CHAPTER TWO
Historians rarely notice that the expansion of early modern Europe was a mass migration, the biggest in the history of preindustrial Europe. The history of that migration includes a series of heroic explorations, but these were only a prelude to Europe’s entry into the global economy after 1450. In the three centuries after 1450, almost four million people left Europe in a migration that was unique not only for its size but also because virtually everyone left by ship. By the time of the American Revolution, half these migrants, two million people, had left Europe for the Indian Ocean and the far East; half a million went to the English colonies in North America, and more than 750,000 people left Europe for the Spanish Empire in America. The scale of this migration was unprecedented, as was the level of risk.
The two million men, and they were almost all men, who traveled to the Indian Ocean under the auspices of the Portuguese Estado da India, the Dutch East India Company, or the English East India Company embarked on a great but dangerous venture. While we know that the risks were huge, the participants had no way of knowing what modern historians have learned about the frequency of death due to disease and shipwreck. The trip from Amsterdam to Batavia took eight to twelve months, and even on a well-run Dutch East Indiaman, 10 to 15 percent of those who sailed for Asia died at sea.
While most of the men who left Europe to join the world of Asian and Indian Ocean trade probably thought in terms of returning, hopefully with a decent bank balance, less than half did so. Their decisions to migrate, despite the risk involved, reflected both desperation and ambition, depending on their place in society.
To keep Europeans in the colonies, both Portuguese and Dutch governors refused to allow married men to bring their Asian or African wives and families back to their home countries. This effectively prevented seasoned colonists from returning to Europe and encouraged them to translate whatever skills they brought from Europe into positions as bureaucrats, artisans, or merchants in local Asian societies while building new family networks. Many of these men shed or revised their European identities and learned to tolerate very diverse communities. It is worth unpacking the mental baggage that shaped their lives.
The goal is to tease out the layers of identity attached to these immigrants. This includes their religious and geopolitical identity, identification with the community where their families lived, the social network of the surrounding region, and the all-important identification that each man had with his extended family. Finally, there is the crucial question of how the men who went abroad viewed other societies.
Our modern era is burdened by three powerful concepts: nation, country, and society. These concepts provide the framework for modern history, but we forget that the twentieth-century concept of nation-state did not exist until after about 1800. In the nineteenth-century, a cluster of these imagined national communities became real enough to precipitate two world wars in the twentieth.1 Despite their power, nation-states are modern cultural conventions. Among other traits, the word “nation” implies clear geographic boundaries that encourage us to think in dichotomies—inside/outside and us/other. As Benedict Anderson points out, clear-cut territorial boundaries are a relatively new Western concept, one that privileges historical narratives that fit those boundaries and modern definitions of the nation-state.2
The term “European” appears frequently in this discussion. It is primarily a label applied by modern observers and is used as a convenient collective label to refer to the people who emigrated from the area we now know as Europe. It is not a label that had much meaning for the people who lived in Europe in the Early Modern era. Historians also routinely impose modern national identities upon the men who sailed under the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, or English flags. In that connection, many of the men who went to Asia were not even subjects of the countries that recruited them. While national identity has some relevance, it is easily used by historians in an anachronistic way. A person’s political identity as the subject of an early modern monarch was not the same as the political identity of a citizen of a modern nation.
The question of identity is also complicated by the fact that these emigrants were almost all men. With no European women available, European males abroad lived with, and often married, Asian, African, or Native American women. Marrying women from established local families was one way for Europeans, like other new residents in foreign places, to develop useful business connections. It also began the process of founding a local family patrimony and family-based information network (see chapter 9). The “national” identity of the men from Europe was probably more important to colonial administrators than it was to the men involved.
In order to maintain a “European” population in the face of high mortality and desertion, colonial authorities generally acquiesced in intermarriage. Mixed-race, or mestizo, children of legally married European men were baptized and registered as subjects of the king of Portugal, the Dutch Republic, or the king of Castile. Among the socially “proper” bourgeois members of European society, such children became officially European members of the social hierarchy and were eligible to enter the administrative hierarchy of the colony of which they were part. European administrations increasingly were staffed with people who were officially European but who looked Asian and lived in households shaped by Asian customs.3 The nineteenth-century loss of this acceptance of intermarriage and interracial families is one of the things that marks nineteenth-century imperialism as different from the early modern experience.
