district of Iskanderun is located in the Southernmost province in Turkey, Hatay province, abutting the border of Syria. Here is a map. Cyprus is "pointing" right toward it. In fact, Syria still claims that land by virtue of what it considers to be a failed referendum arranged by the French in 1939 to determine ownership of Hatay, which had proclaimed itself an independent republic when WWII loomed over Europe in 1938. In any case, there is a natural harbor in the Iskanderun district, and people have been using it for a shipping point for hundreds of years.

Speaking of hundreds of years, Iskendrun, according to this article, preserves the name but not the exact site of Alexandretta (or Alexandria ad Issum). Iskenderun is the loction serving as the best access to the pass known as the "Syrian Gates." Here is a map that shows ancient Issus (the place of Alexander's great victory over Darius III in 333 BCE) as well as the Syrian gates, about 20 or so miles to the South. The Syrian Gates, also known as the Belen Pass, is but 300 paces across and is the most important route from the south Turkish coast to inland Syria. Near the west end of the pass is the so-called Pillar of Jonah, where the prophet Jonah was supposedly disgorged by the whale. It just goes on and on, doesn't it?

The English in the Ottoman Empire

During the late Middle ages, trade between Europe and the Levant intensified. Not wanting to be left out of the flourishing trade and access to goods that came out of "the East," in 1580 some London merchants petitioned Queen Elizabeth for a charter to begin trading in the Levant. This charter was granted, gifts were given to the Sultan of Turkey, Murad III, to enable it to happen, and the official right to exclusive trading with the Levant was given to the Company by the Queen in 1581. The focus of the English efforts would be Aleppo, then the third leading city of the Ottoman Empire. Aleppo would be a place for their "Levant Factory," and Aleppo would also prove to be, in the 17th and 18th centuries, a sort of oasis for English pilgrims heading down to the Holy Land.

In the interest of always introducing new words (!), I found reference to a 1586 communication from the Levant Company offices in London to its factors in Aleppo ordering them to buy cotton yarn needed in the manufacture of "fustians." Sometime later an Englishman active in the Levant trade said, writing about people in Manchester, England, said, "They buy cotton wool in London that comes first from Cyprus and Smyrna and work the same into fustians, vermillions and dimities which they return to London," whence they were exported (oops, there may have to be an essay some day on fustian, its relation to bombast and how those terms first associated with cloth became associated with pretentious speech).

This trade with Aleppo and the Levant resulted in an economic boom in England in the early 17th century. Perhaps its most lasting effect was that it stimulated a silk industry in England. One 17th century writer spoke of a

"notable increase in our manufacture of winding and twisting only of firraign raw silk which within 35 years to my knowledge, did not employ more than 300 people in the city and suburbs of London, where at this present time it doth set on work above fourteen thousand souls."

Now, to scandaroon. Aleppo was 80 miles inland, and at first the English used Tripoli as its port, but they soon moved to Scanderoon (the Anglicization of Iksenderun), where an agent was established as early as the 1590s to handle the Company's traffic, with goods being conveyed from Aleppo to Scanderoon by camel. Over the next 200 years the port was threatened, closed, reopened and flourished, and it became the place from which the goods out of Aleppo were shipped.

Scandaroon, the Bird

Communication then, as now, is vitally important in order to be able to run a business. Indeed, I was touched by Muhammad Yunus' vision of equipping Bangladeshi men and women to be entrepreneurs through providing them with cell phones--which enabled them to check on "market prices" in the city before beginning wasteful trips with their goods. Well, how did communication take place between Aleppo and Scanderoon? By carrier pigeon, of course. These pigeons, according to this article, actually originated in Bagdad, and can still be referred to as Bagdads. "The colors are blue, white, black, red, and yellow with markings similar to the magpie." The OED tells us that their Linnaean name is Columba tuberculosa, though I could find no pictures under that name. The Columba is the genus name for the dove. There are tons of Google images under a "carrier pigeon" search. Well, in any case, since the British used these birds to communicate between Scanderoon and Aleppo, they took on the name scanderoons. I don't know why the "e" changed to the "a," though English spelling wasn't standardized in the 17th-19th centuries. In any case, this carrier pigeon became known as the scandaroon.

Conclusion

The Levant Company ceased operations in 1825, and thenceforth there became no real reason to keep using the term scandaroon, except that it had become associated with a breed of carrier pigeon or, as the brief Wikipedia article says, a domesticated pigeon. Apart from a 1972 novel, out of print, named The Scandaroon, the word seems to have dropped out of our language. But before we let it go, we ought to pause for a second on the history that brought it to us. Reliving those days through the avenue of a word brings us into history, geography, religion and a host of human activities that make us who we are. Thanks to the scandaroons for that...

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