The stories of early interpreters
The Portuguese slave-trade laid the foundations for what was to come, as did the Iberian conquests in the Americas. Had it not been for the need for labour in the New World to supplement reluctant and scarce native peoples, the sixteenth-century trade would not have grown to the transatlantic displacement of millions of Africans. As it was, when the Dutch, …
In the 1400s, navigators commissioned by the Portuguese royal family started to sail along the Guinea Coast, the shoreline from the Senegal River to South Angola. They hoped to obtain directly from the source the goods that were traditionally bought from Moorish merchants in North Africa. There was no need to brave the interior as the trading centres that had …
Sir Walter Raleigh’s early attempts at settlement in Virginia informed the approach taken by the next wave of English colonists. Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia and engravings based on John White’s illustrations were well known, others had written memoirs and Native Americans had travelled to England. Wee our selves have taught them how to be treacherous …
In 1584, Elizabeth I granted Walter Raleigh the right to explore and settle any land on the North American continent that was held by non-Christians. Raleigh’s attempts at settlement came to grief but their story reveals something about the role played by interpreters in early English colonialism. We brought home also two of the Savages being lustie men, whose names …
The Jesuit mission in Japan recognised that the Christian faith had to be less European if they were to make converts. The need to acknowledge the realities of life in Japan gave a worldly edge to the Society’s endeavours there: communication, transactions and negotiations with local governors, powerful barons, and the shogun himself – as well as traders from Macao …
How a Polynesian priest and skilled navigator became an invaluable intermediary in Captain James Cook’s exploration of the southern Pacific. “It turned out that the Maori could easily understand Tupai’s Tahitian language, which differed from theirs only by a few words …” The Endeavour When Captain James Cook set sail for the Pacific on the Endeavour in August 1768 he had …
The Ottoman Empire was bound to need interpreters. In the sixteenth century it extended into Central Europe, Crimea, the Middle East and Africa and had a mixed population speaking a variety of languages. It also attracted outsiders: traders, travellers and diplomats. Not everyone needed an intermediary as multilingualism or the use of a lingua franca enabled communication within the Empire …
Marina appears in sixteenth-century indigenous records of the conquest of Mexico as a powerful figure. Her status faltered with Mexican independence but today we have a better understanding of her role and significance. The woman who came to be known as La Malinche was given to Hernán Cortés early in his 1519 expedition to Mexico; she was baptised Marina and then …
Accounts of early European expeditions of exploration and conquest usually paid scant attention to the role of interpreters, but there were notable exceptions. A multilingual region The Spanish empire-builders who set out from Cuba to explore lands to the west of the Caribbean took Columbus’s improvisational approach to the need for interpreting. When Francisco Hernández de Córdoba led an expedition …
How Enrique, a Malay-speaker acquired by Magellan during the siege of Malacca, became an interpreter and go-between as the explorer’s 1519 expedition searched for the Spice Islands. Pigafetta Much of what we know about the fleet initially led by Ferdinand Magellan from 1519 to1522 comes from the man he recruited as his chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta. Without him we would know …