The Europeans who ventured abroad in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not think of themselves as Europeans—modern geopolitical labels were not a part of their identity. It was the Asians who began to use collective nouns like “Frank” or “firingi” to designate the scruffy, bad-mannered white men who arrived in large, odd-looking sailing ships. Europe was more readily identified as a single “civilization” by outsiders than by Europeans themselves. The latter lived too close to Europe’s multiple identities and conflicting loyalties to think this way.
The term “nation” was also used in the Early Modern era, but in a different way. The modern habit of applying national identities (Italian, Spanish, etc.) to the people of early modern Europe is fundamentally anachronistic. While a man of that era might identify himself as a subject of the ruler of his home country, this did not make him a “Spaniard” or a “German” in the modern sense. “Nation,” or “natio,” referred to groups of people with common backgrounds, as when referring to the merchants from a given town or region, but this use carried no connotation of loyalty to a territorially defined state.4 The members of the network of Jewish trading colonies, physically scattered all over the Atlantic world, consciously defined themselves as the Jewish “nation.”5 The term was frequently used to refer to groups of merchants, like those from the Hanseatic League who lived in Venice or the various merchant “nations” in Antwerp.6 Fifteenth-century Europeans were far more likely to identify with rulers, kingdoms, Catholicism, or, later, Protestantism than with a geopolitical identity outlined on a map.
As an example, over three centuries, thousands of Portuguese quietly left rural Portugal and moved south to the Atlantic islands and then to Brazil or Atlantic Africa. They were part of an informal empire that emerged on the fringes of Portugal’s formal imperial structures. Living outside of effective political control, these migrants married locally, adjusted to local customs and religion, and often completely abandoned their identity as Portuguese.7 The very nature of European monarchy, plus the recurrent religious conflicts and political instability of Europe itself, made geopolitical identity an unstable concept.
Early modern European emigrants sometimes did identify with a specific European monarch or city-state, but this identification was tentative. A man who regarded himself as the subject of a particular ruler could discover that, thanks to a civil war, his ruler had been replaced by the head of another aristocratic family. Alternatively, the ruler with whom he identified may have died, to be replaced by someone who had inherited the right to rule the country even though he was a “foreigner.” Moreover, since the boundaries between Europe’s loosely integrated monarchies were hazy, and characterized by ethnic and cultural syncretism, the geopolitical identity of individuals from border areas was inherently unstable.
Modern writers routinely label the Europeans who went abroad in the first century of European expansion as either “Spaniards” or “Portuguese.” In practice, there were no Spaniards in the sixteenth century—there were Castilians, Aragonese, Catalans, Basques, or Gallegos. Most of Cortes’s soldiers were subjects of the Kingdom of Castile, but they were likely to identify themselves as Estremeños or Andaluces.8 This defined them as natives of Extremadura or Andalucía, historically defined regions within the Kingdom of Castile. One’s identity might be associated with loyalty to a certain monarch, and many of the men who invaded the Canary Islands in 1402–1404 did so as subjects of Henry III of Castile. In fact, however, the initial cadre of recruits came from all over maritime Europe and found it convenient to swear an oath to the king of Castile as a condition of fighting under his flag. They fought as subjects of the king of Castile, but their leader, Gadifer de la Salle, was a Fleming who blithely shifted his own allegiance from the king of France to the king of Castile.9
The early Portuguese and Castilian expeditions into the Atlantic Ocean and West Africa sailed with charters from the rulers of Portugal and Castile, but they can also be thought of as de facto bands of European adventurers. Because these were known to be risky ventures, it could be difficult to recruit local skilled navigators or sailors. Most crewmembers were recruited regardless of their origins. John and Sebastian Cabot were Italians who sailed under the English flag, although Sebastian also worked for the king of Spain, as did the Italian Christopher Columbus. Ferdinand Magellan, who sailed as a subject of Charles V of Spain, was originally Portuguese. While Hernán Cortéz was a Castilian subject of Charles V, his army was diverse and included soldiers of northern European and African origin. Henry Hudson was the Englishman who led the expedition that claimed Hudson Bay for England, but he also led the Dutch expedition that initiated the Dutch colonization of New Amsterdam, now New York. The Portuguese administration in Asia included many officials who were not Portuguese.
