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 in February 1517 to what was to become Mexico, he may have had some Cuban Indians on board. They would not have been able to help much when a group of Maya Indians came out in canoes to meet his ships, however, because their Taino language was not in any way related to Maya. That was why he decided to take two local men with him when he left Yucatán; the captives, known as Melchor and Julián, were expected to learn Spanish and help out on future expeditions.
Things did not bode well: Melchor was a fisherman with limited Maya vocabulary and Julián became depressed on being taken from familiar surroundings. Julián returned to Yucatán with the 1518 expedition from Cuba under the leadership of Juan de Grijalva. Most of his work on the explorers’ behalf seems to have involved asking for gold. That may have yielded some results early on, but because he was a Yucatec Maya, he could not communicate with the Chontal Maya-speakers in northern Yucatán.
Double translation
Grijalva’s solution was to seize and baptise four more Indians to do the job. One of the new ‘recruits’ was named Pedro Barba, after one of Girijalva’s captains. He spoke both Yucatec Maya and Chontal Maya, which allowed for the development of a system of interpreting that historian Hugh Thomas describes as ‘double translation’.1 Grijalva spoke Spanish to Julián who relayed the message in Yucatec Maya to Pedro Barba who was able to put it into Chontal Maya.
Cortés also had a native speaker of Spanish to assist him. Géronimo de Aguilar had been shipwrecked in Yucatán in 1511; he and a shipmate, Gonzalo Guerrero, had survived and made their lives among the Chontal Maya. Having had word of Cortés’s presence in Yucatán, Aguilar was eager to join him and was able to help out in the expedition’s dealings with local people. (Guerrero for his part had ‘gone native’ and stayed behind with his wife and children.)
Aguilar’s presence was noteworthy but his role came to be overshadowed by the person who became the expedition’s main interpreter. She was one of twenty women given to Cortés by a Chontal Maya leader on the Tabasco coast: a young woman baptised Marina in March 1519. It turned out that she was the child of Nahuatl-speakers who had been sold to Maya merchants after her father’s death; she was bilingual and able to serve Cortés, working in tandem with Aguilar before she learned Spanish. She played a key role in the meetings between Cortés and Moctezuma, and in the conquest of Mexico.
References:
