On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe

by Caroline Dodds Pennock

A landmark work of narrative history that shatters our previous Eurocentric understanding of the Age of Discovery by telling the story of the Indigenous Americans who journeyed across the Atlantic to Europe after 1492

We have long been taught to presume that modern global history began when the "Old World" encountered the "New", when Christopher Columbus “discovered” America in 1492. But, as Caroline Dodds Pennock conclusively shows in this groundbreaking book, for tens of thousands of Aztecs, Maya, Totonacs, Inuit and others —enslaved people, diplomats, explorers, servants, traders—the reverse was true: they discovered Europe.

For them, Europe comprised savage shores, a land of riches and marvels, yet perplexing for its brutal disparities of wealth and quality of life, and its baffling beliefs. The story of these Indigenous Americans abroad is a story of abduction, loss, cultural appropriation, and, as they saw it, of apocalypse—a story that has largely been absent from our collective imagination of the times.

From the Brazilian king who met Henry VIII to the Aztecs who mocked up human sacrifice at the court of Charles V; from the Inuk baby who was put on show in a London pub to the mestizo children of Spaniards who returned “home” with their fathers; from the Inuit who harpooned ducks on the Avon river to the many servants employed by Europeans of every rank: here are a people who were rendered exotic, demeaned, and marginalized, but whose worldviews and cultures had a profound impact on European civilization.

Drawing on their surviving literature and poetry and subtly layering European eyewitness accounts against the grain, Pennock gives us a sweeping account of the Indigenous American presence in, and impact on, early modern Europe.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Indigenous, Native American, Audiobook, Historical, World History

Hardcover

First published January 24, 2023

Reviews

[Dale Dewitt · Rating 2 out of 5]

A story that needs to be told..but by someone else.. The author is so prepossessed with making sure she lets the reader know that being a Historian is difficult and any native American couldn't possibly have willingly went to Europe or be baptized. Filled with commentary that not only takes the reader from the narrative but actually sets out to do what the author says she is trying to prevent- the stories of people being erased, An editor needs to intervene and say "we love the subject, we love how you want to tell the story of these people, now how about we dont write a book like a blog post and not put ourselves in it so much?" The author name drops other books throughout her commentary so it may be better to read one of those books instead.

If you want in depth analysis and explanation on how people may have spelled their name different or how people disappear from history but give multiple hearsay reasons as to why that happened without evidence then this is the book for you.

[Chapters & Chives · Rating 2 out of 5]

For a text written in 2023 that claims it is “groundbreaking,” I wouldn’t expect it to just repeat what has already been told decades earlier…Also many Indigenous scholars and record keepers tell their nations’ experiences with European settlers over the centuries. The author rarely cites these accounts; she only uses European texts and scholars to depict Indigenous-settler relationships.

There are so many Indigenous writers and scholars active in the field who tell these accounts in a much more respectful and unbiased manner. It’s time to let them tell their own stories. We’ve heard the white Euro-centric stories enough now.

Also, was anyone else troubled by how the author tries to take an objective unbiased opinion that seems to veer into justifying the European perspective and approach??

[David Wineberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

In school we learned about all the wonderful, brave, heroic explorers from western Europe who discovered the western hemisphere, and began the long, arduous process of civilizing and Christianizing it. But it turns out there was plenty of traffic in the other direction too. In On Savage Shores, Caroline Dodds Pennock has collected a book’s worth of evidence that thousands of natives, from Newfoundland to Brazil, made their way to Europe in the 1500s, discovering it as validly as Columbus did of the west. She says the reverse trips began right with the return of Columbus in the 1490s. By the mid 1520s, France alone was running ten ships a month out of Normandy to Brazil.

It will come as a shock to no one that Columbus captured a handful of his congenial hosts and brought them home as slaves. But Pennock found far more than that. She found indigenous people coming across the Atlantic as royalty, diplomats, performers, servants, family members, and translators. Lots of translators. Because the Europeans were interested in trade. And the aliens were even accepted in European society: “Native people were walking French streets and being baptized in French churches before even Cortés reached Mexico,” Pennock says.

Trade however, often meant taking as much as possible while giving little or nothing in return (aka theft), but she also has examples of genuine fair trade. Manufactured goods were beyond the means of Western societies, while gold, jewels and lumber could be found in abundance. So by dealing something even a little like fairly, everybody went home happy. Pennock cites Maori scholar Linda Tuiwai Smith saying “Our survival as peoples has come from our knowledge of our contexts, our environments, not from some active beneficence of our Earth Mother.”