It is almost automatic to think of the Portuguese trade route around Africa as connecting Goa, the Portuguese capital in Asia, to Lisbon; but in fact, the cargoes brought to Lisbon did not stay there long. The Portuguese route merely passed through Lisbon before continuing to Antwerp. Antwerp was the commercial center of northwestern Europe until the 1560s, and Asian spices, pepper, and silks could be marketed much more effectively from Antwerp than from Lisbon. Soon the Portuguese trade in Antwerp drew Flemings, Germans, and Dutch into Portuguese commercial and administrative positions, both in Europe and in Asia.
Fernando Kron, an Augsburg-born German, is a well-known example. Kron entered the Portuguese world as an Antwerp broker in the marketing network that distributed spices brought from Lisbon to Antwerp. Later he moved to Portuguese Goa, where he became an official in the Portuguese colonial administration. The commercial connection between Lisbon and Antwerp brought many men like Kron into the Portuguese Empire.
This was ultimately helpful to the Dutch, who rebelled against Spanish rule and waged a prolonged war for their independence. By 1585 the Dutch had secured their independence, creating the Dutch Republic. Men from the now independent Dutch provinces who had been recruited to work in the Portuguese Estado da India, sometimes followed their provincial loyalties. They left their jobs and moved to the new Dutch Republic, bringing with them valuable secret maps and commercial information about Portuguese trade in Asia, making it much easier for the Dutch to break into East Asian commerce.
We can see some of the ambiguities inherent in relying on the label “European” when we look at the way historians talk about Mediterranean trade. The discussion usually gives the impression that the trade between the Middle East and Europe was the preserve of merchants from Italy, Catalonia, and France. This stereotype ignores the role of Armenian, Greek, Jewish, and Muslim merchants, who also participated in Mediterranean trade. While some members of these trade diaspora communities were subjects of European rulers or cities, many had family members who were also business partners and subjects of the Mamluk, Ottoman, or Safavid sultans. These transnational or diaspora communities provided commercial bridges anchored on both the Muslim and Christian sides of the Mediterranean. The activities of these trade diaspora communities defy any attempt to find a clear geographic, commercial, or religious boundary for “Europe.”10
At least until the 1550s, most people who went abroad from Europe shared one common identity. They were almost all Roman Catholic Christians. Confronted with a strange society, however, these European expatriates seem to have had two reactions. One was to assume that Catholic Christianity was the true religion, making its adherents slightly superior to the non-Christian peoples they met.11 The other European reaction was conditioned by the Christian assumption that all peoples were descended from the same creation. If they thought about it at all, the Portuguese and Castilian explorers assumed that all societies were part of a common humanity and valued certain basic human institutions.
Despite the various identifiers suggested above, the most important source of identity and self-esteem for a man of this era was his standing within his extended family and that family’s social and economic status in the larger community. This is not the nuclear family of the modern West but a form of extended family that spanned two and often three generations and included aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, and in-laws. This kind of family could also be extended by establishing fictive relationships with trusted trainees, foster children, and clients from other family networks. Whether embedded in the worlds of government or church offices, court privilege and patronage, or the world of commerce, these family-based networks of interpersonal contact influenced the way individuals made decisions. An individual’s identity, status, and self-esteem were based on the degree to which his achievements enhanced the social status of his entire family.12
The early modern extended family was not just the key to building a personal identity; it was also the institution that organized the economy and society of both the local community and, among the elites, bureaucracy and trade. This view of the family is central to understanding Europeans abroad, in part because it was not very different from the family as a social and economic institution in most areas of the early modern world. Almost all businesses were partnerships, but most of the members of a partnership came from a single family, and any jobs created by the partnership were first offered to other members of the family. Family members in higher government or church positions routinely gave preferential treatment to other family members when hiring their own subordinates.
