Book Review

In Interpreting the Amistad Trials: How Interpreters and Translators Make and Shape History, Jeanette Zaragoza-De León offers the first comprehensive historical study dedicated to the interpreting and translation dimensions of the landmark 1839–1841 United States v. The Amistad case. The book probes into the roles of fifteen interpreters and four translators whose linguistic mediation proved indispensable to the judicial outcome that struck a blow, however partial, against the institution of slavery in the United States. Drawing on an extensive range of archival materials including newspaper sources, abolitionist correspondence, court depositions, diplomatic letters, and congressional documents held at institutions from the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans to the Archivo Nacional de la República de Cuba in Havana, Zaragoza-De León recovers a history that has long been obscured by the dominant narratives of legal and political historiography.

The Amistad case is widely known in outline: in 1839, 53 Mende Africans who had been illegally enslaved and transported to Cuba revolted aboard the schooner La Amistad. After the ship reached the coast of Long Island, the incident developed into a landmark legal dispute involving abolitionist activists, the Spanish Crown, and the Van Buren administration. Although historians have generally acknowledged the importance of James Covey, the 18-year-old Mende-speaking interpreter recruited from the British naval brig Buzzard, few studies have examined the broader interpreting and translation network that enabled the trial to proceed. Zaragoza-De León’s contribution lies precisely in bringing this neglected infrastructure to the centre of analysis. As she argues, the Amistad case may represent “the single most documented event of interpreting and translation in the early nineteenth century in the Americas in the context of a racialized and imperial conflict” (p. 8).

The book opens with an introduction outlining its theoretical and methodological framework, followed by seven numbered chapters, a conclusion, and an epilogue. In the introduction, the author proposes what she terms the “Interpreting and Translation Filter” (ITF): a set of guiding questions designed to help researchers in adjacent fields identify and analyse interpreting and translation activity embedded within archival sources that have not traditionally been examined through this lens (pp. 15–16). Conceived as a transferable methodological tool, the ITF seeks to foster dialogue between interpreting and translation studies and fields including legal history, African American studies, Caribbean studies, and postcolonial studies. The book also examines the invisibility of interpreters in historical accounts, which is a frequently documented phenomenon (Ruiz Rosendo & Persaud, 2016; Tryuk, 2015), although readers from within ITF may find that some of the guiding questions map closely onto existing historiographical frameworks already articulated by scholars such as Pym (1998). The ITF’s most valuable contribution may be less as a novel theoretical framework than as a concrete pedagogical instrument for training historians outside the discipline to ask interpreting-focused questions of primary sources.

Chapter 1 situates the Amistad case within the broader contexts of the transatlantic slave trade, antebellum U.S. politics, abolitionist theology, and the evolving legal frameworks surrounding court interpreting in Spain, Cuba, and the United States. This chapter establishes the structural conditions of linguistic access in antebellum American courts: the absence of any federal mandate requiring courts to provide interpreters for non-English-speaking defendants, the fraudulent issuance of licencias by Cuban colonial authorities, and the deep entanglement of pro-slavery ideology in all branches of the U.S. government. All of these factors made the search for a trustworthy Mende interpreter simultaneously urgent and difficult. The comparative treatment of Spanish colonial interpreting ordinances, which had mandated interpreter provision in colonial courts as early as the 16th century (p. 53), and the relative absence of such provisions in the U.S. system is particularly illuminating. It demonstrates how legal infrastructure around linguistic access was not, even in the 19th century, simply absent everywhere: rather, it was unevenly distributed according to the logics of empire and racialisation.

Chapter 2 examines the contested translation of the licencias—the fraudulent travel documents describing the Mende Africans as Ladinos (long-acculturated slaves) rather than Bozales (recently trafficked Africans). The substitution of the term Ladinos with the phrase “sound negroes” in the version of the documents printed for the U.S. Congress is traced through archival correspondence and the personal diaries of John Quincy Adams. Zaragoza-De León analyses this manipulated translation as an ideologically motivated act, which is aligned with the executive and legislative branches with the Spanish Crown’s pro-slavery position. She draws productively on Lefevere’s (1992) concept of patronage to illuminate how institutional power constrains translators’ choices and on Critical Race Theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017) to expose how the racialisation of language itself was at stake in the choice between Ladino and sound negro. The chapter would benefit from deeper engagement with the growing body of scholarship on manipulated translation in colonial and imperial contexts, but as a case study of how translation can function as an instrument of racial governance, it is compelling.

Chapters 3 and 4 respectively introduce the four translators (John Quincy Adams, Robert Greenhow, William B. Hodgson, and William Jay) and reconstruct the recruitment process for the Mende interpreter. Adams is portrayed as an experienced translator who had spent decades rendering Greek, Hebrew, Latin, French, German, and Spanish texts. He brought this multilingual formation to bear on his advocacy for the Amistad Africans, which contributes to more comprehensive understanding of the figure more commonly studied as a statesman and politician. Zaragoza-De León reads Adams’s diaries with care, extracting evidence not only of his translation practice but also of his translation preference: his preference for paraphrase over word-for-word equivalence, his sensitivity to contextual meaning, and his understanding of the political consequences of editorial choices in official translation. Chapter 4’s reconstruction of the recruitment process is similarly valuable, documenting a “frantic forty-day search” (p. 212) through abolitionist networks spanning Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. The author identifies 13 qualifications that the ideal interpreter was expected to meet, organised into categories of social connection, linguistic skill, agency and embodiment, and activism. The abolitionists also hoped that the interpreter would be trusted by the African captives themselves, share their ethnic background, and be ideologically committed to the anti-slavery cause. This challenges prevailing professional norms of impartiality and neutrality (Mikkelson, 2008). The author is unambiguous on this point: in contexts of structural inequality, the demand for interpreter neutrality can serve to reinforce the very power imbalances it purports to transcend. This argument has clear precedents in the literature on community and conflict zone interpreting, and Zaragoza-De León’s Amistad case contributes rich historical evidence to support it.

