Joel at Far Outliers posted excerpts from Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), and I thought this one was of Hattic interest:
Those who remained reasonably healthy and curious would have been immediately struck by Navidad’s sheer diversity. As the port’s population swelled from a few dozen to several hundred, it turned into something of a Babel of races, nationalities, classes, and occupations. Native Americans were ubiquitous. Coming from nearby towns such as Tuxpan and Xilotlán, they had been compelled to abandon their families, homes, and fields and go to Navidad to work for token compensation according to a system of corvée labor known as repartimiento. For these Indigenous peoples, service at the port was yet another labor sinkhole that they had to endure, like the silver mines or the road construction projects. Also common were African slaves, purchased by the viceroy and dispatched to Navidad to aid in the building effort. Some had been Christianized and spoke Spanish, but many others, the so-called negros bozales, had been imported directly from Africa. Particularly visible was a team of Black slaves constantly moving cargo from various towns into Navidad and managing a train of twenty-seven mules and two horses.
Spaniards constituted the largest share of the expeditionaries, as one would expect. The catchall appellation español, however, masked yet more diversity. Friar Urdaneta and Commander Legazpi were both from the Basque Country, so a disproportionate number of voyagers hailed from that region. As Basque is a non-Indo-European language, they enjoyed a private means of communication completely impenetrable to all other Spaniards—far more so than, say, English, German, or Russian. Galicia in the north of Spain, Castile in the middle, and Andalusia in the south were also well represented at Navidad. Although these historic kingdoms were linguistically and culturally closer to one another, the differences between them were greater in the sixteenth century than today and inevitably led to cliques and divisions within the crew and the two companies of soldiers.
A fixture of all early voyages of exploration was the high proportion of non-Spaniards. They could account for as many as a third (according to some regulations) and up to half (as in the case of Magellan’s expedition) of all crew members. The Navidad fleet was no different. The documentation mentions a Belgian barrel maker, a German artilleryman, an English carpenter, Venetian crew members, a French pilot, two Filipino translators, and so forth. Portuguese mariners made up the largest and most conspicuous foreign group: at least sixteen could be counted at Navidad. Spaniards regarded them as rivals but also valued their nautical skills. The Afro-Portuguese pilot Lope Martín, our protagonist, was among them.
(Click through for more on the very interesting Lope Martín.) It makes sense that Basque would have made a good private language.
Re private languages: In the important historical document “Carmen” (P. Mérimée, Revue des deux Mondes, 1845), the title character, a Roma woman, can speak Basque, though badly. How plausible was that? I got to this LH post, which suggests it wasn’t unlikely.
Honestly, there isn’t much justification for the claim that Basque makes a better private language among a group of 16th century Spaniards than Russian does. “Non-Indo-European” presents a particular hurdle for linguists and people who approach language learning systematically, possibly based on their knowledge of Latin (back then) but for the layman without any historical linguistic background a foreign language is a foreign language. Mutual intelligibility between Castilian and Russian is pretty much zero for Spaniards with no exposure to Russian. The odds of a 16th century Spaniard having picked up some exposure to Basque over the course of their life via travel or some random acquaintance seem much higher than the odds they would have heard Russian (or Farsi or Bengali or Irish, to pick other Indo European languages that would have been at least as private as Basque in that context). Yes, Basque is not Indo-European but it has Castilian loan words, Castilian has a number of basic Basque loan words (like bacalao and izquierda) and phonetically Basque isn’t that weird for Castilian speakers. People like to exaggerate how exotic Basque is.
It seems very anachronistic to call a barrel maker (or anyone else) “Belgian” as of 1564. The revolt of Protestants that led to the separation of the more northerly chunk of the so-called Spanish Netherlands from the remaining chunk that was ancestral to current Belgium hadn’t even started yet. Call him Flemish, call him a Walloon, maybe call him “Netherlandish” (in fairly standard use by art historians who understand that it’s confusing to retroject a Dutch/Belgian distinction that didn’t yet exist) or whatever. But not Belgian.
@Vanya:
Good point.