Wealthy families worked to build up the family patrimony and tried to prevent its dispersal among multiple heirs. In most countries, especially England and Spain, the landed nobility developed the practice of primogeniture. This was a legal formula, authorized by the king, that bound an estate into a single hereditary unit that then passed to the oldest living male heir. Primogeniture, mayorazgo in Spanish, often left younger noble sons dependent on their older siblings for their income. This practice prevented the breakup of family estates, but it also produced men who were desperate for the money and reputation needed to maintain their noble lifestyle and thus willing to sign on for risky ventures.
The family was thus a carefully constructed network of personal and economic relationships orchestrated by a patriarchal father, grandfather, or matriarch. The family patriarchs and matriarchs monitored the careers of all their brothers, uncles, cousins, and nephews. They set up marriage alliances between families because it was the most important way to gain access to new financial or patronage resources. The ideal spouse either connected the husband’s family network with families of higher status or with families with substantial economic resources.
The classic European example is the Medici family in the 1400s.13 At its center was a business partnership that included a small number of senior members of the family. Their wool manufacturing company, located in Florence, was a legally separate business partnership, but some of its partners came from the “central office.” Branch offices in several cities in Europe were organized as legally autonomous partnerships. Each branch included local partners, but each branch also included a Medici partner, who kept a controlling interest in the business. The scope and wealth of the Medici example makes it exceptional, but small or large, family networks sustained the personal identity of members of the clan, even when dispersed over thousands of miles.14
This type of family-based business network was not uniquely European. We get a glimpse of a similar family firm from the will of the Armenian merchant Khojah Petrus Uscan, who died in Madras (now Chennai), on the east coast of India, in 1750. At the age of fifteen he was sent to Chennai as a trainee in the business of another Armenian family. He traveled as a company agent to places as distant as Nepal and Lhasa. He was one of a small group of Armenian merchants based in India who controlled the export of American silver from Manila to India, providing the English East India Company with much of the silver it needed for its business in India. Through traveling relatives and local agents, Uscan did business in cities from London to Basra to Chennai and Manila.15 The importance of family contact over long distance is clear from the anxiety Uscan expressed over the questionable decisions of a young relative in a distant city.16
A slightly different example comes from the Spanish Empire and illustrates how far a family-based network could extend. The population of the small Kingdom of Navarre lived on family-owned farms and formed a tightly knit, strongly endogamous community. Farms were protected from dispersion by primogeniture and produced a variety of products, including wheat, barley, cheese, sausage, and cattle destined for urban markets. Younger sons were routinely prepared for careers in government, trade, or the Church through a combination of cross-family apprenticeships, university education, and reciprocal favoritism. Within the community, as younger sons emigrated, families created a larger network of mutual support wherever they went. One result was a Navarrese support system that stretched from Madrid to northern Spain to Mexico and the highlands of colonial Peru. By 1700 Navarrese merchant families dominated retail trade in Madrid and were involved in Spain’s trans-Atlantic commerce.
To reinforce this pattern of informal mutual support, the Navarrese community formed a Madrid-based Hermandad de Navarros (Brotherhood of Navarrese). Officially, the Hermandad was charged with collecting funds that could be used to help distressed members of the Navarrese community. Their office in Madrid kept records of its members throughout the Spanish Empire and sent agents as far as Peru to solicit funds for its activities. The Hermandad was thus an “old boy” affinity network that stretched six thousand miles from northern Spain to the Peruvian highlands—a network that lobbied for positions for its members when government posts or contracts were being awarded.17
Whatever their origins and motives, the actions of merchants and other travelers were conditioned by ties to the paternal core of the family and concerns for the well-being of the extended clan. This is important because it was not uniquely European. It was equally true of merchants, administrators, and landowners in most of the advanced societies that Europeans encountered. This suggests the merits of the early modern habit of trying to understand other societies by looking for institutions and customs similar to those of European society. For example, early contacts with Native Americans in Virginia caused Europeans to comment on the strength of bonds among Native American families and communities.18 The same family structures sustained international diasporas like the Southsea Chinese, the Jews, and the Armenians.
