I was wondering how Europeans (Spanish, Portuguese, British, etc.) and the various natives (mostly Native Americans, also Pacific Islanders) they encountered developed the translators they used during the “Age of Exploration.” Were the translators usually the natives or the Europeans? Do we know if there was a protocol in learning/teaching the languages that the Europeans used? Any idea about how long it took them to gain a basic understanding of a language?
I know the Europeans dealt with a lot of different cultures and I’d like to learn if thier methods were somewhat uniform or depended on the natives and the leader of the respective exploration.
This question seems to be languishing. I can’t answer it authoritively, but I will throw in some examples, if that helps.
Columbus, of course, set off hoping to run into people in either China or Japan. There had been quite a lot of medieval contact with the Far East and there was a recognised way of handling the language barriers: Arabic functioned as a lingua franca right the way along the Silk Route, so you either learnt that or acquired a translator who understood you. They could then speak with locals who knew Arabic in different places. On the first voyage Columbus therefore took along a converso called Luis de Torres, who could speak Hebrew and some Arabic. As it turned out, this wasn’t much use - though there’s also a document from the planning of the fourth voyage where he’s still talking about taking Arabic speakers along. Once it became obvious on the first trip that there would still be a language barrier, he took to kidnapping natives with the intention of taking them back to Spain so that they could learn Castilian. Most of them died aboard ship, but one of them, dubbed Diego Colon, acted as his translator on the second voyage. Since there are accounts of him being unintelligible on arrival in Europe, he seems to have picked up the language between the two trips.
Cortes sort of lucked out on the translation front. Early in the expedition to Mexico, he came across Jeronimo de Aguilar, a Spaniard who’d been shipwrecked on the coast of the Yucatan and who’s married a local. He’d thus learnt Mayan. Independently of this, he was given a slave called Marina who spoke Nahuatl as her mother tongue, but had also leant Mayan. Via these two, Cortes could therefore make himself be understood in Nahuatl. (He also started sleeping with Marina.)
During the colonisation of Mexico, the Spaniards tended to use local translators rather than learn the language themselves. The main problem was in missionary work, since the priests involved were trying to convey rather subtle concepts. Even so, it was rare for 16th century priests in Mexico to have any knowledge of the local dialects. One obvious exception were the Jesuits.
For the later British voyages in the Pacific, the standard practice seems to have been to pick up and carry Polynesians who were willing to learn English. The best known example is Omai, but this page discusses some of the others who accompanied Cook.
Even in the 19th century, one sees elements of the same idea in the Fuegians taken back to England on the first voyage of the Beagle and taken back on the (rather more famous) return trip. As always, this was also very much about using them as an exotic spectacle back home and converting them to Christianity. But it was regarded as handy that they would learn English and hence could translate.
In most (perhaps even all) of these cases, the Europeans did still pick up at least some rudimentary vocabulary themselves.
Actually, I should also have mentioned the “slave-interpreters” used by the Portuguese during the Henrician explorations down the west coast of Africa. Not only are these the precedent for how Columbus handled the matter, this is an example where the issue was governed by a deliberate policy.
The instructions to these expeditions were not just to go further than before, since they were also expected to collect information about the tribes and countries they passed on the way. To do so effectively required being able to talk to the locals, so each voyage carried African translators captured on previous trips. A captain would proceed southwards until the language barriers were sufficiently high that his translators couldn’t understand what was being said. Some locals would then be captured and taken back to Portugal as slaves. Once there, it was either a matter of finding other such slaves who knew enough to act as intermediaries to these new ones or expecting them to pick up Portuguese. They could then be used as interpreters on the next trip, which could get that bit further south as a result.
In his biography of Henry the Navigator, Peter Russell cites his own 1995 book Portugal, Spain and the African Atlantic for a detailed account of how this system worked, though I haven’t read it.
Sometimes they found a native who had been to Europe and returned before tyhe Europeans first arrived. Sounds impossible? No – when the Pilgrims arrived at Massachusetts Bay in 1620, one of the local natives had been to England, and therefore already spoke English. Biography of Tisquantum