There were all types of travelers beyond slaves. Some sent their children to be educated in the ways of the modern world. Diplomats crossed the ocean to negotiate trade and grievances. Officials came to pursue land grants, income grants, and titles promised, or merited by marriage. Natives were brought over as entertainment of the freak show kind, what with their tattoos, pierced lips and cheeks, and near total nakedness. Topped by outlandish Quetzal feather adornments. Some proved to be remarkable marksmen or canoeists, and many picked up their hosts’ languages and became go-betweens. Pennock has a documented story for every one of these kinds of travelers.

And while Europeans were busy being amazed at these aliens, the Indigenous visitors were busy being horrified by European society. They saw Europe “with its rulers and beggars, opulence and starvation, supposed civility and extreme violence against its citizens – as a savage shore,” she says. They came from a cashless, sharing economy where none of that made any sense.

There are plenty of legends and lies to dispel too. Pennock says more than 200 years before Condamine “discovered” rubber, it had already been written up by the Cortés crew. Five years before Jacques Cartier began “discovering” Québec, his wife became godmother to the baby of an Indigenous woman in France. One legend that turns out to be true concerns an Indigenous king who was presented to the King of Spain, and refused to bow before him, a slap that could easily lead Europeans to all-out war. He claimed that a king did not bow to another king, and that was good enough to avoid the dungeon and war and make for a totally successful tour.

Columbus and his huge (for the time) ship attracted a lot of attention, and people came to engage with him. Then in the middle of talking, he would grab them and drag them onboard and into slavery. In total, “Columbus himself seized and forcibly transported between 3000 and 6000 Caribbean men, women and children to Europe.” This made him one of the top traders of Native Americans in history. The pattern of kidnapping and promise breaking grew inexorably, not to mention shamefully.

And yet, the Spanish legal system was remarkably fair. With the right prominent lawyer, a western slave could obtain freedom. Queen Isabella set the stage by first of all being disgusted, and then by declaring that all indigenous people from the new lands were free subjects of the Spanish Crown, her vassals, and therefore could not be enslaved.

This of course, only lasted until her death, after which slavery flourished, along with branding, right on the face. Branding went well beyond symbols or initials. Pennock describes one woman who was illegally branded “Slave of Jurado Diego Lopez of Seville”. And yet, Spanish courts evaluated stories, paperwork and corroboration, and not only awarded freedom, but damages to several plaintiffs Pennock cites. For example, the courts fined Diego Lopez about a year’s wages. English, French and Portuguese slaves did not have an Isabella to shield them.

Slavery, caused numerous Natives to commit suicide rather than be taken by for example, English “cannibals”. Some killed themselves to avoid capture. Some threw themselves overboard. The trip itself caused many to die, and numerous others died after a short time in Europe, with its diseases and cold, damp weather. White supremacy also showed up in racism of all stripes. The most absurd story Pennock tells is of an “ugly and deformed” older woman who was not slave material, but she had to be checked out regardless: “So after they assured themselves she was not a devil or a witch – plucking off her boots to check for cloven feet, they let her go.”

There is also a Hollywood-esque story of an English hostage. Partners from Plymouth negotiated a deal to bring the native king to England while one of them remained as a hostage pending the king’s safe return. The English visit went splendidly, but the king died onboard the return trip. After a lot of explaining and negotiation, the natives allowed the hostage to go free anyway. These kinds of stories light up the book.

The detective work in On Savage Shores is nothing short of amazing. Tracking down clues and sources, Pennock has assembled as much as can be possibly gleaned from the European historical record. From court documents to paintings, from travelogues to eyewitness accounts, from graveyard visits to published memoirs, she has been able to separate fact from fiction, account for misspellings and language differences, and assess the fragments for what they really are - incomplete at best, but remarkably revealing nonetheless.

There are seemingly endless stories, and it is often difficult to remember who is who and how they are related. Remembering what tribe they came from not only can’t be done, it barely matters for the purposes here. The facts of European behavior hold across all nations and individuals – white supremacy and no respect.