Since interpersonal relations were important in all societies, it is worth restating that, whether or not they were very religious, Europeans lived in a culture conditioned by late medieval Catholicism.19 The premise that Europeans saw themselves as part of a single human community was reinforced by medieval Europe’s experiences in the Mediterranean. For many historians the Middle Ages were dominated by the Crusades and an ongoing tension between the Christian and Muslim Mediterranean, but the story of European contact with Islam involved much more than the Crusades. It is also a story of continuous Christian-Muslim commercial relations. Europeans regularly exchanged goods and personal experiences with their Greek Orthodox and Muslim counterparts. At one point the merchants of Barcelona negotiated with the ruler of the Muslim state of Tunis for access to the African gold trade and admission of Franciscan missionaries into Tunisia. In return, the Tunisian government got a slice of the profits and a company of Catalan soldiers to guard the royal palace. It is true that the Portuguese were intermittently at war with parts of North Africa, and they captured the Moroccan port of Ceuta in 1415. Despite these conflicts, the merchants and shipowners of Lisbon developed a routine trade with Muslim North Africa, sometimes even transporting Muslim pilgrims across the Mediterranean on their way to Mecca.
While the commercial society of Mediterranean Europe had long understood the diversity of the Mediterranean world, by the fifteenth century less cosmopolitan parts of European society were developing an appetite for accurate travel literature. Between 1200 and 1500, more and more people also sought out the thoughtful and accurate accounts found in diplomatic reports and the memoires of traveling merchants and explorers with secular backgrounds.20 These were men who offered systematic, eyewitness descriptions of what they saw.21 William of Rubruck and Marco Polo are the best-known thirteenth-century examples. The images they offered were more comprehensive than pilgrim accounts, and usually left out the fantasies repeated by European publicists who mixed real and fantastic stories about the outside world.
William of Rubruck’s travelogue, presented to the king of France in 1266, reads much like a modern ethnography as he tries to understand the societies he visited by citing parallels between Mongol and European societies.22 Visiting the Mongol court in the 1250s, William provides a nonjudgmental description of the customs, food, habits, and religious eclecticism of the Tartars.23 He is speaking as a real observer in a practical world.24 He accepts the logic of local customs and seems to approve of the Khan’s religious policy, presenting him as saying: “We Mongols believe that there is but one God, by Whom we live and by Whom we die and towards Him we have an upright heart. . . . But just as God gave different fingers to the hand, so has He given different ways to men. To you, God has given the Scriptures. . . .”25 Then, William says, the Khan chided him because Christians fail to observe the tenets of their own faith, which commanded them not to disparage others and to place justice above wealth.
This same approach appears in the writings attributed to Marco Polo, Europe’s best-known medieval traveler. Returning from Asia in 1294, with Rustichello da Pisa as his ghostwriter, he constructed an extensive verbal picture of China. The accuracy of parts of his account is controversial,26 given that he apparently combined his own eyewitness accounts with material from informants at the Mongol court, but the result is still convincing.27 Marco Polo himself is indifferent to religion as he presents his reader with descriptions of various religions and debunks old myths and fables about China.28 Along with other observers, Marco Polo questions the assumption of European superiority, finding that China was more civilized and livable than Europe.29 William is probably a more accurate reporter than Marco Polo, but Marco Polo was far more widely read and at least conveys a level of realism that reinforced the curiosity of his readers.
