The Queensland Naturalist, p185, 31 Jan 1911
The Name "Glass Houses" by David Owen MA.
Mr. John Shirley, in his address on the Geology of the Glass House Mountains, before the Royal Society of Queensland in 1907, offered the suggestion that those remarkable hills had been so named by Captain Cook from their "apparent resemblance to glass palaces that he had seen in England." The suggestion was one that set me thinking, for during that very period I was, studying a cluster of place-names, of which Glass House was of the number, with a view to discovering their meaning. The explanation that rewarded my study then is one that differs from Mr. Shirley's, - but I can understand that while it was with the geology of the hills he was mainly concerned, he had meant that he should be taken as speaking only casually when offering an opinion as to meaning. I have examined those place-names often since, and with the same result, so that I venture now to submit it for the consideration of other students.
While all the world knows that Yorkshire was Captain Cook's native county, not many know that his birthplace is named Marton and that it is situated on the northern edge of the Cleveland Moors. These facts are for the purpose now in hand, specially to be noted, as it is with reference to them that Cook must have given to those two objects in the geography of our part of the world, that are so familiar to-us, their present names Glass Houses and Moreton Bay.
Now, the Cleveland Moors, like many other out-of-the-way places in Britain, which may have been left in their almost primeval state, still exhibit the ruined remains of the ancient population that long ago inhabited them; the most conspicuous of such remains being the more or less elevated tumuli and barrows that the old folk had used for burial purposes and for habitation. A century and half ago, they could still show the outlines of their early form, and they stood almost undiminished as to their original height. From the front seat of the old stage-coach, as it rounded the shoulder of a hill or clattered along the level moorland road, the traveler saw scores of these hillocks on either hand in groups of three or more, standing moveless and silent in the middle distance or glimmering faintly on the far horizon.
The name given them by the people of the locality is houes or howes. Of these names the singular houe is a softened form of the Danish word haug, which means a burial-mound; a few of them may be enumerated, such as Blakhowe, Brownhowe, Threehoues, and Leafhoue. The fact of the larger of them having served as dwellings has led to confusion being made between the plural name houes, which is descriptive of them as burying-places, with the English word house, which is descriptive of a dwelling-place.
Should this word houes afford a sufficiently reasonable explanation of the second element in Glass House, there will then be some warrant for expecting that some such word as cladh, a word of Celtic origin and meaning a mound or tumulus will sufficiently explain the second element Glass, so that finally, the name Glass House may be regarded as, a euphonised form of cladh-haug, a kind of Celtic-Norse compound meaning a burial-mound.
This seems a better view to take of the name than the one in which it has been made-to appear as meaning 'glass-palaces' or according to some 'glass furnaces'. Crystal palaces had not come into use-in Cook's time, and though he may have in some industrial quarter of a seaport town set eye upon furnaces for making glass, yet it is not likely that, whilst the upstanding hillocks of his native moors familiar to him from boyhood had never left his memory, he would be thinking of some pent-up furnaces, seen by him in a smokey town, when searching his memory for a name for the wonderful hills that met his gaze as he was entering Moreton Bay.
The mere mention of the name of Cook's birth-place, Marton, should make anyone instantly to see the utter impossibility of there being any other name from which more appropriately to derive the name Moreton Bay. There is a point specially to be noted in this connection, and that is, that in the chart and in the text of the "Voyages," differences occur in the spelling of the proper names. On the chart which accompanies Vol, III, edition 1773, the entries are: "Glass Houses" - three of the -, and "Glass House Bay"; "Cape Morton" and "Morton Bay". These differences in the spelling may have occurred through the differences of opinion that existed then and exist now as to the quality of the vowel 'a' in the name Marton.
An examination on similar lines of the name Cleveland in Moreton Bay might lead to the discovery of some point of connection between it and Cook's country.
References:
(Copies of the original article)
QN Glass House Mts Part 1
QN Glass House Mts Part 2