The Digital Ark: Early Modern Collections of Curiosities in England and Scotland, 1580-1700
Island of Gozo
Malta
View Larger MapDescription of institution: An island in the Maltese archipelago, now part of the Republic of Malta. This is probably the "Island of Gaza" Woodward refers to in the Catalogue of the Foreign Fossils, page 8 (sig. Oo3), in his Attempt Towards a Natural History. Eighteenth-century sources variously refer to the island as "Gaza" and "Gozo." The compendium British Military Library describe the "Island of Gaza" separated from Malta by a strait some five miles wide, with "the little island of Cumin" (now known as "Comino") in the strait between Malta and Gaza (volume 1 [1799], p. 108). In the same entry in his Catalogue of the Foreign Fossils, Woodward describes "Gaza" as "near Candy." This reference is probably not to the nearby and smaller (less notable) island of Cumin, but rather to Crete, which was know in eighteenth-century England as either the island of "Candy" or (more commonly and more widely) "Candia." In this case, Woodward is wrong about the relative closeness of the two islands. URL:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gozo Print Sources linked to this location: Mentioned - An attempt towards a natural history of the fossils of England; in a catalogue of the English fossils in the collection of J. Woodward, M. D..