At least one earlier writer helped define an empirically accurate approach to evaluating distant places. In the mid-twelfth century, John of Salisbury pointed out that the classical world had all the elements of civilization, even though it was not Christian. He also provided a philosophical basis for the assumption that all societies had comparable traits. He did this by proposing a model for evaluating cultures that could be applied to any society. It was based on the presence of secular justice and the right of every man to disagree with authority without persecution.30
Joan-Pau Rubiés has analyzed the writings of medieval ambassadors from all parts of Eurasia and finds that these ambassadors would probably have agreed with John of Salisbury. Diplomats responsible for advising their governments on important international issues were inclined to describe what they actually saw. Rubiés shows us that diplomats from most medieval governments shared the assumption that a society was “civilized” according to “the extent of [its] urban prosperity and commerce, the refinement of artistic skills, and the strength and stability of a political authority responsible for security and the administration of justice.” Ambassadors were obligated to make accurate reports to their superiors, but they also wrote for an emerging audience that wanted factual information. Two centuries later the logic of John of Salisbury and medieval ambassadors was the foundation of Bartolomé de las Casas’s argument for the civilized humanity of Native Americans.31
By the fifteenth century there was a growing literate audience that was attracted to accurate information about the world—an audience that did not automatically assume European superiority, except possibly in the area of religion.32 This growing curiosity about the world was connected to a parallel growth in European demand for a wider range of exotic imports. Urbanized court elites were an important part of that demand as they were drawn to life at royal courts. The growth of royal entourages, the fashion of collecting and displaying exotic objects, and the emergence of permanent capital cities brought about the urbanization of royal followers. This increased the size and disposable income of court elites, and fashions at court created a growing demand for literature about exotic places. The use of exotic goods like coffee, silks, cottons, porcelain, precious jewels, and decorative objects aroused curiosity about the places that produced them.
Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century travel writers both responded to and reinforced the widening outlook of this changing European world by accurately presenting what they saw.33 This is reflected in the attitude of several different travelers that visited and described southern India and the Hindu Vijayanagara Empire (1336–1646) in the 1400s and 1500s.34 They abandoned the wonders, religious metaphors, and legends of earlier writers in favor of pragmatic observation, making credible their own descriptions of the societies they had visited. These travelers, ignorant regarding local religion and dependent on translators,35 used explicitly cross-cultural analogies to work out such complex phenomena as the logic of urban layout and the complexity of royal ritual.36 One of these travelers, Ludovico di Varthema, visited India around 1500 and commented that he saw nothing especially “alien” about the people of South India.37 In the early seventeenth century, a traveler like Pietro della Valle could express a desire for religious dialogue with the Hindus of South India and expect a coherent, intelligent reply.38
The ultimate cross-cultural traveler was probably the Russian Afanasii Nikitin, who traveled through Persia and India from 1468 to 1475. Nikitin blended in well and learned local languages. As a Russian Orthodox Christian, he found Islam more comfortable than Hinduism and tried to celebrate Orthodox religious holidays. As time went on, however, he lost track of their dates and compromised by celebrating Muslim holidays in their place. At one point he formally converted to Islam for the simple reason that the local Muslim ruler had limited the amount of time Christians could stay in his domain.39
We do not know how much of this travel literature reached the men who risked long and dangerous voyages to Africa, Asia, or America, nor do we know how critical Dutch readers were in their use of sources. Medieval “science fiction” like John Mandeville’s often-fantastic Travels, written around 1360, was popular well into the sixteenth century, and Christopher Columbus even referred to Mandeville to back up some of his own assertions.40 For our purposes, it is important to know that by the fifteenth century, a growing proportion of travel literature contained thoughtful eyewitness observations.
Even if the early explorers and their sponsors were not directly exposed to the travel literature outlined above, they probably encountered secondhand, word-of-mouth versions. If the stories of Prester John could circulate as part of an oral tradition, so too could the adventures of Marco Polo or the descriptions of Hindu India. By the later fifteenth century, therefore, many Europeans were intrigued by other societies and assumed that if they visited them, they would find values and institutions that paralleled those of Europe.