David Wineberg

(On Savage Shores, Caroline Dodds Pennock, January 2023)

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[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some time in the early 1990s, during my first venture to grad school, I had a photo on my office wall of an Indigenous People’s demonstration in Cairns (or maybe Townsville) in North Queensland. Prominent in that mid-to-late-1980s picture was someone holding a placard that read ‘Aboriginal People discovered Captain Cook in 1770’. This agitated one of my fellow grad students, who was quite adamant that only the ‘explorer’ Cook could have made any discoveries because only he ‘left home’ and went looking, which caused me to wonder, who has agency here? I recall reflecting on the contrast with Alexander Fleming, whose ‘discovery’ of penicillin was, in the popular version of the story at least, the product of either an open window or a messy lab: it was a culture that by this popular account he stumbled on by accident when working on something else. Yet Fleming’s ‘discovery’ implicitly attributed agency to him, in a way my workmate refused to grant any agency to Indigenous people in what is now North Queensland.

The subtitle of Caroline Dodds Pennocks’ superb On Savage Shores, and no doubt many of the ‘debates’ (the term will no doubt flatter some responses) it stimulates, took me back to that exchange in my small, in the darkest corner of the department, office. The book does two things most powerfully; first, it puts at the centre of the story Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, who for all manner of reasons including their own initiative (agency), travel to Europe, reading carefully, subtly and cautiously through scattered archival traces to find individuals, many of who remain un-named and hard to find. Second, it focuses on the 16th and early 17th centuries – so the first 150 or so years of Europe’s substantial occupation of the Americas, meaning that for English language readers she focuses on the less common part of our tales of empire in the Americas – Spain and Portugal, with a smaller French and English presence. Despite the paucity and scattered nature of the sources and the presence of individuals in them she has also managed to build a narrative that highlights individual cases, many of whom are, by the nature of record keeping of various elites, but not all, and in doing so brings the experiences of discovery and engagement to life.

Her exploration of the era and the experience of Indigenous engagements with and in Europe is built around six principle types, noting that there is some overlap between at least some of the categories: these are people with rich and rounded lives – of course one label is insufficient, but for analytical purposes this is one of the things we do as historians, build explanatory categories. The opening case, slavery, unpacks both the commercial drive of early expeditions, including notably Columbus, the vision of Indigenous peoples as, if not less than human, lesser humans, where enslavement was legitimate. Dodds Pennock makes the point well that not only were there extensive debates over the legitimacy of the enslavement of these Indigenous Peoples, leading to their legal protection from slavery, but also stresses that there is a deep difference between the existence of those laws and their enforcement across Spanish America. She also notes that even in these early days Africans were being shipped to the Americas for enslavement, and in passing reminds us that the laws protecting Indigenous Americans intensified that business. As with each of the six chapters, the focus on individual cases and personalised narratives brings home the brutality of these colonial relations – where it is important to add that this was the only relationship that was always coercive.

Even so her second category – what she calls ‘Go Betweens’ – also involved cases of coercion. Dodds Pennock draws on other ‘encounter’ literature to note two kinds of ‘go between’; Indigenous people who occupied social roles in a form of limbo, operating and engaging with both Indigenous and newcomer worlds, and newcomers who lived, for whatever reason – sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity, sometimes by coercion – in or on the margins of Indigenous worlds. Her focus is on the former. Here she has some really strong source material and well-known cases, most obviously Malintzin – an Indigenous woman understood to be of high status, mother to one of Cortés’s sons (who lived as a noble courtier and soldier in Spain: Dodds Pennock notes that Indigenous Americans were, if not common, at least a not uncommon presence). These are among the most complex of relationships explored.

Overlapping with this category is her ‘Kith and Kin’ group, as many of those ‘go betweens’ were kith and kin. However, she also doesn’t shy away from the sexual violence that marked colonialism, making clear (although not explicitly pushing the point) that the term ‘wife’ conceals many things. It is in this discussion that the extent of Indigenous presence in Spain starts become clearer – noting for instance the comparatively large, high status Inka population in Trujillo, in western Spain – a population still marked by house decoration and other indicators in the town. It is hard to miss the sexual relations in the ‘colonial encounter’, but Dodds Pennock makes the powerful consequent point that many of the children of those relations, and in fewer cases the women, settled in Europe.

Whereas this kith and kin group were comparatively settled, both the ‘go betweens’ and the other group that overlaps with them, Diplomats, were much more mobile. Here we note that the harshness and often murderousness of colonial relations on the ground were also often accompanied by state-to-state relations. Where in later years we Māori visiting Britain on diplomatic missions in the 1820s, nations from North America entering into treaties and alliances with both the French and British, and visiting London and Paris and elsewhere, in this earlier era we see nations such as Inka, Mexica (Aztec), Tupi and other attending the courts of Spain and Portugal, asserting state to state relations. Alongside these, Dodds Pennock also notes the ways Indigenous and Mestiza groups and individuals used Spanish law to assert and maintain a degree of relative independence. The picture she paints is of a highly sophisticated array of political engagements (many of those Indigenous came from backgrounds where there were highly developed complex state systems), including insightful use of the Spanish Court and legal system, sometimes spending long periods in Europe.