The negros bozales, depending on where they had originally come from, might have been better placed on the shared private language front. Not, I imagine, that the Spaniards would have cared much about what they were saying to each other.
@Vanya: I thought it was unknown which way bacalao had been borrowed?
I thought it was unknown which way bacalao had been borrowed?
… (te conozco bacalao aunque venga disfrazao)
vengas, ¿no?
Sí, vengas. Gracias.
This comment specifically.
(Best cryptolect ever.)
One of the few to get back from Magellan’s expedition (as captain) was Juan Sebastián Elcano, also from the Basque Country, which was heavily involved in ship-building at the time, thanks to the abundant forests in that region. Elcano is not terribly well known, I think, in the anglophone sphere, but in Spain he seems to get as much mention as Magellan.
The negros bozales, depending on where they had originally come from, might have been better placed on the shared private language front. Not, I imagine, that the Spaniards would have cared much about what they were saying to each other.
Good point. As far as utility, even having a language wherein they could insult their owners without the owners realizing might have been good for morale.
But you got me thinking if any of the Basque Spaniards actually benefited from having a “private” language. Any important secrets that need to be shared can usually done by speaking in private in a low voice. As Reséndez points out, the various languages the Spanish spoke just increased social divisions and probably created more friction than utility.
It would have been later (not too much later …) than the timeframe of this anecdote, but soon enough the establishment of stable/ongoing commerce between Mexico and the Philippines meant the addition of speakers of various Filipino languages to the population of Mexico’s Pacific coast. The early waves eventually pretty much assimilated via “admixture events” into oblivion, although supposedly modern genome analysis will tell you that X% of the population in certain parts of Mexico has a detectable quantum of Filipino ancestry. There are supposedly some other Filipino-origin contributions to Mexican cuisine and other cultural practices; I dunno about Austronesian-origin loanwords in current Mexican Spanish.
ETA: And of course if there’s a book about the early Filipino presence in colonial Mexico, that seems like exactly the sort of book that Far Outliers would run excerpts from …
Judging by the African elements in the various Atlantic creoles, there seems to have been a pretty major component of Fon speakers among the first-generation victims of the Atlantic slave trade, so shared language seems possible despite the enormous linguistic diversity of West Africa.
I’m not sure where most Spanish slaves originally came from in this period. The Spanish actually seem to have relied mainly on the Portuguese for supplies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiento_de_Negros
@JWB: See https://faroutliers.com/2009/05/04/asian-roles-in-new-spain/
and
https://faroutliers.com/2007/01/08/earliest-filipino-immigrants-to-north-america/
@DE: Reséndez published an earlier book I’ve started reading about slavery of New World Indians during the Spanish Empire: The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. Slavery was outlawed by Queen Isabella, but enforcement was very difficult in many corners of the empire. Spain (and others) relied on Portugal to supply African slaves to New World mines and plantations. Expect excerpts to appear soon.
Joel
OT, but wondering how the Irish folk are getting on? It’s been wild and noisy here, but only odds and ends of destruction that I know of…
@jen
Lots of people w/o power, only one fatality so far. Water treatment plants also partly without power, so people are being asked to conserve water.
@Peter Grubtal: Three quarters of the crewmen from Magellan’s expedition who made it back to Spain were on the San Antonio, which abandoned the mission (under somewhat but definitely acrimonious circumstances) at the Straits. As to Elcano, he seems to have been a fairly obscure figure for quite a long time. The backgrounds of many of the major figures during the Voyages of Exploration are not well known. (Most famously, this applies to Columbus.) Magellan is not quite as obscure, but Elcano’s background is definitely one of the poorly known examples. According to Wikipedia: “Even in Spain, for example, the first biographies about him were written in the second half of the 19th century, after three centuries of neglect by historians.”
@Joel: Thanks/ありがとう. (Don’t know the Tagalog and ain’t gonna look it up just for this purpose.)
the establishment of stable/ongoing commerce between Mexico and the Philippines …
Shush! We don’t want to give anybody an idea for a Western expansion of the Empire. Filipinos practically run His resorts already.
