24 – Columbus’s Interpreters: Some Ran Away, Some Stayed, Many Died

  

We associate Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) with the New World and sometimes forget that he was from the old one. “Christopher Columbus” is the posthumous, anglicised version of the Ligurian “Cristoffa Corombo”, the Italian, “Cristoforo Colombo”, the Portuguese “Cristóvão Colombo” and the Spanish “Cristóbal Colón” by which he was known in his lifetime among Ligurian, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish speakers. He may have chosen to go by the  Spanish version as his voyages of discovery were sponsored by the Spanish royal family. When he marshalled his arguments for sailing west from Europe to reach the nations of the east he drew on his own experience.  Experience and precedence also informed the ways he tried to communicate with the “Indians” he met on his first two voyages as he tried to make sense of the world he had accidentally discovered. 

“The task he set himself – to cross the Ocean Sea directly from Europe to Asia – was literally beyond the capacity of any vessel of his day.  The task he performed – to cross the ocean from Europe to the New World – was beyond the conception of many of his contemporaries.” ¹

“Moreover, not understanding Indian speech allowed a certain agreeable latitude in construing the signs of the other.”²  

“[Diego Colón’s] ability to learn, and the fact that he survived the deadly epidemics of those early years, meant that he played a key role as a guide in the waters of the West Indies and, later. as ‘lengua’ or translator.³

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Beginnings

Columbus was a Genoese sailor, who first sailed as a simple mariner in the 1470s, on ships belonging to Genoese merchants with destinations that included Tunis, Chios, and Lisbon.  He worked for one of them, Ludovico Centurione, in the 1470s, when he sailed to Madeira to pick up sugar to be sold in Genoa.  That was how he learned about life on a plantation colony reliant on slave labour; he also became acquainted with the Atlantic trade winds that were so important to his later voyages.

It may be through his connection to Centurione that he met and married Filipa Moniz Perestrelo, whose family was one of the first to colonise Madeira.   They lived in Lisbon, then Madeira, where Filipa died in childbirth in 1479.  Little is known about her but it seems that she gave Columbus her father’s navigational records and charts.  After her death, Columbus returned to Lisbon with their son, Diego, and worked as a bookseller and cartographer. ⁴ “Columbus must then have met mariners and merchants who knew the Ocean Sea, as the Atlantic was then known, for it was still believed by most educated people, following the Greek geographer Ptolemy, that the great expanse of water surrounded a single global landmass.”⁵

Sailing west

Here we have an experienced sailor with an interest in cartography who began to put together a case for sailing west to reach the lands described by Marco Polo, among others: Cipangu (Japan) said to be 1500 miles east of Cathay (China).  Lands attractive to merchants for their spices, silks, and gold that were popular in Europe.  According to two of his sources – the early fifteenth-century cosmographer, Pierre d’Ailly, and the Florentine physician and astronomer Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli (d. 1482), the Atlantic was narrower than generally thought and it was therefore within the range of fifteenth-century vessels to reach China by sailing west from Europe.

There were experts to be convinced that such a journey was feasible.  The committee appointed by King João of Portugal was not persuaded, but after repeated attempts, Columbus convinced those advising Fernando of Aragon and Isabel of Castile, who agreed to fund his expedition on his terms.  That is how it came to be that the Pinta, the Niña and the Santa María set sail on August 3^rd, 1492, The forty men on board the Santa María with the man now known as Admiral of the Ocean Sea included Luis de Torres, a converso (Jewish convert to Christianity) interpreter who knew Hebrew, Chaldean, and some Arabic.  It was established practice to work with interpreters with Spanish or Portuguese and Arabic in Iberia and the Maghreb at this time, as traders, officials, and diplomats needed intermediaries; Columbus thus was going by precedent.

The Taíno people

The caravels finally saw land on October 10^th and two weeks later Torres was sent with Rodrigo de Xerez, an “Indian” from the island of San Salvador (called Guanahani by the Taíno and now Watling Island in the Bahamas) and a local man, into the interior of what is now Cuba – which Columbus thought was the Asian mainland.  They returned four days later having found the first town seen by the expedition and discovered cotton and what turned out to be tobacco.  There is nothing in contemporary sources about Torres’s having to rely on signs to communicate with the Taíno people he met.

