The Rhode Island government admits that "This nickname was formulated to attract tourism to Rhode Island".
It continues: "'Ocean State' began appearing on Rhode Island license plates in 1972, replacing 'Discover.' The Rhode Island Tourism Division promotes over 400 miles of coastline. This is not all ocean frontage but includes Narragansett Bay extending inland from the Atlantic Ocean north to the center of the state. All Rhode Islanders live within a 30–minute drive to the Atlantic Ocean or Narragansett Bay."
Narragansett Bay is the largest estuary in New England. Just over 80% of its 147 square miles of surface area belongs to Rhode Island, the remainder being in Massachusetts.
As you probably know, Rhode Island is not an island. It's believed that the colony was named after Aquidneck Island, which is the largest of more than thirty islands in Narragansett Bay.
According to Wikipedia, "Giovanni da Verrazzano [a Florentine explorer, in the service of King Francis I of France] noted the presence of an island near the mouth of Narragansett Bay in 1524 which he likened to the island of Rhodes off the coast of Greece. Subsequent European explorers were unable to precisely identify the island that Verrazzano described, but the colonists who settled the area assumed that it was this island."
Wikipedia continues: "[The Dutch privateer] Adriaen Block passed by the island during his expeditions in the 1610s, and he described it in a 1625 account of his travels as 'an island of reddish appearance,' which was 'een rodlich Eylande' in 17th–century Dutch ... supposedly evolving into the designation Rhode Island. Historians have theorized that this 'reddish appearance' resulted from either red autumn foliage or red clay on portions of the shore.
I have to say that I'm more than somewhat sceptical about Wikipedia's assertion that Giovanni da Verrazzano compared Aquidneck Island to Rhodes. Seems quite a coincidence ... and I could find no evidence to back it up.
© Haydn Thompson 2021