The wrong spelling of the French term _manant_ began with a misconception of its proper pronunciation. The Dutch thinking that the _t_ was sounded, pronounced the name _man-ant_, whence “_man-hat_,” “_man-ath_,” “_man-ad_,” and other strange forms of the name. Wassenaer, the Dutch historian, in 1624, speaking of the Indian tribes of New Netherland, says: “The Manhates are situated at the mouth” of the Mauritius River.[439] De Laet writes the name Manhattes, Manatthans, Manatthanes, and Manhattans.[440] De Vries, the Dutch navigator, who could speak French, spells the appellation Menates and Minates.[441] In the deposition of Catelyn Trico, a French woman, who emigrated from Holland, in 1624, to New Netherland, the term is written Mannantans.[442] Besides these peculiar changes the name has many other anomalous forms.[443] When the first French explorers sailed along that massive bulwark of trap-rock, now called The Palisades, rising on the west side of the Grande River to varying altitudes from two to five hundred feet above the level of the stream, and ranging northward and southward a distance of more than ten miles, they were peculiarly impressed with its grandeur, and figuratively called it L’Anormée Berge, (The Grand Scarp.) The adjective _anormée_ and the noun _berge_ definitely describe the steep and extensive wall of stone which borders the noble river, now bearing the name of a later explorer. _Anormé_, an obsolete form of the adjective _énorme_, signifies that which is grand, vast, majestic.[444] The noun _berge_, besides meaning an elevated border of a river, a scarp of a fortification, a steep side of a moat or of a road, is a designation for certain rocks elevated perpendicularly above the water.[445] In an old French lexicon it is said: “They likewise call in marine phraseology _bèrges_ or _barges_ those great rocks, rugged and perpendicularly elevated, that is to say, uprightly and plumb, as the _bèrges_ or _barges_ of Olone: such rocks as are Scylla and Charybdis, toward Messina.”[446] A more appropriate name could not have been selected to designate geographically this part of New France than that of The Land of the Grand Scarp (_La Terre d’Anormée Berge_), or, in more familiar phraseology, The Land of the Palisades. The words, scarp and palisade, are terms of fortification. The first designates the steep slope below the parapet of a fortification, next to the ditch; the second an upright row of strong stakes set firmly in the ground in front of the counter-scarp, on the opposite side of the moat from the scarp.