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Language‐learning, orality, and multilingualism in early modern Anglophone narratives of Mediterranean captivity

2019; Wiley; Volume: 33; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/rest.12565

1477-4658

John D. Gallagher,

Linguistic Variation and Morphology

On a Spanish ship bound for Cadiz in the middle of the seventeenth century, an English sailor named Edward Coxere heard the news of Oliver Cromwell’s death. One of the Spaniards on board the ship called to him and his fellow-sailors, and uttered the words ‘“Aie bona Nova Cromwell sta morto granda Feasta Enferno”, which is to say “There is good news: Cromwell is dead. There is a great feast in Hell”.’2 Though the Spaniard did not speak in English, Coxere understood him: he took pride in being what he called a ‘linguister’.3 Sent to France at fourteen, where he lodged with a family in Le Havre and learned the language, he was later sent to the Low Countries to train as a wine-cooper, but ‘I not settling my mind to trade, my lot fell to the sea’.4 He joined the crew of a Dutch ship, and later recalled that ‘though I had French and English, I had Dutch to learn to understand those I was withal, which I soon got’.5 He picked up Spanish, and his skill as a ‘linguister’ aided him as he served (willingly and unwillingly) in the ships of many nations: he recalled how ‘I served the Spaniards against the French, then the Hollanders against the English’, then the English against the Dutch, until ‘last I was taken by the Turks, where I was forced to serve then against English, French, Dutch, and Spaniards, and all Christendom’.6 As a captive, Coxere served in Tunis – there, between the captives’ quarters and the shipyards where he was put to work, he added a new language to his linguister’s list. He called it ‘Lingofrank’ or ‘Lingwa frank’: Lingua Franca.7 Coxere’s multilingual experiences were emblematic of the early modern Mediterranean. He was proud of his languages, claiming that ‘I spoke [French] as well as if I had been born in France’, and that his Dutch was so good that he was able to disguise himself as a Dutchman when he returned home from an early voyage.8 Whatever his levels of competence in each language (a critic might point out that his rendition of the Spanish announcement about Cromwell is impressionistic rather than strictly accurate), he seems to have been able to act as a ‘linguister’ when the situation demanded it. He boasted of his knowledge of ‘the names of ropes and sea-phrases’ in Dutch, mastering the sailor’s vocational jargon in that language before he managed to do so in English, which caused him some embarrassment when he was employed on an English vessel.9 The multilingual abilities Coxere claimed to possess allowed him to ingratiate himself with sailors of different nations and to serve under different flags, and may even have smoothed his way as a captive in Muslim North Africa. His linguistic competences were likely not the polished and scholarly competences prized by Renaissance humanists or by advocates of elite educational travel: instead, they reflected what Eric Dursteler has called ‘the more mundane, quotidian reality of communication’, in which ‘individuals who might often not be able to pass a simple modern language examination nonetheless developed an ability to bridge these linguistic differences well enough to achieve their primary objective, “effective communication”’. Dursteler describes a situation in which ‘individuals … were multilingual not in the sense that they were polyglots who had mastered multiple languages, but rather that they were able to navigate this vibrant linguistic world through varying levels of ability in one or more regional languages, a lingua franca, or even through the use of gesture’.10 Crucially, too, Coxere’s competences were largely acquired and exercised in oral contexts: he presented himself first and foremost as a speaker (as distinct from a reader or writer) of foreign languages. Coxere was someone who learnt to navigate the linguistic world of the Mediterranean, and a key moment in his narrative of life as a ‘linguister’ was the period of his captivity in Tunis in 1657–58, where he learnt the language known as the Lingua Franca. As a Christian captive in a Muslim city, he became one of the thousands of English-speakers captured by North African ships in the early modern period: sold into households and captive quarters in North Africa and beyond, some converted, many died, some escaped, and only a few wrote down their stories for posterity.11 Narratives of captivity have had significant attention from linguists, historians, and literary scholars in recent years. They are troublesome sources, offering what often purport to be first-hand documentary accounts of life in captivity. Their style, content, and the motivations behind their writing are all open to question: authors may have written to entertain or scandalise, to spur national feeling or sectarian hatred, to justify their