May 11: The Ice Saints Arrive, a King Names His Country, and a Legend Departs

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There is a European folk tradition that identifies May 11 as the beginning of the Ice Saints — the three-day window when winter makes one last attempt on the spring garden. The Ice Saints are Mammertus, Pancras, and Gervase (or, in German tradition, Mamertus, Pankratius, and Servatius), feast days falling on the 11th, 12th, and 13th. Farmers across France, Germany, and the Low Countries still wait until after the 13th before setting out tender plants, because the data — accumulated over centuries of watching frost patterns — suggests they are right to be cautious. The Ice Saints are not superstition dressed as religion. They are agrarian science dressed as superstition.

That May 11 should be associated with one final cold breath before summer’s warmth consolidates feels appropriate for a date that carries, in other registers, the sense of transitions that resist completion. A settlement that begins in tragedy. A country renaming itself. A musician whose music insists on surviving his body.

The Ships That Started a Nation’s Worst Idea

On May 11, 1607, three English ships — the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery — dropped anchor in the Chesapeake Bay after a voyage of four months from England. They were carrying 104 colonists under the charter of the Virginia Company of London, and their plan was to establish a permanent English settlement in North America. Four days later, on May 14, they would select a site on a peninsula in the James River and begin building what would become Jamestown.

The settlement that resulted was, for most of its first two decades, a catastrophe. Of the 104 original colonists, only 38 would survive the first year. The period from 1609 to 1610 became known as the Starving Time, when the population collapsed from roughly 500 to somewhere between 60 and 90. There are accounts — corroborated by recent archaeological evidence — of colonists resorting to eating leather, rats, and, in at least one documented case, a deceased person. A teenage girl whose partial remains were excavated in 2012 showed butchery marks consistent with post-mortem consumption. Jamestown was not a founding myth; it was a prolonged, partially successful disaster that happened to outlast its own collapse.

The Virginia Company lost enormous sums of money. The Crown eventually revoked the Company’s charter in 1624 and turned Virginia into a royal colony. The settlement survived by developing the tobacco economy that would also install plantation slavery as the economic foundation of the American South. The ships that arrived on May 11, 1607, were therefore not just the beginning of a colony but the beginning of a set of institutions — racial chattel slavery, tobacco monoculture, company colonialism — that would shape the continent for centuries. The date is worth knowing. The full weight of what it inaugurated is heavier than any founding narrative can hold.

The Country That Renamed Itself

On May 11, 1949, the country known as Siam formally changed its name to Thailand. This was, in fact, the second name change: the first had occurred in 1939, under Prime Minister Plaek Phibunsongkhram, whose government had also forced the change as part of a nationalist program modeled partly on European fascism. When the post-war government came to power, the country briefly reverted to Siam in 1945 before the 1949 restoration of Thailand under yet another Phibunsongkhram government following a coup.

The name “Thailand” is often explained as meaning “Land of the Free” — Thai (ไทย) can mean free, and land is self-explanatory. This is accurate as far as it goes, but it misses that Thai is also the name of the dominant ethnic group, making the country name simultaneously “Land of the Thai People” in a way that the old name “Siam” was not. The Chinese communities, the hill tribes of the northern highlands, the Malay-speaking Muslim populations of the south: none of them are ethnically Thai. The 1949 name change was nationalist in the most literal sense — it named the country after its dominant ethnicity and implicitly defined belonging accordingly.

“Siam,” by contrast, was a name with no clear ethnic ownership. It appears in Portuguese records from the early 16th century and may derive from a Sanskrit or Mon word. The Siamese themselves rarely used it internally. It was, in a sense, a name given from outside, which the Thai nationalist movement wanted to shed. What replaced it was more precisely theirs — and more precisely exclusionary.

The siamese cat, the siamese twins (a term deriving from the conjoined Thai brothers Chang and Eng Bunker, who toured with P.T. Barnum in the 1830s and 40s), the siamese fighting fish — all retain the older name. The cat has not been renamed despite Thailand’s request. Cats, as a rule, do not acknowledge political decisions.

The Ice Saints and the Science Beneath Them

The Ice Saints (May 11-13) are one of those pieces of folk meteorology that modern climatology has repeatedly tried to either confirm or dismiss, with inconclusive results. The phenomenon that underlies them is real: in Central Europe, a statistical tendency toward cooler temperatures in mid-May exists, associated with the northward retreat of warm air masses and the occasional southward intrusion of Arctic air. The effect is measurable at the regional level, though not universal.

Saint Mammertus, whose feast falls on May 11, was a 5th-century Archbishop of Vienne in what is now France. He established the Rogation Days — three days of fasting and procession before Ascension Thursday, intended to ward off earthquakes, crop failure, and other calamities. The association with cold weather and agricultural anxiety is therefore not accidental: Mammertus was already the saint of agricultural caution, and the naming of this cold snap after him was a sensible piece of folk taxonomy.