The other categories do not overlap with these three or four in the same way. There is an extensive discussion of trade and traders, of interwoven systems where both newcomers and Indigenous operate systems of commerce. Here Dodds Pennock notes the extensive and very early presence of American foodstuffs entering European diets – tomatoes, potatoes, beans and more within a few years of the beginning of sustained imperialist and colonialist invasion and presence. This is not just the image we usually get of those newcomers ‘taking back’ goods, but also the cultural knowledge and nous of Indigenous peoples in their use and significance. At times this trade and exchange does happen as part of diplomatic encounters, but far from always. Again, here we see individual’s stories and experiences pieced together through subtle and nuanced reading of archives along with judicious deployment of the essential tool of the historian – plausible explanation – although Dodds Pennock is careful not to overstate her case or claim things that are not sustainable.

The final category marks a return in part to coercion – this is the encounter built around spectacle and curiosity, where Indigenous Peoples visit or more often are ‘brought to’ (which like the museum statement that an artefact was ‘collected’ hides many crimes) Europe in part as curiosities, in part to show off the power of Europe’s empires, in part to entertain. As with some of the other cases here we see coercion and tragedy, as well as contradiction. One of the most compelling instances explored here is that for an Inuit mother and child and another Inuit man ‘brought back’ to England in 1577, all three of whom died shortly after – and yet are buried in church yards in Bristol and London, so on consecrated ground even if in unmarked graves. This points to some of the ambiguousness of engagement that Dodds Pennock draws out.

Throughout the book she is cautious both to not overstate her case – archival sources are sparse but far from non-existent, but also to as much as possible represent Indigenous perspectives, an important part of which is naming correctly. So there is extensive discussion of naming, of making sure that Indigenous individuals and nations are properly named in the ways they would have known. For those of us working in these fields, this is a vital aspect of recognising both the distinctiveness and integrity of Indigenous Peoples, but also of chipping away at the power of the Imperialist and colonialist sources as the only ways of knowing. Crucially, also, it is a way of enhancing the humanity and agency of those Peoples

This is an essential text, written for a wide audience but richly academically informed and rigorous, and crucially part of a more widespread rethinking of imperial and colonial relations, and of the ways Indigenous Peoples engaged with these newcomers in their worlds. I see it in the regions I know better – the Pacific, where not only did European visitors fail to even see some of the major island groups and populations for nearly 200 years, but were dependent on Indigenous navigators, such as the well-known Tupaia who was able to draw very detailed maps of much of the south Pacific (see Nicholas Thomas’ Voyagers ) and guided James Cook (who got the navigational credit – of course). More recently in the same region we have seen important work done on Māori who set out ‘across the globe’ from the late eighteenth century, discussed in Vincent O’Malley’s valuable Haerenga . The story Dodds Pennock tells is distinctive – all imperial encounters were – but similar events can be seen across many other Imperial settings.

There is also a second body of literature the case engages with where it deepens our understanding of colonial and imperial relations. Nearly 30 years ago Paul Gilroy elaborated his notion of The Black Atlantic undermining the single story and showing the Atlantic as complex site of travel, exchange, and engagement. Dodds Pennock strengthens another strand that has begun to appear since, implicitly, in other literature: here we see an Indigenous Atlantic traversed both ways by Indigenous Americans as diplomats, traders, visitors, and family members, whose agency is undeniable and cultural impact extensive, as well as those enslaved or otherwise coerced, whose agency in the movement is minimal to non-existent, but who resisted, carved their own spaces and in some cases gained significant social and cultural power.

Dodds Pennock takes us across a colonial frontier by bringing those ‘from the other side’ into the heart of empire, exploring and engaging with that new world east across the ocean, building relations and links, taking knowledge home often to better operate in the new social spaces developing in their home-worlds. It is a vital text that disrupts the simplicities of the heroic colonial adventurer, recognises and highlights that agency and actions of Indigenous Peoples often relegated to the unknowable across the frontier, it focuses on the ‘early modern’ period and does so in a scholarly book directed well beyond the academy. It is essential reading that reminded me just how wrong my former fellow grad student was.

[Catherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

When we realise that there were thousands of Indigenous people in Europe from as early as the 1490s, it becomes impossible to dismiss them as insignificant oddities. Across Spain and Portugal, France, Italy, England, and the Low Countries, Europeans were meeting Indigenous people, as diplomats, performers, translators, sailors, servants, family members, and enslaved people. A majority were involuntary migrants -- kidnapped or coerced from their homes -- but there were also a significant number of free people, travelling individually or in small groups. Most went to Spain and Portugal rather than England, the Tudors being busy with their domestic issues and giving little time to overseas exploration until Elizabeth I's disastrous Roanoke venture in the 1580s. But even England had several high-profile Native visitors, including Manteo and Wanchese, the Coastal Algonquin men who -- as we'll see -- became a critical part of early imperial enterprises, translating for Walter Ralegh and helping to compose an orthography for the Ossomocomuck Angonquian language in London. These men's explicit role as go-betweens, helping to translate the novelties of the 'New World' and inform European views of the Americas, is obvious, but a similar role was being played by Indigenous people at every level of European society, from the enslaved to the nobility.

Caroline Dodds Pennock, a British historian who specializes in Aztec history, took on an ambitious project: searching the historic record (and drawing on other historians' work) for people from the Americas who went to Europe (for both brief and extended periods) during the first century or two of globalization. The documents that have survived include very little actual narration (or extremely biased narration), so often she (and others who came before her) must rely on court documents (including appeals to the European courts to right the wrongs perpetrated by conquistadors and other Europeans), financial records (such as expenses approved to clothe, house, and otherwise support foreign royalty and others out of the crown's coffers), and other vague references to visitors from the Western Hemisphere. A certain amount of speculation is necessary to put the pieces together, but at times it feels like entire pages are constructed out of Ms. Pennock's conjectures about what people might have experienced and how they might have perceived European culture based on the differences from their own cultures.

Overall, a fairly interesting study, taking a different perspective on history, but less speculation could have made it a stronger (and shorter) read.

[Miguel]

DNF. Had to give up on this one – it’s not very good work of history and it seemed that the author was spending more time apologizing for not being a Native American in order to tell these stories – it was just completely over the top and exasperating. It's a bit sad that this sort of tone and writing style can exist in historical reporting these days.

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 1 out of 5]

A colonizer sadly opining about the erasure of colonial records by other colonizers. I tried to give this one chances. I did. But every time I picked it up I felt gross, author’s Good Intentions be damned. Read indigenous histories by indigenous people. End of.

[Tim O'Neill · Rating 2 out of 5]

A while ago I was reading a nineteenth century work on medieval history that was very quaint in style to a modern reader. This was substantially because of its constant moralising; with asides to the reader about the naughty behaviour of many of the people described and mini-sermons on how such wickedness, usually of a sexual nature, should be avoided by all good, right-thinking and pious persons.

This all seems very odd to us, but I wonder if sometime in the future a lot of our current historical writing will seem similarly quaint and moralistic. I began Caroline Dodds Pennock's book after reading interviews with the author and seeing some good reviews. The idea of turning the whole historical narrative of the "discovery of the New World" around and looking at it from the opposite perspective, from the point of view of indigenous people who travelled to Europe, seemed very interesting.

And in most respects this is a very interesting book. There are fascinating characters, interesting and often-ignored sources and plenty of novel perspectives to had from it. The problem, for me, was the way the writer seemed to see her project as an exercise in penitence for the sins of colonialism. After several chapters, the constant reminders that colonism was bad and wrong and that the Europeans who engaged in it were, from our perspective, ignorant, wicked and cruel got wearying.

I should be clear that I definitely DO think colonialism and its attendant consequences was very much a terrible thing and can definitely see this with the benefit of several centuries of hindsight. But when the writer moves beyond assuming the reader understands this to having to reinforce it with almost every sentence, the work begins to feel a lot like that nineteenth century moralism mentioned above.

It is one thing for us to empathise with the fate of an indigenous person who was enslaved and also to find it hard to understand their enslaver. But it's another when the tone and language used to describe these things casts aside any objectivity at all and gets emotionally invested, sometimes to the point of being melodramatic. The chapter on Slavery is heavy with this kind of thing. But it is light on other elements that may have been good to explore. The indigenous traditions of slavery are barely mentioned. How did they differ to European slavery practices? We aren't told. Would they have informed how enslaved indigenous people understood their predicament? This isn't examined. It seems that kind of analysis would get in the way of the strong undertone of "Europeans bad/Indigenous good" that pervades this book.