There had already been recourse to the language of gestures: that was how Columbus had learned from people on San Salvador that he could find metal like the gold in their nose-rings further south.⁶  Columbus was optimistic is his reading of gestures and his assumption that these natives were bound to provide the expedition with the information it needed.  “But charades or pantomimes depend upon a shared gestural language that can take the place of speech, as anyone knows who has tried to ask the simplest of questions in a culture with a different gestural language, exchanges of the kind Columbus describes are fraught with difficulties.”⁷

Columbus may have felt that he was in command and that the Taíno had to be in good faith. They, however, could well have perceived him and his vessels as a threat.  They knew their waters and were practiced at dealing with their traditional enemies, the Caribs, so they could have decided to pre-empt further incursions by the explorers.  In sending Columbus further south to look for gold, the Taínos of San Salvador may have simply decided that this “was the best way of freeing themselves from the strangers – a trick used by many other peoples in the next few generations.”⁸ 

Captives

Columbus did recognise the need for guides and interpreters who could provide information and enable better communication.  Here too, there was a precedent to follow: the Portuguese practice of taking captive West Africans to Lisbon for language training so they could help traders plying the Guinea Coast.  His Diario (log-book) entry for October 14^th, 1492, indicates that he had seized seven Taíno men from San Salvador, planning to take them to Castile to learn Spanish.  Meanwhile he had use for their navigational skills and whatever else they could offer by way of information. 

The “Diario reveals that soon after he [had] committed the kidnapping, the abducted interpreters in the making [were] directing the voyage of supposed discovery”, as Columbus depended on them for directions.⁹ It does not seem to have occurred to him that his captives had their own views.  When the ship anchored off an island he named Santa María de la Concepción, two of them jumped ship.  In two separate incidents soon afterwards, individuals in canoes approached his vessel.  Again, Columbus assumed he was in control of these potential captives, rather than considering that they might have their own reasons for seeking him out. When he explored the eastern part of San Salvador, he was beckoned by a large group of people on the beach who seemed to be inviting him to steer his ship to shore.  Presumably, they knew that the reef surrounding that part of the island would be dangerous to his vessel but he could not acknowledge that they might be using their familiarity with their territory to defend themselves against intruders.¹⁰   

Diplomacy

From San Salvador, Columbus sailed to Cuba, and then to the island he named La Española – Hispaniola today – with just two ships, as the captain of La Pinta had sailed off, abandoning the expedition.  He “talked continuously of seeing the Great Khan’s ships and other signs of Chinese civilisation; but he still never seems to have considered how he could with impunity seize that powerful sovereign’s people and land.”¹¹ It was in Hispaniola – on the north-west of the island (in modern-day Haiti) that he met the cacique Guacanagarí, one of five local Taíno chiefs.  Columbus’s men made a friendly demonstration of how their bows and arrows, and lombards (canons) worked and he allowed as how they might be used in an alliance with the cacique against his enemies, a diplomatic attempt at the sort of alliance that characterised the Conquista. 

Then on December 24th, 1492, the Santa María was wrecked and a decisive step was taken: on Christmas Day, Columbus founded a settlement. He named it La Navidad and used the remains of his ship to build a wooden tower there.  He decided that the thirty-nine people he could not accommodate on the one vessel he had left would stay behind in La Navidad, collect gold samples, and await the next expedition from Spain.  That number included Luis de Torres, his original interpreter. 

Interpreters baptised

However mixed the feelings of his trainee interpreters, there were ten of them on board the Niña when it set sail in January 1493.  It seems that one of them died at sea and three of them died after the travellers reached Seville.  Six of them were taken to Barcelona and presented to the monarchs, who acted as godparents to some of them at their baptism later that year.  Little is known about these men: according to contemporary records, one of them was baptised don Fernando de Aragón; another, baptised don Juan de Castilla, stayed in Barcelona as a page to his namesake, Prince Juan, but he soon fell ill and died.  Both of them were the sons of Guacanagarí, which shows the significance of the ceremony to the monarchs who wanted cordial relations with local leaders and converts to Christianity.  The baptism of Diego Colón at the same ceremony was also recorded: Columbus’s son was his godfather.¹²

Diego Colón

Columbus’s second voyage was an ambitious expedition involving some 17 vessels and over 1000 men.  Four of the ten original interpreters – including Diego Colón – were a part of it, but Colón was the only one to survive the journey.  He was needed when the ships reached Hispaniola on November 28th, 1493:  La Navidad had been destroyed and all 39 settlers had been killed.  While it has never been established exactly what happened, it seems that the Spanish settlers had angered the Taíno.  “The Indians complained that the garrison quarrelled within itself and its men had gone on a career of woman-snatching and gold-stealing about the island.”¹³  The cacique Caonabo had allegedly led the attack. 

