Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [188]
Third, the conquest of the New World was the first major invasion to be undertaken in a number of independent initiatives, often by free enterprise, even if the adelantados—’advance men’, as the pioneer captains-general were known, their title previously reserved for the governors of frontier provinces facing the Muslims—all claimed to be acting on behalf of the king of Spain. The invasion forces tended to be so small (607 with Cortés in Mexico, 160 with Pizarro in Peru) that the defending leaders were misled as to the nature of the threat, and delayed fatally in their defences by attempting to negotiate with, or at least to observe, their unwanted Spanish visitors. The New World was conquered through a patchwork of campaigns of soldier adventurers: Columbus in the Caribbean (1490s), Cortés in Mexico, Alvarado in Guatemala, García in Bolivia, Pizarro in Peru (1520s), Quesada in New Granada (the future Colombia), Mendoza in Argentina (1530s), de Soto in Florida, Coronado in Texas, Cabrillo in California, Valdivia in Chile (1540s), to mention only the most famous or successful. Each campaign was aimed primarily at enriching its participants, even while the formal justification was to demand wider loyalty to the king, and to save souls by gaining converts to the True Church.
These three aspects of the event usher in a radically new age, and were to become commonplace features of the major language contacts to come, as maritime nations of Europe sent fleets to every temperate and tropical part of the world that possessed a coastline, and attempted to claim them as colonies, and their people as customers, subjects and converts. This sequence of conquests marked the crucial transition in the development of the fully global world of today, where practically anywhere on the planet is within twenty-four hours’ travel of anywhere else.*
Almost as an afterthought, the conquest of the Americas did eventually serve the purpose with which Columbus had set out, a link with Asia. In 1565, on the instructions of King Philip II, an expedition from Mexico crossed the Pacific to the islands of Cebu and Luzon, and established the beginnings of Spanish dominion in what was to be the Philippines. Other smaller Spanish colonies in the Pacific included the Marianas and Guam. Spanish control, and the attempt to spread the Spanish language here, was to last until the USA took over in 1898, after winning the Spanish-American War.
Since these Pacific colonies were gained at much the same time as the Americas, but were very much part of the Old World of the spice islands, on the edge of India’s and China’s zones of influence, they provide a useful contrast to highlight the special features of the progress of Spanish in the New World. Spanish never made widespread or deep-seated progress in the Philippines, and despite over three centuries of presence was soon displaced by English in the early twentieth century. It will be interesting to ponder the roots of the difference with Spanish in the Americas, where despite US economic dominance Spanish is still growing at the expense of English.
One can state at the outset that the conquest of the Philippines did not share in all the unprecedented properties of the conquest of the Americas. It was, admittedly, a seaborne invasion, and its point of origin was, like many expeditions of exploration into North America, in Mexico. But the land targeted was part of the Old World, not the New, and hence did not suffer from the disastrous lack of immunity to European diseases which devastated America: the advent of the Spanish was not followed in the Pacific by any collapse in the native population. Furthermore, the settlement of the Philippines did not proceed by individual groups spreading out to explore and exploit in their own interest. It was a Spanish government foundation, set up first at Cebu, and then, more permanently, in