The chapter on the part played by indigenous people in the "Columbian Exhange" of goods and new plant products and treasure continues this moralising theme. After a long paen to the mystical connection of indigenous people to the land and its bounty, an indigenous academic is quoted cautioning that this sort of thing tends to be silly. As though noting this somehow makes the fact Dodds Pennock has just done the very thing the academic warns against okay. European exploitation of reseouces and the terrible consequences of capitalism and commerce are noted at some length. Yet when the author notes that native peoples engaged in these activities with some enthusiasm, we are suddenly told that this is good and should be admired. No explanation is given as to why this is bad when Europeans did it but good when natives took it up.

I rarely give up on a book without finishing it, even when I'm not enjoying it. I gave up on this one. The hectoring moralism and emotive tone became, after four long chapters, too high a price for the nuggets of genuine insight the book provided. History is not meant to be a sermon. And even when you agree with the faith (as, here, I do), sermons are usually boring. This book got boring.

[Sarah-Hope · Rating 4 out of 5]

Caroline Dodds Pennock's On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe is a remarkable piece of work. The task she's set for herself is to explore the flip side of Europeans' "discovery" of the Americas: indigenous Americans' "discovery" of Europe. Drawing on the available evidence—there's more of it than one might have expected, but still less than one might have hoped—she examines the identities of indigenous Americans who traveled or were taken to Europe; their status, raging from slavery to reception as "sibling" royalty by the king of Spain; and how they attempted to use contact with Europe as a way of defending existing indigenous hierarchies or to advocate for indigenous communities as a whole. In some ways, this is a frustrating read because there is so much that's not known, but Pennock makes good use of the information available, both to document events known to have happened and to consider what extrapolations can reasonably be made from those events.

If you're at all interested in the history of contact, On Savage Shores is a must-read for the perspective it provides that has been missing from this literature. I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really valuable addition to Indigenous-European history. Too often this history is one-sided, very much the perspective of those Europeans encountering Indigenous people for the first time. Part of this is, of course, the difficulty of the historical record - few Europeans bothered to record Indigeneous thoughts, words or even their very presence, and little in the way of Indigenous records survived the genocide that accompanied the Colombian age, and even archecological records were intepreted, coloured and confused by European perspectives and beliefs.

This book highlights just how much trans-Atlantic traffic there was, how much of an Indigenous presence in Europe has gone ignored and neglected by European historians, beyond those individuals highlighted as 'curiosities', 'savages' or 'spectacles', and how this skewed European focus turned many of these vibrant, still-living cultures and cvilisations into the stuff of museums and curiosity cabinets, the ongoing legacy of which still damages many Indigenous descendant cultures and communities today.

[Caroline]

Sounded like it would be fascinating but I was very disappointed. It felt like paragraphs of repetitive anguish for every paragraph of information, and jumps to irrelevant random snippets dropped in were distracting. I bailed early. It may get better later.

[Shrike58 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Even keeping in mind that I'm probably not the target audience for this book, having done a fair amount of the study on the period and the issues, on the whole, I found it unsatisfactory. The main problem is that Dr. Pennock is basically producing a critique of Western Civilization, using the experiences of those natives of the Western Hemisphere that were dragged back by assorted voyagers, soldiers, and merchant adventurers as a mirror. However, she doesn't have enough testimony from the indigenous folk to hold up that end of the equation, whereas I think that the nature of the book requires her to offer an analysis of the mentality that rationalized conquest and exploitation; at least that is what I'd expect from a working academician. This being the case, I can only offer the tepid recommendation that if you really know nothing about the period besides Christopher Columbus hitting the beach in the "New World" in 1492, you'll probably get something out of this book. Otherwise, the best praise that I can give it is that I sense a strong opinion piece struggling to escaped a half-baked monograph.

As for my rating, I couldn't find it in my heart to round up from 2.5.

[Jen Juenke · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was so excited to dive deep into this book. The synopsis was so tantalizing....what did Native Caribbean, Native Americans, Native South Americans think of Europe when they were brought there against their wills?

With romanticism, scant evidence, and verbosity in her heart, the author decides to destroy the subject.

Too much of the book is the author explaining why she was using certain words, even going so far as to write a paragraph on the word "stuff" instead of another word.
This was done on place names, Native names, explorer names, just about everything in the book had multiple names and the reasons behind it.

Further, the book had too many questions from the author....imagine what the Native would think? The Native person must have seen this, felt this, wondered this.
Not enough was concrete evidence

The author premises that these enslaved "indios" or people from the New World were diplomatic and advocated for their tribe, Nation, population.
Her own work in the book does not prove this. Over and over again the scant evidence in the records were that of the Natives begging the Crown for their OWN FREEDOM! Their inheritance, begging for alms, etc.