This was an inauspicious end to the first European settlement in the West Indies.  Columbus spent the next few months establishing another one, Isabela, in the north of the island (in what is now the Dominican Republic).  Conditions proved difficult, relations with the Taíno were tense, and gold was less readily available than hoped, leading Columbus to fall back onto another colonial precedent in order to make money. He decided to follow the example set in the Canary Islands and Africa and ship Taíno people to Europe to be sold as slaves. ¹⁴ This west-to-east Atlantic slave trade did not last long, not least because the Taíno people were decimated by European diseases, like smallpox, to which they had no immunity.

Further exploration

While the settlement of Hispaniola was unrewarding, there was still the possibility that further exploration would lead to landfall in Asia and more discoveries.  Diego Colón was among the men who set sail with Columbus in April 1494.  He is known to have helped Columbus explore the islands around Hispaniola and establish contact with people in Cuba: “…sirviendo de intérprete.  Diego, cuyo idioma era casi semejante al de estos, habló al que se había cercado más: depuesto el miedo, se aproximó el indigéna y persuadió a los demás que se acercaran sin temor y no tuvieran miedo.” ¹⁵  In the event, Columbus failed to ascertain that Cuba was part of continental Asia.  It was probably out of exhaustion, doubt, and disappointment that in June 1494 he had the expedition’s notary draw up a statement to be signed by his sailors and passengers.  The signatories all agreed that they had seen China or Malaya – and further swore to keep their word, on pain of a fine of 10,000 maravedis, and the excision of their tongues.¹⁶  

We do not know if Diego Colón was invited to take this oath, though it would have been difficult for him to do so: the Taíno knew that Cuba was an island. ¹⁷ We do know that he stayed on in Hispaniola and married into Guacanagarí’s family.  It is likely that he returned to Spain in 1503 with his son – also called Diego Colón – who was tutored in Spanish and the Christian faith before dying in Seville in 1505.  He returned to Hispaniola and appears in the records up until 1514.¹⁸

Diego Colón and his fellow interpreters are part of the story of Columbus’s voyages.  Early explorers in the Americas were divided between exploiting indigenes and recognising their humanity; “they [had] a simultaneous interest in preserving difference – hence maintaining the possibility of grossly unfair economic exchange – and in erasing difference – hence both Christianizing the natives and obtaining competent interpreters”¹⁹ The indigenes also had decisions to make when they were enlisted in the Europeans’ endeavours. Someone like Diego Colón shows us that these intermediaries played a key role even though they have often been pushed to the margins of history – a role that has to be acknowledged if we are to understand the complexities of local peoples’ responses to the events of 1492.

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My first ever piece was on Columbus and his interpreters. I thought it would be interesting to take a second look at this story after having done more research.

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  References:

1. Columbus, Fernández-Armesto, F. 2000, Phoenix Press, London, p. 132.
2. Greenblatt, S. 1991. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, U. of Chicago Press, p. 104.
3. Mira Caballos, E. “Caciques guatiaos en los incicios de la colonización: el caso del indio Diego Colón” in Iberamericana (2001-), Diciembre de 2004, Nueva época, Año 4, No 16) pp. 7-16, p.9.(My translation)
4. Thomas, H. Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire, UK, Penguin, Random House, 2010, pp.59-61; Fernández-Armesto, op. cit., pp.16-17.
5. Thomas, op. cit., p. 61.
6. Ibid, p. 106
7. Greenblatt, op. cit. p. 89.
8. Thomas, op.cit., p.106.
9. Brickhouse, A. 2013 “Mistranslation, Unsettlement, La Navidad” in PMLA, October 2013, Vol. 128, No. 4, pp. 938-946, p. 939.
10. Ibid, p. 940.
11. Thomas, op. cit., p.110.
12. Mira Caballos, op.cit, p.9.
13. Fernández-Armesto, op. cit, p. 71.
14. Ibid p. 73.; Thomas, op. cit., p.153.
15. Mira Caballos, op. cit., p. 11, quoting Peter Martyr. “… Diego, whose language was close to theirs, interpreted.  He spoke to the one who had come closest and when his fears were allayed, he came closer still and convinced the others to approach without fear and they were not afraid.” (My translation).
16. Fernández-Armesto, op. cit., p. 75.
17. Thomas, op. cit, p. 166.
18. Mira Caballos, op. cit., p. 13.
19. Greenblatt, op. cit., pp. 108-9.