decisions and behaviours during the period of their captivity, or to rehabilitate their reputations on their return.12 The association between captivity and conversion to Islam meant that there were good reasons why a returned traveller might insist in print that they had never ‘turned Turk’, or claim that their decision to do so was the result of physical force or malicious misunderstanding.13 But they remain tantalising, not least because – as Nabil Matar argues – ‘the corpus captivitis provides the most extensive description of England’s early modern encounter with Islam and Muslims in North Africa’.14 These texts dramatised the encounter between English Protestants and North African and Ottoman Muslims for an English reading audience; whatever the difficulties they present to the historian, they remain rich sources for thinking about early modern Mediterranean encounters between people, cultures, faiths, and languages. Captivity was, fundamentally, a linguistic experience. In this – despite its involuntary nature – it had much in common with other the other kinds of early modern mobility discussed in this special issue. Language-learning and linguistic mediation have not generally been central to accounts of early modern mobility, though it is difficult to think of experiences of mobility that were not characterised by the encounter between languages.15 Travellers within and beyond early modern Europe were constantly negotiating polyglot spaces and multilingual geographies: just as they experienced a ship as a site where passengers and sailors spoke their own languages and jargons, so too did they navigate areas where varieties of language could indicate regional affiliations or confessional convictions.16 The competences acquired through mobility varied depending on the circumstances, needs, ability, and opportunity of the traveller. They reflected the nature of the traveller’s encounter with other cultures: who they spoke to and how, what they sought to get from the encounter, and often what they hoped to bring home from it. In early modern Europe, mobility was a multilingual experience. Captivity was too. Anglophone captives found themselves thrust into bewilderingly multilingual environments, working alongside others and serving masters who often did not speak their language. Many captives became language-learners by necessity. Linda Colley notes ‘the centrality of linguistic capacity to captives’ chance of survival’,17 and captivity narratives are full of stories in which some knowledge of a local language enabled the captive to protect themselves from harm, build relationships, disguise themselves, plot or effect escape, or improve their situation. Captivity narratives are rich sources for linguistic detail, too, with their authors noting the street-cries of North African cities, the language of slave markets, the linguistic mingling of captives and captors, and the language of other cultures and another religion: some authors of captivity narratives may have performed their knowledge of Arabic or Ottoman Turkish in their writing as a means of demonstrating the truth of their account.18 Accounts of Mediterranean captivity offer unique insights into language-learning and its meanings for English identities abroad. Captivity narratives are unique and important sources for the history of language-learning for two reasons. Firstly, in the corpus of captivity narratives we find first-person accounts of language-learning and multilingual communication by a diverse group of people. Captivity narratives record the experiences of men, women and children, of English Muslims, of sailors and passengers from a range of backgrounds. Language-learning was a feature of lives across the social spectrum in early modern England and Europe, but accounts of the language-learning experiences of non-elite learners are often difficult to come by.19 Secondly, captivity narratives are rare in depicting a form of language-learning which, for most captives, was predominantly oral.20 Captives rarely had access to pedagogical texts in the languages they learnt, even where texts like these were available.21 Most followed no formalised or text-based language-learning process. Instead, captives learnt from their fellow-captives, their masters and overseers, and from observing their environment. Learning languages in this way, without significant textual interference, may well have been central to early modern experiences of travel and migration for many people, but it is a process which was rarely described by those who had experienced it. Captivity narratives have often been read for their insights into the big picture of cultural and confessional encounter in the early modern period. In this article, I read them for language: for what they have to say about the everyday business of learning and communication in a powerfully multilingual world. By using captivity narratives to think about polyglot oral encounters, oral language-learning, and oral competences, we can frame questions and find