Maritime Pedagogies of The Spanish Language: Or, How Much Spanish Did Melville Know?

Abstract

This essay approaches the question of Melville's engagement with things Spanish and Spanish American not by analyzing cultural representations and stereotypes, but by asking: what was the kind and degree of Melville's competency in the Spanish language? How did he learn it and deploy it? The essay draws on corpus-driven evidence and theories arising from three overlapping subfields of linguistics: bilingualism, code-switching, and second-language acquisition. Further, it applies the sociolinguistic concepts of language attitudes and language ideologies to nineteenth-century contexts. Elaborating on scholarship on Melville's reading and what can be inferred from biographical evidence about his interactions with living Spanish speakers, it speculates on adjacent cases of Spanish-language acquisition by English speakers during the period. Richard Henry Dana's account of his self-study program in Two Years Before the Mast (1840) provides one example; Spanish-English textbooks, including John Emmanuel Mordente's New, Easy, and Complete Grammar of the Spanish Language, Commercial and Military (1810) provide others. By framing Melville's written and spoken interlanguage play within the prior, unrecorded context of his acquisition of Spanish, this essay expands outward from a single man's biographical record into the ambient conditions of maritime life in the Latin Pacific of the mid-nineteenth century.