Circumnavigations #7: Guma'Cervantes

While in Valladolid, on a chilly afternoon, I walked through a house with cramped staircases and low hanging doorways. There were small beds in darkened corners. Aged chairs and paintings. Iron pots and kitchen implements. No doubt much of what was in there, had been placed for effect, but you could still feel the age. This house is known as Case de Cervantes, it was a home where the writer Miguel Cervantes stayed in the early 17th century. Today it is a small museum that features small bits of information about the writer's life. You will also find similar Case de Cervantes in other parts of Spain.

Miguel Cervantes is best known for his book Don Quixote, and called the greatest writer in the Spanish language and the first modern novelist. Historians of nationalism are always quick to remind us that the political history of a place doesn't have as much of a role in creating national identity as historians usually imply. Arts and culture, can play a much more profound role in being shared sources of enjoyment, things that all people who are on a common national journey, can refer to and draw their identity from.

While I was leaning against against the wall at Casa de Cervantes, taking in the place around me, my mind began to wander. Different languages were floating past me, English, Spanish, Chinese, German as different tourists walked through the halls. It dawned on me then that I hadn't really spoken Chamoru for several days. Even though I had typed it quite a bit, and I use it when I'm talking to myself, I hadn't spoken to anyone else in Chamoru for about a week. That made me wonder, had these walls ever heard the Chamoru language before? Had a Chamoru ever visited this museum? Or even more intriguing, had a Chamoru visited a house like this in the time of Cervantes? Had a Chamoru made it all the way to the center of the Occident during the 16th or 17th centuries?

In truth, most definitely.

At the time of Cervantes, Guam had been incorporated into the Spanish empire formally through the claim of Legaspi, but it had not yet been colonized. San Vitores and his mission to bring Christianity to the savages of the Ladrone Islands was still decades away. Magellan had stopped in Guam, and other ships that followed also made landfall in Guam, but none of them initiated prolonged contact or colonization. The Ladrones, which later became known as the Marianas, had been determined to have no gold, no spices or anything else of tremendous value in the age, and so when ships stopped they did so to get supplies such as food and water, but also Chamorus.

From the earliest examples of European contact, Chamorus were already being snatched away, usually against their will. We have accounts of some being taken to work as assistants to priests or on ships, some being taken as slaves to work in the bowels of the ship or as servants for travelers. Chamoru women most likely were also taken to be sexual slaves or forced wives for sailors. Europeans interpreted the nakedness of the savages they met to mean they were highly sexualized and could be used with impunity. I have seen accounts of this from the Philippines and the Americas, but never from Guam, but I am certain such horrific takings did take place.

We know that through these takings Chamorus made their way to the Philippines and Mexico, which represented the two ends of the Spanish empire in the Pacific. It is possible that some would have made it across to the Spanish Lake of the Caribbean, and if they had proven themselves to be good sailors or servants, perhaps been able to cross the Atlantic, and visit the Iberian capitol of their future colonizer.

Given the ways in which Pacific Islanders have been known for centuries to undergo such fascinating and bewildering voyages, it would not surprise me.

And so for an afternoon I thought about a unique meeting between Cervantes and a well-traveled man from Guam. I imagined that Chamoru man, with an interesting flavor to his Spanish, would tell stories of a giant fish threatening to eat his island, that is only defeated when the women cut their hair and tie it together. Or perhaps he would have regaled him with tales of the mighty Gådao or the tricky Ukudu. They would sit near a fire, the man from Guam, never quite getting accustomed to the cold or the dying seasons of this strange new world, and tell jokes, about what Europeans believe of others and their savagery and remark on how ridiculous the world can be sometimes.

I think I will reread Don Quixote and see if I can pick up any Pacific Island traces in it.