Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

This was to have some strange effects on language policy in the Americas. Free thinking was seen as pernicious and indeed contagious; and a consequence of this was the preference, when Spain became responsible for education in the Americas, that native students should learn Latin, rather than Castilian; vernacular literature could never be guaranteed free of deceptive influences. But in spreading Spanish civilisation among foreign-language speakers, it would also become clear that the linguistic priorities of the secular and the sacred diverged: nothing matched the symbolic power of the Spanish language to signify empire—but it was easier, quicker and more reliable to spread understanding, and hence faith, in one of the native languages.

Faith and righteous government might be one thing: but the getting of wealth was another. Here there was scope for innovation. Indeed, the new departure that Castile authorised was so far reaching in its consequences that it transcended even the wildest fifteenth-century romance. The Portuguese were exploring south and eastward in this period, finding a route round Africa to India and the spice islands; they had rounded the Cape in 1488, and were to reach the fabled orient on follow-up expeditions, India in 1499, Melaka (Malacca) in 1511, Guangzhou (Canton) in 1514. But in that same cardinal year of 1492, the Spanish were offered, by the Genoese adventurer Christopher Columbus, a more speculative path to the same destination, travelling due west. Queen Isabella backed him, and the result was quite different from what had been hoped: not an economic back door to the Orient, but a whole new set of worlds to conquer, ultimately a far richer prize.

Caliban to Prospero:

You taught me language; and my profit on’t

Is, I know how to curse: the red plague rid you,

For learning me your language!

Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611), i.2.1, 1.321

It is of note that the Indians of Peru, before we Christians had come to them, had certain and particular modes of swearing, distinct from ours. They had no assertive oaths, such as ‘by God’ or ‘by heaven’ but only execration or curses… e.g. ‘if I am not telling the truth, may the sun kill me’ they said mana checcanta õiptiy, indi guaõuchiuancmancha… Once when I asked a chieftain in a certain province if he was a Christian, he said ‘I am not yet quite one, but I am making a beginning.’ I asked him what he knew of being Christian, and he said: ‘I know how to swear to God, and play cards a bit, and I am beginning to steal.’

Fray Domingo Santo Tomás,

Arte de la Lengua General … del Perú (1560), ch. Xxiii

The spread of Spanish into the Americas was the first linguistic effect of a totally new development in recorded human history. The Spanish and the Portuguese discovered, in the late fifteenth century, that a new technology, the ocean-going ship, powered by sail, and guided by the magnetic compass and an evolving knowledge of prevailing winds, could give them direct access to distant parts of the world. Although this came as a surprise to these navigating nations, the shock was much greater to the peoples already living in the parts of the world on to which they burst. The Arabs of the Indian Ocean instantly lost their monopoly of trade with India and China; the Indians, the Chinese and all between them faced a new military threat from rapacious Europeans. But for the inhabitants of the Americas, without a seafaring tradition of their own, and so isolated for millennia from the hazards of long-distance contact, it was a shock that was usually fatal.

The surprise of the Spanish irruption into the New World was registered in many ways. Spanish incomprehension can be seen in the permanent misnomer of their new subjects, called ‘Indians’ ( indios ) by Christopher Columbus. [93]It is also seen in Columbus’s assumption, followed by many later chroniclers, that hostile Caribbean islanders were clearly cannibals (a term that as a result became synonymous with ‘eaters of human flesh’). [94]Never substantiated, this may have been a hangover from the traditions of European travellers’ tales about the ends of the earth; Herodotus said that beyond the Scythians lived the flesh-eating Androphagi; and Strabo had retailed the same story about the Scythians themselves, and even the Irish. [516]But the European mariners may have been misinterpreting—to fit with more conventional horror—the first evidence they were finding of the true, but for then still truly inconceivable, indigenous practices of human sacrifice.

Most directly for our purposes, the Spanish incomprehension can be seen in the linguists that Columbus had chosen to bring in the hope of easing communication: Luis de Torres, who knew Hebrew, Aramaic (’Chaldaean’) and some Arabic, and Rodrigo de Jérez, who had perhaps visited some of the Portuguese colonies in Guinea. Although he may rationally have believed he could run into Arab traders when he reached China, his choice is eloquent of the sheer ignorance of what the rest of the world was like linguistically, when the only alien that even an educated Spaniard was likely to meet was a Moor or a Jew. [95]And indeed Spaniards went on calling the spiritual centres of the Americans ‘mosques’: for example, in a letter to his king in 1520, Cortés wrote, of a city in Mexico that had never seen a Muslim: ‘And I assure your Majesty that I counted from a mosque some 430 towers in the said city, all of them belonging to mosques.’ [517]

The incomprehension of the extent of the new horizons now opening up was of course not confined to the Spaniards. Seeing themselves quite explicitly as emissaries of Christendom in these new realms, they turned to the Pope—Alexander VI, conveniently a Spaniard—to validate their title to the territories. It was a situation familiar to us from the modern rush for patents in the uncharted areas of information technology and genetics. In 1493 the Pope, after granting Spain sovereignty over Columbus’s discoveries on his first voyage, went on to award it title to all territories more than a hundred leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands, approximately longitude 30°W, explicitly all the way to India. If it had become established, this would have given Spain rights to all the Americas. But no one could know this, a year after Columbus’s first voyage. The Portuguese were at this stage the only major competitors and were duly concerned about the Pope’s dispensation, above all in order to guarantee their routes through the Atlantic to Africa and beyond. They succeeded in negotiating with the Spaniards to have the north-south demarcation line moved 270 leagues farther west, effectively to longitude 45°, and this notional limit was agreed in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. It was never clearly identified in practice, and corresponds to no modern boundary—Brazil, for example, extends inland all the way to longitude 74°W, and even on the coast as far as 50°—but it did serve as a convenient rule of thumb, giving Portugal a prior claim to Brazil, whose south-eastern coast was first visited by both Spanish and Portuguese ships in 1500, but inhibiting its interest in the Amazon until 1637.

On the American side, the shock of incomprehension was registered more brutally, by a devastating loss of population. It is impossible to estimate safely the numbers living in the Americas before European contact. Estimates vary between 13 million and 180 million. But everywhere there is evidence of a massive fall in the early years after the Europeans arrived. First of all, the Spaniards complained of depopulation in the first islands they colonised, Cuba and Hispaniola, and the figures bear them out: a census of Hispaniola in 1496 gave a figure of 1.1 million, but just eighteen years later the repartimiento of 1514 listed 22,000. Mexico witnessed a series of epidemics, beginning with the Spanish visit to their capital Tenochtitlán, which carried off most of the native population, and spread southward into Guatemala. Of the whole Caribbean, Joseph de Acosta was writing in the 1580s: ‘the habitation of which coasts is … so wasted and condemned that of thirty parts of the people that inhabit it there wants twenty-nine; and it is likely that the rest of the Indians will in short time decay’. [518]