@AntC: there may be French folks who miss sovereignty over Algeria, English folks who mourn the loss of Empire more generally, and maybe even Germans who feel pangs of separation from Südwestafrika or Italians who yearn for the Dodecanese. But I have never met an American, however nationalistic or jingoistic, who thought it had been a mistake to abandon U.S. ownership of the Philippines much less wanted them back. Both attitudes can, by contrast, be occasionally found (now or at least within my lifetime) w/r/t the Panama Canal Zone and the canal situated therein. But that’s really a very modestly-sized irredentism (553 square miles, sez wikipedia) for a country so large.
Joel, thanks for the link to the post “Earliest Filipino Immigrants to North America”! This has opened up a very stimulating line of enquiry for me.
But I have never met an American, however nationalistic or jingoistic, who thought it had been a mistake to abandon U.S. ownership of the Philippines much less wanted them back.
Have you ever met an American who wanted to take over Greenland? These things no longer depend on vox populi, if they ever did.
Bloomfield’s Tagalog Texts contains one called “Fleeing from the Americans.” I recall reading an affecting comment on this from an American postgrad who had been astonished to find that the people of the Philippines had ever not really loved the Americans.(Should have read his Mark Twain.)
If the POSOTUS tells his Trumpodules that it was a mistake to give up the Philippines, they will believe him. And the American annexation did take place under his current role model McKinley …
Perhaps he’ll just invade Cuba. That would Energise his Base.
hat is correct to note that there is an element of elite-driven control and realpolitik in these things. I do not think the U.S. purchase of the quondam Danish West Indies in 1917 (now rebranded as the U.S. Virgin Islands) was motivated by broad grassroots interest or support. And Pres. Truman’s generous offer to buy Greenland in 1946 (rejected out of hand by his late majesty Christian X, who may have been ill-advised by his ministers) was likewise not a grassroots-driven thing. But recall that back in the 19th century, the Danes sold all of their miscellaneous African and South Asian colonies to the Brits. They are not good at imperialism and are thus in the business of territory-selling.
I have my own perhaps idiosyncratic angle. The U.S. is hosting the Olympics in 2028 (subject to the relevant sites in Los Angeles not having all burned down beforehand, I guess), which means that as host we will get to, and in fact be obligated to, compete in team handball w/o our teams having to qualify the usual way, which we could not presently manage because of the comparative weakness of our national handball teams. Right now the men’s world championship is going on, and with two games left to play the U.S. is likely going to finish somewhere between 25th and 28th in the field of 32, down from 20th in 2023, which does not bode well for the Olympics, in which only 12 teams are in the tournament and our aspiration should be to not to be embarrassed. Greenland just so happens to be on a purely per capita basis the strongest handball power in the world (Denmark is often #1 w/o adjusting for population). We have occasionally lost games to the Greenlandic national team despite having a population several thousand times larger to draw from. Getting the best Greenlandic players under the U.S. flag in time for the Olympics would be the most effective quick-and-dirty way of building a stronger team (both on the men’s side and the women’s side), although it is also possible that an eccentric tech billionaire and an aging celebrity rapper will happen to choose the improvement of our national handball teams as a pet cause they want to devote their energies and resources to over the next three and a half years.
Alas, these matters are rarely decided completely rationally. My own positively Kissinger-level proposal that the UK and China should simply trade Hong Kong for Liverpool was poorly received at the time, but has surely been amply justified by subsequent events.
@David E.: But then the Chicoms would get the benefit of the aesthetically-lovely Scouse accent we were just discussing in another thread? Although maybe that would have somehow led them down a less illiberal path than they have in fact pursued.
I have spent a certain amount of time in an old-style American gentleman’s club up in Connecticut (women and non-WASPs now welcome as members) which has hanging on the wall near the bar a sort of homemade artillery piece that had been captured by a distinguished member from insurgents in Mindanao circa 1901. You may find pockets of patriotic nostalgia for the initial acquisition of those islands. I myself as a boy went on tours of the now-museum-ship U.S.S. Olympia, Admiral Dewey’s flagship when he defeated the Spanish fleet at Manila in 1898, and have taken my own oldest son on a tour of ditto. That’s different from wanting the headache of being having those islands back.