In France, the saints are called saints de glace; in German-speaking regions, Eisheiligen; in Dutch, ijsheiligen. The advice is consistent: plant nothing tender until after the 13th. A 2007 study published in Meteorologische Zeitschrift found some statistical support for a cold anomaly in the first half of May in Central Europe, though the effect was stronger in certain periods than others. The folk wisdom is imprecise but not invented.

Valentino Rossi and the Art of Making Speed Legible

Valentino Rossi was born on May 11, 1979, in Urbino, Italy, which had previously been best known as the birthplace of Raphael in 1483. The city has now accumulated two kinds of genius — one who made paint move with uncanny life, one who made motorcycles move with uncanny precision — and seems unbothered by the four-century gap between them.

Rossi won nine world championships in Grand Prix motorcycle racing, seven in MotoGP (the premier class), and is widely considered the greatest motorcycle racer in history, with some credible arguments for the greatest two-wheeled athlete of any kind. What made him exceptional was not just speed but theater: the celebrations choreographed at the end of races, the yellow-helmeted number 46, the relationship with the crowd that transformed what is otherwise a sport with high barriers to comprehension into something spectators could feel.

He retired from professional racing in 2021, at 42, after a career that lasted 26 seasons. The number is almost incomprehensible for a sport where crashes at 200 mph are not rare. He said at his final race: “I want to thank motorcycles, because they gave me everything.”

The Last Day of Bob Marley

Bob Marley died on May 11, 1981, at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Miami, Florida, from melanoma that had spread from a wound in his toe. He was 36 years old. The wound had been noticed in 1977 during a football game and diagnosed as acral lentiginous melanoma — a rare form that tends to appear on the palms and soles, and that disproportionately affects people with darker skin. Marley’s Rastafarian faith initially prevented him from agreeing to amputation of the toe, and by the time he accepted conventional treatment, the cancer had metastasized.

He died en route to Jamaica, having attempted to return home to die there. He made it only to Miami. His last words to his son Ziggy were: “Money can’t buy life.”

The strangeness of his legacy is this: he was the most commercially successful reggae artist in history, but he remained genuinely poor by the standards of global celebrity. His estate, which eventually became enormously valuable through the licensing of his music and image, generated little benefit for him during his lifetime. The man who wrote about Babylon — the Rastafarian concept of Western capitalist corruption — was managed by a company called Cayman Music, died intestate (without a will), and had his estate tied up in litigation for years after his death. The contradiction is not ironic in a cheap sense. It is tragic in a structural one.

His music continues to sell. His image continues to appear on posters and t-shirts. Whether the person who buys a Bob Marley t-shirt has listened to any of the music, or read anything about what the music was saying, is an open question that the market declines to answer.

Also on This Day

• 1858: Minnesota becomes the 32nd U.S. state. Its name derives from the Dakota Sioux word mni sota makoce, meaning “land where the waters reflect the sky.” The state’s motto, L’Étoile du Nord (Star of the North), is in French, a holdover from the territory’s history under French and then British influence before American acquisition.
• 330: Emperor Constantine I inaugurates Constantinople as the new capital of the Roman Empire, on the site of the Greek city of Byzantium. The ceremony involves pagan rites, Christian blessings, and the founding of a city that will last as a capital until 1453 — over eleven centuries.
• 1997: IBM’s chess computer Deep Blue defeats world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match — the first time a computer defeats a reigning world champion in a classical chess match under tournament conditions. Kasparov, who won the first game, suspected cheating. He was wrong, but not entirely unreasonably: Deep Blue’s play in the second game included a move so unexpected that Kasparov concluded no machine could have produced it. It turns out that move resulted from a bug that caused the program to make a random selection when it couldn’t identify a best move. Kasparov lost to a glitch.
• 1894: The Pullman Strike begins in Chicago when workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company walk off the job to protest wage cuts that were not accompanied by corresponding cuts in company-owned housing rents. The strike will eventually involve 250,000 workers across 27 states, bring the American railroad system to a near-halt, and prompt President Cleveland to send in federal troops over the objection of the Illinois governor. Eugene Debs is arrested. The American Railway Union is destroyed. The company wins. Grover Cleveland declares Labor Day a federal holiday three days later, widely interpreted as a political gesture to labor following the violent suppression.
• 1904: Salvador Dalí is born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain. He will grow up to paint melting clocks, collaborate with Hitchcock on dream sequences, design a logo for Chupa Chups lollipops, and become the most recognizable surrealist in history — a man whose personal eccentricity was so extreme that it sometimes obscured how technically accomplished his painting actually was.
• May 9

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