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

Hernando de Soto led an expedition through Florida and the North American south-east in the mid-sixteenth century, finding a thick population of Indians, clustered in small cities, on the Mississippi river near modern Memphis. In 1682, when the area was next visited by white men (this time French), it was deserted.

The diseases travelled faster than the spearheads of Spanish conquest: smallpox arrived in Peru in 1525, Francisco Pizarro in 1532. It had already killed Huayna Capac, the Inca, and many of his relations, and precipitated the dynastic struggle that the Spaniards were to turn to their own advantage. Thereafter, as everywhere, further epidemics, of typhus, influenza, diphtheria and measles as well as more smallpox, ravaged the population.

The Spanish were not notably humane conquerors, but they had no interest in genocide. From the first days in Hispaniola, they had hoped to exploit the labour of the natives, and for this alone they were dismayed at the sudden and disastrous collapse in their numbers. Yet everywhere, the fact that the previous population was melting away would have materially aided the long-term spread of the conquerors’ language, changing the balance in numbers by subtracting predominantly from the speaker communities of the indigenous languages.

From the perspective of the world, with full benefit of hindsight, three aspects of the Spanish advance into the New World stand out as quite new to history.

One is that this was the first direct confrontation of races of human beings from quite separate lineages, divided by tens of thousands of years of independent development. The last common ancestor of Christopher Columbus and Guacanagarí, the first king he encountered on Hispaniola, could not have lived less than two thousand generations before, a period over twenty times longer than the time elapsed since the birth of Christ. That common ancestor would have lived in Africa, and so the two men’s lineages had to extend all round the world before they could meet. From that moment onward, contacts would no longer be restricted by this intrinsic linearity in the human settlement of the world: nation would speak unto nation, from anywhere to anywhere.

This aspect was fundamental to the special catastrophe that, as we have seen, hit the American population. It turned out that the long millennia of development that had culminated in America and Spain had given the European lineage an attribute that acted like a secret weapon: resistance to a variety of diseases which, since they were endemic, were likely to spread to any other population with which they were in contact. This, far more than the technical superiority in arms which meant they could win battles against overwhelming numbers, eliminated swathes of the native population before they had any chance to adapt culturally, or rally in the long term. It is this biological factor, above all, which explains why the majority population in the Hispanic countries of America nowadays is everywhere mestizo.

The second unprecedented aspect of the Spanish advance is that this was the first conquest of a foreign continent by seaborne invasion. Maritime empires had certainly been a feature of the ancient and medieval Mediterranean (Athens, Carthage and Venice stand out), and in the first millennium AD Indians had projected their civilisation across the Bay of Bengal, though without apparent military intent. Only eighty years before the Spanish founded their empire, China’s Admiral Zheng-He had cruised the Indian Ocean, exacting tribute from Sri Lanka, and demonstrating that China was capable of reaching the eastern coasts of Africa, if it so chose. But no previous empire had been gained or maintained through the control of oceanic seaways. Now for the first time a subject territory could be a continent away from its government, the link maintained through the projection of power by a navy across oceans.

Third, the conquest of the New World was the first major invasion to be undertaken in a number of independent initiatives, often by free enterprise, even if the adelantados —’advance men’, as the pioneer captains-general were known, their title previously reserved for the governors of frontier provinces facing the Muslims—all claimed to be acting on behalf of the king of Spain. The invasion forces tended to be so small (607 with Cortés in Mexico, 160 with Pizarro in Peru) that the defending leaders were misled as to the nature of the threat, and delayed fatally in their defences by attempting to negotiate with, or at least to observe, their unwanted Spanish visitors. The New World was conquered through a patchwork of campaigns of soldier adventurers: Columbus in the Caribbean (1490s), Cortés in Mexico, Alvarado in Guatemala, García in Bolivia, Pizarro in Peru (1520s), Quesada in New Granada (the future Colombia), Mendoza in Argentina (1530s), de Soto in Florida, Coronado in Texas, Cabrillo in California, Valdivia in Chile (1540s), to mention only the most famous or successful. Each campaign was aimed primarily at enriching its participants, even while the formal justification was to demand wider loyalty to the king, and to save souls by gaining converts to the True Church.

These three aspects of the event usher in a radically new age, and were to become commonplace features of the major language contacts to come, as maritime nations of Europe sent fleets to every temperate and tropical part of the world that possessed a coastline, and attempted to claim them as colonies, and their people as customers, subjects and converts. This sequence of conquests marked the crucial transition in the development of the fully global world of today, where practically anywhere on the planet is within twenty-four hours’ travel of anywhere else. [96]

Almost as an afterthought, the conquest of the Americas did eventually serve the purpose with which Columbus had set out, a link with Asia. In 1565, on the instructions of King Philip II, an expedition from Mexico crossed the Pacific to the islands of Cebu and Luzon, and established the beginnings of Spanish dominion in what was to be the Philippines. Other smaller Spanish colonies in the Pacific included the Marianas and Guam. Spanish control, and the attempt to spread the Spanish language here, was to last until the USA took over in 1898, after winning the Spanish-American War.

Since these Pacific colonies were gained at much the same time as the Americas, but were very much part of the Old World of the spice islands, on the edge of India’s and China’s zones of influence, they provide a useful contrast to highlight the special features of the progress of Spanish in the New World. Spanish never made widespread or deep-seated progress in the Philippines, and despite over three centuries of presence was soon displaced by English in the early twentieth century. It will be interesting to ponder the roots of the difference with Spanish in the Americas, where despite US economic dominance Spanish is still growing at the expense of English.

One can state at the outset that the conquest of the Philippines did not share in all the unprecedented properties of the conquest of the Americas. It was, admittedly, a seaborne invasion, and its point of origin was, like many expeditions of exploration into North America, in Mexico. But the land targeted was part of the Old World, not the New, and hence did not suffer from the disastrous lack of immunity to European diseases which devastated America: the advent of the Spanish was not followed in the Pacific by any collapse in the native population. Furthermore, the settlement of the Philippines did not proceed by individual groups spreading out to explore and exploit in their own interest. It was a Spanish government foundation, set up first at Cebu, and then, more permanently, in Manila. Thereafter, expansion of Spanish presence, and hence the Spanish language, came through the (more or less) disinterested activities of missionaries. The Philippines lacked the precious metals found in the Americas, and were much harder to reach from Spain, since the only barely practical route lay through Mexico: the colony offered little practical incentive for a Spanish-speaking community to grow and expand.