insights into the intertwined histories of language-learning and experiences of mobility which underlay cultural encounters in the early modern period. Those who had experienced captivity had, in Nabil Matar’s words, ‘heard the Moorish other “speak”’.22 What they heard, what they did with it, how they told their stories, and what they might mean are the questions addressed by this article. I was all this while as it were in a dream, wherein a man sees strange apparitions, which cause fear, admiration, and curiosity, reflecting on the several Languages (for they spoke the Turkish, the Arabian, Lingua Franca, Spanish, French, Dutch and English), the strange habits, the different Armes, with the ridiculous Ceremonies at their Devotions23 At the moment of captivity, the voices and languages of captives and captors mingled. Francis Knight described the cries of joy of his captors on their taking of his ship, ‘Alla, Alla, Mahomet, and Rosallah, which is God, God, alone’.24 For some, the voices that hailed their entry into captivity spoke in languages that were more familiar to them, though the content of their speech was not comforting: d’Aranda recorded that his ship’s capture was heralded by the voice of ‘a Christian Slave, who cry’d out in the Flemish tongue, Str pht voor Argiers [sic], that is, Deliver your selves up for Algiers’, while Elizabeth Marsh met an interpreter who spoke to her in her own language, though she recalled his ‘bad English’ as part of the experience of being taken from her ship.25 And while a shared language could be used to make communication run more smoothly, it might also be an instrument of deception. Thomas Phelps, who was captured in 1684, wrote that his ship spotted what they believed to be an Algerian vessel – and thus no threat in a time of peace. The other ship sent a boat to them, containing ‘an antient Moor, who formerly had been a slave in England and spoke good English, and who was set at liberty by our late Gracious King Charles the 2d’.26 The ‘antient Moor’ – as well as standing as a reminder that Christian Europeans were not the only ones made captives (and language-learners) – turned out to be a Trojan horse, tricking Phelps and his shipmates into becoming captives of a Moroccan vessel based out of Meknès. European languages in Muslim mouths were could be a cause of confusion and fear for newly-taken captives. At the taking of Joseph Pitts’ ship, the corsair captain – ‘a Dutch renegade and able to speak English’ – was the first to speak to them, and the simple language of their capture reflected the ill-treatment the captives would face on their arrival in Algiers: ‘The very first words they spake, and the first thing they did, was Beating us with Ropes, saying, Into boat you English dogs!’27 Once they arrived on land, linguistic competence could shape a captive’s fate. Having made landfall, many captives would be sold, and their wealth, status, background, family, and skills were all factors which determined the price (or the ransom) that they would ultimately command.28 Robert C. Davis writes that captives’ masters ‘were willing patiently to interrogate their recently purchased slave for hours, using whatever language or interpreter would function and hoping to persuade or trick him into revealing what abilities he had’.29 Captives found themselves immediately in a situation in which their capacity to speak for themselves and to define who they were could determine their fate. For this reason, Emanuel d’Aranda warned that ‘A new Slave ought to be distrustful of all people’: ‘It is… necessary he should dissemble a while, till he be sufficiently inform’d whether they [those that speak to him] be impostors, or may be trusted’.30 D’Aranda’s advice echoes the debates in the advice literature aimed at travellers on the early modern European continent about the place and practice of dissimulation in travel: Fynes Moryson wrote in 1617 that ‘a traveller must sometimes hide his money, change his habit, dissemble his Country, and fairely conceale his Religion, but this hee must doe onely when necessity forceth’; in other words, the traveller could be permitted to dissemble, ‘yet onely in dangerous places, and among suspected persons’. Captives certainly found themselves in danger and with reason to be suspicious; they might have taken literally Moryson’s maxim that ‘[h]e that cannot dissemble, cannot live’.31 A lack of linguistic competence could have a significant impact on the captive’s future. Adam Elliot described his being offered for sale, saying that prospective buyers at market ‘call’d upon me at pleasure to examine me what trade I was of, and to see what labour my hands were accustomed to’.32 Elliot, lacking the language to explain his situation, became the victim of others’ lies: somebody spread the story that he was a relative of the Duke of Norfolk, driving up the potential ransom he could be expected to command.33 Elliot was unable to make his own case, due to ‘my defect in the Castilian language wherein [his master] was