Chapter 5, the longest and densely documented section, traces the biographies and courtroom roles of the three principal interpreters: James Kaweli Covey, Antonio Ferrer, and John Ferry. The account of Covey’s life is handled with sensitivity and draws extensively on Lawrance’s (2014, 2015) foundational archival work on the Amistad orphans. He was kidnapped from the Mende region, enslaved aboard the Segunda Socorro, liberated by the British Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron, educated at a Church Missionary Society school in Sierra Leone, and recruited from the deck of HMS Buzzard by the Yale linguist Josiah Gibbs. Zaragoza-De León expands the scope by reinstating Covey’s ethical dimensions of his position, including the scenario in which abolitionist Tappan considered having Covey “detained” to prevent his return to the Buzzard. Zaragoza-De León clearly identifies this as a contradiction within the anti-slavery movement. Antonio Ferrer, the captain’s enslaved cabin boy, is presented as a complex figure whose survival aboard the schooner was contingent upon his role as a linguistic conduit between the Mende and the Spaniards. Zaragoza-De León explores the ambiguity of his status and the shifting allegiances he navigated throughout the legal proceedings. One unresolved yet intriguing question concerns whether, and by what means, Ferrer facilitated communication between the Mende and the Spaniards, given the lack of evidence that he spoke either Mende or English. Despite a court order for his return to Cuba as “lawful property (p. 143),” his story culminates in a defiant act of agency as he escapes to Canada via the Underground Railroad, aided by the very abolitionists who initially viewed his testimony with suspicion. John Ferry’s story receives detailed treatment as well. He was enslaved in West Africa, transported to Latin America, and liberated there by the forces of Simón Bolívar. The author’s insistence on tracing Ferry’s role as the first African interpreter in the case corrects a historiographical oversight. The sections on sign language interpreting, involving Thomas Gallaudet and George Day, are concise but important: they situate the Amistad case within the broader history of Deaf communities and their interpreters, and Silva’s (2014) work on this connection is appropriately foregrounded.

Chapters 6 and 7 cover the judicial hearings from September 1839 through the trial of January 7–11, 1840. Here, the narrative becomes more explicitly restructured from newspaper transcriptions, given the absence of official trial transcripts for the January proceedings. Zaragoza-De León handles this limitation responsibly, flagging it explicitly while demonstrating how The Emancipator, The Daily Herald, and The Noticioso de Ambos Mundos read comparatively and with attention to their ideological positions. The attempts by opposing counsel to impeach Covey are meticulously documented and analysed: the strategy of discrediting the interpreter as a means of silencing the Africans’ testimony is presented as a direct expression of the racialised politics of language access. The incident in which Theodore Sedgwick III, counsel of record for the Africans, assumed the role of Spanish interpreter for Antonio Ferrer—while declining to swear the interpreter’s oath on the grounds of his status as counsel—especially reveals the double standards that underpinned the court’s handling of linguistic mediation.

The book’s main strength is its archival breadth and the perseverance with which Zaragoza-De León has assembled a narrative from sources scattered across multiple languages, continents, and institutional repositories. The recovery of interpreters and translators who have been named but not studied is a scholarly contribution with which future historians of the period will need to engage. The theoretical insistence that interpreters and translators are historical agents, not conduits, and that their subjectivities, ethnic competencies, and ideological commitments matter to outcomes, is well supported by the evidence marshalled here.

There are, nevertheless, a few aspects of the book that some may find could be organised differently. Owing to the book’s distinctive chapter structure, certain key facts and statements reappear across multiple chapters from different angles. In many cases, this layered presentation allows the reader gradually to assemble a fuller picture of the Amistad case and its interpreting network. At times, however, some information is introduced only partially in earlier chapters before being revisited later in greater detail, which may create a slight sense of repetition for those less accustomed to this cumulative mode of historical narration. In addition, a number of interpretive comments and reflections are woven directly into the narrative discussion. A more consolidated reflective section at the end of each chapter may provide an even clearer separation between historical reconstruction and theoretical commentary. That said, the overall architecture of the book remains highly coherent and carefully designed. Zaragoza-De León’s decision to proceed from macro-level historical contexts to the various actors, networks, and courtroom events ultimately gives the study both narrative depth and strong scholarly rigour while also distinguishing it structurally from more conventional histories of the Amistad case.

These reservations do not diminish the significance of what Zaragoza-De León has accomplished. Interpreting the Amistad Trials is a substantial and original contribution to interpreting history, to the history of race and language in the Americas, and to our understanding of how linguistic mediation has functioned as a site of both oppression and resistance. The recovery of 15 interpreters from the margins of a well-known historical event is itself a scholarly act of the kind the book advocates: a demonstration that translation and interpreting histories, when pursued with rigour and imagination, can make and shape our understanding of the past.