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

General de Quesada tried to find out what people were arrayed against him. There was an Indian whom they had captured with two cakes of salt and who had led them to where they were in this realm, and who through conversation already spoke a few words of Spanish. The General had him ask some Indians of the country whom he had captured to serve as interpreters. They replied in their language with the words musca puenunga , which is the phrase for ‘many people’. The Spaniards who heard it said: ‘they say they are like flies [ moscas ]’… [Quesada] gave them a blast from the arquebuses. Then when the Indians saw that without coming up to them the Spaniards were killing them, without waiting a moment they took flight; our men gave chase and attacked them, until the great host came apart and disappeared. In the pursuit they say that the Spanish said: ‘There were more of these than flies; but they have taken flight like flies’; with which the name [Mosca] was fixed for them; and this assault finished off the whole war.

Juan Rodriguez Freyle, Conquest and discovery of the New Kingdom of Granada ,

ch. vi (written in 1636, describing events in the region of Bogotá in 1536)

Perhaps disappointed by the inadequate, because misguided, linguistic support he had brought on his first voyage, Columbus had kidnapped a handful of the people in his ships as he sailed onward around the islands he was exploring, and then taken them back to Spain. ‘It appeared to him that he should take to Castile, from this Isle of Cuba or the mainland as he was already reckoning it to be, some Indians so that they might learn the tongue of Castile and to know from them the secrets of the land, and in order to instruct them in the matters of the faith.’ [519]

Several of them were presented at court, and received baptism, with royal godparents, no less. Most of them either died in Spain or took flight as soon as they returned to the Indies, and only one of them, now (after baptism) known as Diego Colón, did service as an interpreter. Columbus had at first been under the impression that all the ‘Indians’ he met spoke the same language; but the limited usefulness of Diego as he toured even the rest of the Caribbean islands gave him, first of the Europeans, an inkling of how diverse the language stock of these lands really was.

This kind of attempt to capture likely lads and train them up as interpreters was never a great success, although persisted with for thirty years or so. It caused resentment when candidates were taken by force—the native populations of Taino Indians already had bitter experience in their own culture of raids by neighbours for enslavement and human sacrifice—and far too often the apprentices died in the unnatural setting of life in Europe.

More effective was the natural process whereby an isolated Spaniard, shipwrecked or on the run from his own people, would take up life in an Indian village, and so get to know their language, before returning to act as interpreter. There are a good dozen such cases on record. [520]One of these turned out to be crucial for the first Spanish advance into the interior of America, when in 1519 Cortés penetrated to the heart of the Mexican empire. He communicated through a relay of two interpreters, one of them Jerónimo de Aguilar, a Spaniard who had spent eight years in a Mayan village after a shipwreck on the coast of Yucatán, the other the famous Malin-tzin, a Nahuatl-speaking woman from Coatzacoalcos who had been traded to a nearby Mayan community, Xicalango, in childhood.

As interpreters of Spanish, many native trainees remained rather inadequate, lacking the background to understand the Spaniards’ real interests, even if they were as self-motivated as the Peruvian Felipillo, who had ‘learnt the [Spanish] language without anyone teaching him … [and] was the first interpreter that Peru had’. [521]

He was the main interpreter during the conquest of Peru, and mediated the first, crucial, conversation with Atahuallpa, the Inca emperor, just before the decisive battle of Cajamarca. Felipillo was called on to translate a harsh and pithy address by the Dominican friar, Fray Vicente Valverde, which ran through the basic doctrines of Christianity, the apparent duty of the Pope and the Spanish emperor Charles to convert the world, and the consequent need for Atahuallpa to submit to them without further ado.

Atahuallpa’s reply is transmitted by Inca Garcilaso, himself a mestizo bilingual in Spanish and the Inca language Quechua, but also a highly educated student of Ciceronian rhetoric, writing more than a lifetime after the event. By his account, the poverty of the translation seems to have vitiated any chance that understanding, or at least courtesy, could be maintained. Atahuallpa is supposed to have replied at length, starting with a comment on the poor quality of the interpreting:

It would have caused me great satisfaction, since you deny everything else I have requested of your messengers, that you should at least have granted me one request, that of addressing me through a skilled and faithful translator. For the urbanity and social life of men is more readily understood through speech than by customs, since even though you may be endowed with great virtues, if you do not manifest them by words, I shall not easily be able to perceive them by observation and experience. And if this is needful among all peoples and nations, it is much more so between those who come from such widely different regions as we; if we seek to deal and talk through interpreters and messengers who are ignorant of both languages it will be as though we were conversing through the mouths of beasts of burden. [522]

A speech of this level of elaboration was evidently going to floor such a simple interpreter as Felipillo, but it is most likely a fiction of Garcilaso’s, in accord with the best traditions of classical history-writing. Nevertheless, Garcilaso does claim that the Spaniards ‘who were unable to brook the length of the discourse, had left their places and fallen on the Indians’. So intolerance of long-windedness in an unknown language perhaps played a role in the action that did develop.

After the conquests were achieved and Spaniards installed in positions of power, there was little in the new economic order that was established, with native inhabitants of a region assigned to work on the land or in mines, that would have encouraged widespread diffusion of the Spanish language. Repetitive duties among static populations would minimise the need for communication between master and subject. There was nothing analogous to military service in the Roman empire, or the spread of monasteries and universities in medieval Europe, which would diffuse the language of the Spanish masters around their domains. There was, in any case, a constant flow of Spanish speakers emigrating from Spain itself to boost the speaker population. Yet a substantial number of bilinguals would have been needed to organise the work of the natives. They would have arisen naturally as the Spanish immigrants, overwhelmingly male, took Indian wives or mistresses ( mancebas ) and began to raise families with them. Their children, known as mestizos , would learn both languages from their parents. ‘As early as 1503, the Court recommends to the governor of Hispaniola that some Christians should marry some Indian women, so that they may communicate with and teach one another.’ [523]

Such enthusiasm for the Nueva Raza , the ‘new race’ generated by these interracial unions, is one feature that strongly distinguishes Spanish imperialism from the attitudes of later Anglo-Saxon empire-builders. Among the famous conquistadores , almost every one had mestizo children, often with several different women, and they were fully recognised as heirs to their fathers. Cortés, Pizarro, Benalcázar and Alvarado all conform to this tradition; indeed, Pope Clement VII officially legitimised three sons of Cortés in a bull of 1529, although he did temporise a little: ‘the virtues’ beauty purges in the sons the stain of the birth, and with the purity of customs the shame of origin is effaced’.