exquisite’; as a result, his master ‘provided a Jew (who had been in Europe and spoke good Latin) to treat with me’.34 The attempt to use Spanish and Latin here indicates that these tense moments of bargaining were multilingual, with a variety of strategies – from the use of a shared language or gesture to the involvement of interpreters – employed as potential buyers worked to build up the fullest possible picture of their captive’s history. As so often, the mediators in these situations were not necessarily formally trained interpreters, but other polyglot individuals living trans-imperial or transcultural Mediterranean lives.35 The importance of being able to tell one’s story was emphasised in the account of Richard Hasleton, who had been a captive in North Africa and returned to Europe, only to suffer torture and imprisonment at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition in Majorca. After escaping this predicament, he found himself again on the coastline near Algiers, where – having just made landfall, and carrying a weapon – he came across an elderly man. In his account of their meeting, Hasleton slipped into the shared language he had learnt in his previous captivity: ‘I spake unto him in the toung of Franke, and called him to me. I having my hatchet in my hand cast it from me’. The man approached him and, ‘taking me by the hand, demaunded very gently what I would have’, and Hasleton, ‘perceiving that he did even at the first sight pitty my poore and miserable estate, tolde him all things that had happened unto me’. In Hasleton’s story, his competence in ‘the toung of Franke’ (the Mediterranean Lingua Franca, discussed below) allowed him to lay out the facts of his story to this elderly Muslim: ‘how I was an English man, how I had bin Captive in Argire, how I chanced to come to Genua, their sending me to Maiorque, and all the torment which I had suffered there, and finally, my escape from thence, with all the rest that followed’.36 Unlike Elliot, who was rendered dumb at a moment when the ability to tell his story was crucial, Hasleton was able to employ his linguistic skill (not to mention the careful use of gesture) to head off a potential conflict. In these narratives, the first days of captivity were often coloured by incomprehension and misunderstanding. William Okeley recalled how, having been brought to his new master’s home, he had fallen almost immediately into a sectarian argument. Okeley wrote that his master’s father ‘began to insult over me with insupportable scorn, reflecting upon me because I was a Christian, and cast out some expressions which did really reflect upon the person of my Rdeemer, [sic] though I have heard worse since’. At this point in his captivity, ‘[m]y Neck was not yet bowed, nor my Heart broken to the Yoke of Bondage; I could not well brook, because I had not ben used then to such language’. However much of these comments he could understand, he was unable to respond properly in kind, ‘because I could not express myself in the Moresco, or Lingua Franc’. Instead, he turned to gesture, writing that ‘I supplyed it with Signs; and imitating the Coblers Yarke, I signified both waies as well as I could, That their Prophet was but a Cobler’. Through rude gestures, he hoped to get across his belief that Muhammad had simply ‘patch’d up a Cento of Jewish, and Monkish Fopperies, which was now their Religion’.37 Adam Elliot, beaten by the merchant who had bought him, became so furious that ‘I vented my passion in the most rash inconsiderate expressions, the most provoking, opprobrious and menacing terms, that my anger and my little Spanish could accommodate me with, daring him to dispatch me, for my life then seem’d a grievous burthen to me’.38 We might read in both of these accounts a returned captive’s attempt to portray himself as an indomitable Protestant, boldly defending his faith in the face of the infidel’s taunts. Whatever the reality, it is telling that both men framed their responses as emerging from their lack of suitable language, suggesting a relationship between the emotional turmoil of the first days in captivity, the captive’s frustration at their dislocation and powerlessness, their clumsy attempts at communication, and the shaming and inhibiting effect of their linguistic incompetence. In navigating new and unfamiliar urban speechscapes, captives also encountered other languages and risked misunderstanding and miscommunication. Some captives, to pay for their bed and board, performed jobs that took them into the noisy world of the city streets.39 These few hours’ partial freedom allowed some measure of engagement with the world beyond the site of work and the captives’ quarters, and accounts of captivity show that captives were involved and attentive participants in the street life of cities like Algiers. The French captive Chastelet des Boys was told by his master to carry water from the public fountains around the city: ‘Like the others, I therefore displayed [myself] along the streets, crying at the top of my voice, Ab el ma (which is to say, who wants some water?)’