My advice to Pres. Trump when it comes to that part of the world is to stick it to the Obama legacy by relegalizing the importation and sale of clove cigarettes, a traditional export of Indonesia that were ungallantly excluded from the US on the watch of our first Indonesian-raised president. One problem may be that Trump is too old and Vance in turn too young to have likely once had a quasi-hippieish girlfriend who liked to smoke clove cigarettes, which was I think a fairly common experience for my specific generational cohort.
I too had such a girlfriend.
ungallantly excluded from the US on the watch of our first Indonesian-raised president
Payback for the illegal American seizure of his birthplace.
Re “illegal American seizure of his birthplace”: I spent some amount of time back then (okay maybe not cumulatively as much as five or ten hours over several years …) urging so-called “birthers” to work that angle for the man’s possible ineligibility for office rather than claim the man had been born in Kenya rather than the illegally-occupied sovereign Kingdom of Hawai’i. Now, probably his mother’s undisputed American citizenship would have made him a U.S. citizen-from-birth per the statutes then in effect even if she’d given birth to him in e.g. Tonga (or for that matter Kenya), but let’s not get too hung up on the technicalities.
Trump is not offering to buy Greenland at some fair price. Reportedly he screamed at the Danish Prime Minister to give it to him the point where it caused a major government crisis to n Denmark. Outright war between the U.S. and the EU is starting to feel inevitable over here in Europe. Glib jokes about handball are just whistling past the graveyard.
At least in Austria we still have our flammable trees under control and the raking of the forest went well this year.
But I have never met an American, however nationalistic or jingoistic, who thought it had been a mistake to abandon U.S. ownership of the Philippines much less wanted them back.
Presumably they regarded Philippine politics as an irredeemable kleptocracy, with one coup regularly supplanted by the next, who promptly pardoned the previous-but-one regime’s miscreants.
(With apologies to our host for straying off topic. But I can’t help holding a mirror up to the World’s Greatest Democracy.)
Let’s not mock the Americans. Most of them didn’t want this, and furthermore we may easily be next. Also, we should be vigorously opposing Trump’s project of making everyone in the rest of the world think that all Americans are hateful. Fuck that guy (as Marx so memorably puts it.)
Let’s talk about Language. (Also, Hats.)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7b/Garibaldi_%281866%29.jpg/1568px-Garibaldi_%281866%29.jpg
Well, plus/minus a few million voters, about half thought this was better than the Democrat disaster. Is it then reasonable to surmise that about half of all Americans are hateful ? Maybe they were underthinking the issues. It’s complicated, I wouldn’t care to bet.
The linguistic diversity of the 16th-century Pacific coast of New Spain presumably did not extend to any Greenlandic speakers or speakers of any other Eskaleut tongue. By the early 19th century, there were some L1 Eskaleut speakers living permanently in what is now northern California as part of the Russian settlements there a bit north of San Francisco Bay. I expect there may have been Eskaleut-speakers among the crew of some Russian ships that might have traded as far south as Pacific-coast ports of current-boundaries Mexico, but would doubt that they ever jumped ship in sufficiently large numbers as to create a stable local Eskaleut-speaking community.
On the other hand, almost 5% of the current population of Alaska is of Filipino ancestry,* and at least some of them presumably have some fluency in a FIlipino language although I haven’t taken the time to look for those separate stats. (Hawaii has by far the highest Filipino-ancestry percentage of U.S. states; Alaska appears to currently be in third place, just behind Nevada and just ahead of California.)
*That may include those of mixed ancestry. There may have been enough mixed marriages along the way that a small-but-non-zero number of Alaskans perhaps have some heritage-language competency in both a Filipino language and some Native Alaskan language (possibly but not necessarily an Eskaleut one).
My sense is that many Americans, finding that their families face declining expectations and harsher lives, feel betrayed by our government and many of our institutions. This looks like a real systems collapse.
Yes, but as DE says, this is not the place to discuss it. Thank you for not smoking!
Sincere apologies. Too much reality…