Whatever the mix of fact and fancy that circulated in Europe, the late 1400s saw the beginning of an era in which thousands of Europeans settled permanently in places across the world—an outcome that suggests a willingness to interact with the societies they contacted. While survival required a careful approach to strangers, from the thirteenth century onward, more and more travel literature appeared in which Europeans examined other cultures by looking for behavior and values similar to their own.41 They looked for such things as family traditions, impartial justice, sovereign governments, familiar business practices, and aspects of everyday life that seemed familiar. Whether in Asia or North America, Europeans found similarities, traded with local merchants, married local women, and sometimes assimilated into local society—all of which hint at a tenuous attachment to Christianity and European identity and an openness to alternatives.42 Although differences were noted, essentialist, racist assumptions were not part of the evolving European identity.43
While the case has been made that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europeans were open to understanding and collaborating with foreign societies, that is probably not the only factor at work as Europeans established themselves abroad. It remains that when surrounded by an alien and potentially dangerous community, survival recommends a circumspect approach. Especially during first encounters, which combined curiosity with wariness and attempts at diplomacy, there is no lack of cases in which Europeans shot first and negotiated later. The small size of most European expeditions, their limited resources, and their distance from home all restricted their ability to use force when trying to obtain what they wanted from a host society.
The crucial bridge in any cultural exchange is language. Language allows us to communicate with one another, and works best if both participants in a conversation speak the same native language. Language is thus an important part of the personal identity we present to others.
English-speaking Americans, who seldom speak even one other language, have little sense of how common it was to be multilingual in the age of expansion. Europe itself was more linguistically diverse than it is now, and its main languages existed in several, sometimes mutually incomprehensible dialects. No early modern ruler or merchant assumed that his subjects or customers all spoke the same language or dialect. In the arena of trade, societies in frequent contact quickly developed simplified and syncretic trade languages. The result in the Indian Ocean was that even the Portuguese’s worst enemies used pidgin Portuguese for trade. Language was rarely mentioned as an obstacle to diplomacy, government, or long-distance trade.
In such an environment, the importance of being multilingual or being able to locate competent translators is obvious. Any merchant who traded over any distance was almost certainly able to speak two or three languages. Those who traded across the Mediterranean probably found that Italian, Greek, and Arabic were essential. If Europe was linguistically diverse, Indian Ocean seaports were even more so. Depending on the port you were visiting, you could hear Swahili, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Hindi, Urdu, Greek, Tamil, or Malay. Market towns everywhere included professional brokers and translator-middlemen who could adapt quickly to a new language. Alongside Malay and Chinese, pidgin Portuguese, mixed with other languages, became a new lingua franca around the Indian Ocean littoral and in maritime Southeast Asia, Macau, and Nagasaki.
Two of history’s most remarkable language bridges illustrate European ingenuity in making verbal contact. When Cortés landed in Mexico, he confronted a totally incomprehensible language, the Nahuatl of the Aztec rulers. At that moment he rescued a Spaniard who had been stranded for several years in the Yucatan. This man had lived among the Maya and spoke the Mayan language fluently. Meanwhile, Cortés acquired a young Indian woman as a “companion.” One of her attractions was the fact that she spoke both Mayan and Nahuatl. The result was a three-step process of translation from Spanish to Mayan to Nahuatl and back that allowed Cortés to communicate with the ambassadors the Aztec emperor sent to meet him.
The story of the survival of Plymouth Colony in 1620 is equally improbable. Soon after landing, the Pilgrims were met by a local Indian who spoke fluent English. He identified himself as Squanto and explained that he had been picked up by men on an English ship and taken to England, where he lived for several years and became fluent in English. Squanto had returned to America shortly before the Mayflower arrived. Thanks to Squanto’s diplomatic service, half the original complement of Pilgrims survived the first winter in New England.
Having sailed unprecedented distances, with little hope of return, Europeans frequently found themselves in situations where they were not in charge. Whatever their cultural conditioning, tolerance and adaptability suddenly became valuable survival skills. Even after they were well established, Europeans were both outnumbered and unlikely to return home. Having partnered with or married local women, they often assimilated local practices, abandoned Christianity, and worshiped local gods. In such cases, the search for similitudes and the ability to redefine one’s personal identity were rational adjustments to reality, whether or not it resembles modern open-mindedness.
Family, clan, hometown, region, ruler, and religion were in various degrees part of the self-aware identity of the men who left Europe, survived the risks of the transition, and settled in distant parts of the world. The test of this “European identity” came when, as permanent residents far from home, they found themselves embedded in very different cultures and societies. The choices these men made as they settled into new worlds, married local women, and produced intercultural offspring will tell us which parts of their “European” identity were really important to them.