.40 In taking on this role, he learnt at least one spoken Arabic phrase which would have helped him ply his trade and also to understand at least one element of the urban speechscape.41 One of Emanuel D’Aranda’s fellow captives had been appointed to lead a mule through the streets, but not knowing that in Algiers’ narrow, dirty streets ‘the custome is, that when one leads a Mule or Camel loaden, he ever and anon cries Belec, that is, Take heed there’, the inexperienced mule-driver ‘overthrew a Turk in the dirty Streets’.42 The man he knocked over angrily threatened the captive with a knife until he was calmed by a group of passers-by, who said ‘What would you do, do you not see that this Christian is yet a Savage, and that he does not know the custome?’ By this, they meant that the slave was still wearing his Spanish clothes and had yet to change into a captive’s habit, which – alongside his ignorance of the city’s verbal codes – marked him out as a new arrival.43 Over time, captives might come to understand their aural environment better. Edward Coxere transcribed some of the abuse he claimed to have received in Lingua Franca from Muslims in the streets of Tunis, saying that ‘Sometimes they would give me the name of Cania sinsa featha, that is to say dog without faith, because I would not believe in Mahomet’, while Joseph Pitts recalled how ‘the Cull Ougles44 will, upon the least Provocation, twit the Renegadoes, with words like these: ‘Eir youle bullersen catchersen,’ i.e. Thou wilt run away, if thou knewest how. And at other times they will jear the Renegadoes with Domus eate, the hoe dishing dader, i.e. There is yet Swines-flesh in thy Teeth, (meaning they have still a tang of Christianity)’.45 By the time they came to write their accounts, former captives like Pitts could present themselves as knowledgeable translators of urban noise for an inquisitive English readership. In doing so, they demonstrated the competence they acquired during the period of their captivity while also adding verisimilitude to their accounts. The linguistic confusion and halting storytelling of captivity’s first moments and days was replaced by a competence in cross-cultural translation, and the confident presentation of the returned captive’s multilingual experiences. This lingua franca is so common that there is no house where it is not used. There are no houses where one or more Christians live and few houses where there is a Turk or a Moor, large or small, man or woman, even children, in which it is not spoken to a greater or lesser extent (most people speak it quite well). It is the means by which they communicate with the Christians.48 The Lingua Franca was a shared language which facilitated communication between Christians and Muslims in a cosmopolitan city like Algiers, with its large and transient population which included captives, renegades, traders, Berbers, travellers, and subjects of the sultan from elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire. Known to English writers of the period by many names – they called it ‘Lingofrank’, ‘corrupt Spanish’, and ‘the common language’, among others – the Mediterranean Lingua Franca (hereafter Lingua Franca) was a contact language for a contact zone.49 As the term ‘corrupt Spanish’ – used by John Whitehead in his late seventeenth-century manuscript ‘relation of Barbary’ – suggests, the Lingua Franca had its roots in Romance languages, Spanish and Italian in particular.50 Thomas Dallam recorded in his account of his journey to Constantinople that his group was addressed in Rhodes by ‘tow stout Turkes’ who asked them ‘Parlye Francko, sinyore? which is: Can ye speake Ittalian, sinyor?’51 The Lingua Franca drew its vocabulary from these and from the other languages spoken in the region, including Greek, Arabic, and Ottoman Turkish.52 The language was simple in structure and vocabulary, and likely varied depending on the speaker and their origins.53 As such, it proved relatively simple for many captives to grasp a basic knowledge of the language, to express themselves and to understand what was said to them. Crucially, though, this was a language whose life was almost entirely oral: besides its appearance in texts like captivity narratives – and snatches of it in literary works by Molière, Carlo Goldoni, and others – this was a language which was spoken rather than written.54 As Karla Mallette writes, ‘No one ever wrote a text in the lingua franca. It appears in writing only as the record of an overheard conversation, and almost always in the voice of another speaker’.55 Its speakers in this period had no dictionaries or grammars to draw on in learning it: it was learnt through conversation and experience.56 The Lingua Franca remained a pidgin language rather than a creole, meaning that it was never any speaker’s native language, and thus did not become ‘creolised’, a complete language with a community of native speakers. Natalie Zemon Davis argues that creole languages ‘illustrate the ingenuity of human populations in difficult straits and the wide range of situations and subjects they wanted to be able to talk about in relatively short order’, which is also the case with a pidgin like the Lingua Franca.57 Nobody’s first language, it grew out of the contacts that made the early modern Mediterranean: by focusing in on the environments, the people, and the practices involved in teaching and learning it, we come closer to understanding experiences of cultural and confessional encounter and communication. It remains frustratingly difficult to access the Lingua Franca as it was spoken by those who learnt it: captivity narratives are a rare, if problematic, source for this pidgin language in use. we found many Englishmen in their Ships, Slaves, like our selves, from whom we had no other Comfort, but the Condoling of each others Miseries, and that from them we learnt a smattering of the Common Language, which would be of some use to us when we should come to Algiers, whither, after five or six Weeks we were brought.59 This passing reference is all that Okeley offers to indicate the manner in which he began to learn the ‘common language’, meaning the Lingua Franca. It was learnt early, in preparation for a situation in which it would become vital. It was learnt through a kind of solidarity between captives, and particularly between captives of Okeley’s own nationality. And it was learnt in the galley, which in Okeley’s account is revealed as a site of oral language-learning and knowledge exchange.60 In the accounts of a captive like Okeley and a sailor like Coxere, the ship became a space in which languages were learnt in dialogue with fellow-seafarers and fellow-captives. I remember I was saying to my consorts in a frolic that it may be the skrevan would come to us and say ‘Engleses, a lesta suas robas’, which is in English ‘Englishmen, make ready your clothes’, as much as to say we should be gone.64 By this point, Coxere was able to mimic the speech in Lingua Franca of the ‘scrivan’ (secretary) at his bagno, to comic effect – as well as enabling communication between captives and their masters, the Lingua Franca could also be used as a means of creating solidarity with fellow-captives, even those of one’s own nation. he said… Pilla Basso, that is in Lingua Franca, Lay him down on the ground, and let four hold his arms and leggs, that he may be cudgell’d over the back and buttocks: For Saldens had a cudgel ready in his hand; having learnt that kind of justice when he was with us at Algiers.67 Saldens turned the form of punishment he had known as a captive onto this would-be captor, even appropriating the language of the overseer as he did so. It is difficult to read d’Aranda’s account of his attack without thinking about the ways in which language-learning in the context of imprisonment and pain could engender and unleash its own traumas. Captives’ tales about their acquisition and use of Lingua Franca may need to be taken with a pinch of salt, but they offer much to the historian of mobility and communication. They present language-learning as occurring in the galley, the bagno, and the site of work, and as an activity which was intimately tied to bodily effort and the threat or reality of physical punishment. They draw our attention to the extent to which language-learning could be an embodied process: in an era when corporal punishment in educational contexts was common, they might prompt historians to wonder about other experiences of language-learning which left their mark on the body. And they remind us that language-learning was more than an intellectual endeavour: it could be social and emotional too. The visceral experiences of these involuntary language-learners carry their own lessons for historians of early modern language and mobility more generally. When she was captured and brought to Morocco, the Flemish captive Maria ter Meetelen ‘didn’t speak the language at all’. Thanks to dogged efforts and official favour, she managed eventually to receive the aid of ‘a torseman, i.e. a mistress of language, [who] was to come with me every day before the king as an interpreter since I knew not yet enough of the language’. This ‘torseman’ – or dragoman – was ‘an Irish female renegade, who had turned Turk after many torments’.68 This Irishwoman, sufficiently fluent in Arabic to act as an interpreter and possibly a teacher, had learnt a language which was freighted with meaning and sometimes with a sense of potential danger for Christian Europeans and Anglophones in the early modern period. It was also a subject of fascination: for at least a century beforehand, England had been witnessing a growing interest in the study of the Arabic language and its texts.69 At Cambridge, a professorship in Arabic was founded in 1632, and the study of the language grew more common at both English universities during the seventeenth century. Books on the Arabic language found an audience in English print (even if they were mostly written in Latin), while