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?