The book needs a good editor in which to cut out 2/3 of the content and to get the author to stop TALKING ABOUT HERSELF ALL THE TIME!

The author skipped around so much, I was pretty sure that I had whiplash and there were many times in which I had to reread several pages back to understand how the heck did I end up in Wild Bill Hickok's wild west show when the author had been talking about an event in 1521!?!

Save yourself the trouble, read the synopsis, then don't read the book. Think about what Native peoples might have felt going to a strange land.....and you would save yourself HOURS of your life by NOT reading this poorly written book.

Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for this honest review.

[Jolanta (knygupė)]

2,5*

[Thom]

After 10 days and 80 some pages, this isn't grabbing me. Perhaps too much focus on future Mexico, but then that is the author's expertise.

[Debbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

'On Savage Shores' takes a fascinating look at the Atlantic World of the sixteenth century, but rather than adding to the voluminous literature about how the West 'discovered' the Americas, Caroline Dodds Pennock comes at the story from the other side: how the various Indigenous American peoples explored and experienced Europe. It is a novel, intriguing idea, and one that has been crying out to be written for years.

It is also a difficult idea to realize: as Pennock acknowledges, the sources - particularly those written by the Indigenous travellers to Europe themselves - are few and far between. So there is the unenviable process of combing through seemingly unrelated documents, scouring for hints and brief mentions, allowing - even more than usual - for writer's bias, and making leaps of faith based upon oral histories, later writings, and wider knowledge. There might be a reason why a popular history on this subject has not been attempted before.

Luckily for the reader, Pennock has completed the task with élan. Not only has she managed to find, tease and then tug on enough threads to form a coherent argument, but she has also reconstructed a astonishing number of characters from the evidence, turning them from mere objects of curiosity into individuals, acting sometimes under their own agency, sometimes at the behest of others, but always in an authentic, convincing manner. Despite the magnitude of her topic, her style is light and engaging, her narrative balanced, her points powerful and extremely pertinent. There is a relevancy to the book, not just in it fitting with the trend in historical research to explore beyond the Eurocentric vision of the world and the embracing of other peoples and cultures, but in the critique it provides of the way in which our society is constructed. Implicit across the book is the suggestion that there are other ways to live, in greater harmony not just with ourselves and our communities, but with the planet itself.

And this is what 'On Savage Shores' does best: it makes readers question their own versions of history and challenges some very deeply held notions. The internet is strewn with reviews criticizing elements of this book – complaints that Indigenous peoples are idealized; that a few thousand Indigenous travellers in Europe across a century do not constitute enough of a movement to justify a reworking of ‘History’; that there is nothing wrong with Native peoples being objects of curiosity; that it is simply the process of ‘Progress’. But this reaction strongly emphasizes the point that this book should be read, not just to challenge assumptions and provide new - and much-needed - insight, but to make the reader ponder the purpose of history. Because 'On Savage Shores' makes history come alive, not just in the usual way of bringing a certain era, or a certain people, into the foreground, but the very discipline of history itself is invigorated by its contribution. It encourages its readers to ask what the purpose of historical narratives actually is: should they bring communities together in shared myths; or constantly challenge old assumptions; or just be a way of hearing interesting stories? Whatever the conclusions to which we come, this act of exploration is enlightening. We discover new interpretations of the past, and new understanding about ourselves. Sometimes it is good to visit foreign countries.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a refreshing new look at the impact of the meeting between native Americans -from Brazil to Nunavut- and colonising Europeans in the 15th century and beyond. Rather than documenting the familiar stories of the imposition of colonial domination over these newly 'discovered' lands, the author explores what is known about those indigenous peoples who were brought to the Royal courts of Europe, whether as slaves, curiosities, ambassadors, translators or the wives and children of explorers and conquistadors.
It's a fascinating study of cultural clashes and the long term impact on attitudes today.
Along the way, there are tantalising tales of named -or misnamed- indigenous individuals whose names appear briefly in centuries-old documents, only to fade into obscurity shortly after, such as the Inuit infant who is buried in a Church in East London.
The author discusses the terminology of colonialism and the morality of retaining indigenous artefacts in 'first world' institutions, a really engrossing aspect of the book. Highly recommended.a

[emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25 ☆

Caroline Dodds Pennock had the right idea here, but her execution was pretty lacking in several significant ways.

(Sorry, really long review ahead.)

Her stated goal in the text was to investigate and elucidate the lives of Indigenous Americans that traveled against the more widely recognized grain of the early colonial period. History emphasizes the flow of Europeans and the forced movement of Africans into the Americas starting in the late fifteenth century, but what has slipped under the radar is the simultaneous flow of Indigenous Americans into Europe, for a wide variety of reasons. This is a really interesting and important premise on which to predicate a text—Indigenous American empires, nations, communities, and individuals are continuously erased from historical narratives, often described as precursors to the centuries of transatlantic slavery, as an early and swift casualty of European colonization. Pennock is trying to counter these narratives of damage and depravation, not to show that colonization didn’t decimate Indigenous people and ways of life (because it very obviously did), but to highlight the fact that these were real and living people, each with their own unique experiences at the confluence of the two hemispheres.

But the problem is that Pennock sits comfortably within her known world of European primary sources in order to explore this thesis. In the introduction, she writes that, “Striving to make Indigenous people subjects, rather than objects, of the newly cosmopolitan world in which they found themselves, involves poring over European accounts searching for snippets, reading them against the grain, trying to tease out insights from documents which were never intended to be used in this way. Most of the time, the best we can do is to recover outsider perspectives on Indigenous people’s experiences: to say what happened to them, to show why that mattered, and to tentatively suggest how they may have thought or felt about it, given their background. Such readings must always be speculative, but can be enriched by an understanding of the vibrant diversity of Indigenous people’s world views and cultural knowledge.”

And all of this IS true, and necessary to highlight given the aims of this book. But that last sentence gets to the issue that I have with Pennock’s approach—whose understandings of the “vibrant diversity of Indigenous people’s world views and cultural knowledge” are being utilized to make her arguments? Pennock is a white British woman, and while that doesn’t make her unable to write about Indigenous history, it rubs me the wrong way that her reading of colonial texts appears to be almost entirely informed by her understanding of how Indigenous people would have experienced and understood colonial actions. I would have really liked to see more collaboration with contemporary Indigenous scholars who are already asking these questions, or a greater willingness to consult Indigenous oral histories in addition to the written primary sources so highly valued in the Western scientific and historical tradition. While Pennock ends the book by emphasizing the need to look to living Indigenous individuals, nations, and goals, her actual writing is entirely enmeshed in colonial interpretation and history.

But, with that in mind, I did still find Pennock’s text to be interesting and enlightening in a lot of ways. I learned so much here about the Indigenous individuals living in Europe in the centuries following Columbus's first disastrous voyage. She emphasizes the persistence of Indigenous communities that survived contact with Europeans, but also the widely unreported fact that many Indigenous people were enslaved in Europe, and, more importantly, carved out spaces for themselves on that foreign soil.

The book does occasionally take on this weird tone where European colonial actions are presented more neutrally, where the ways in which Indigenous individuals found success eclipse the more expansive ways that their empires and communities were irrevocably altered and damaged. I would have really liked to see Pennock more explicitly interrogate this balance between individual and community-wide levels of harm, as well as the ways in which modern nations built on Indigenous land often draw a source of national identity from their Indigenous history while denying rights and resources and reparations from their Indigenous citizens. At the best, this is a book that might be an interesting jumping off point into more Indigenous-centered research and history.

[Tom A · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s hard to write about this history because none of it was written by the people being talked about, which also makes this a cool and important topic to write about. Truly never thought about native people being in Europe after initial contact and this book does a great job bringing to light specific stories of native people where some sources exist about their time in Europe. So much of it is speculation and I didn’t really care for the author inputting on how they “must have felt” because it’s really impossible to know definitively. Just tell me what we know for sure and not what they might have been doing or thinking.

This is seeming to be a very new field of study that I see gaining more traction as time goes on so hopefully we can stumble upon some new research and continue learning because there are some really cool stories of native people doing well over seas. It’s also frustrating because we only have a handful that were “notable” enough for the Europeans to write about. Thousands more people were there that we just have no record of who they were or where they were from. Certainly recommend checking some of this book out if you don’t feel like reading all of it.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Academic exploration of indigenous people from the western hemisphere who visited Europe from 1492 through the 1600s. Many were slaves, others not exactly slaves but not in control of their situations - captives in some sense. Some did have some measure of autonomy and visited Europe as family members of Europeans and some even as translators or diplomats or royalty from the Americas.

Some amazing stories. As an academic work there was maybe more detail than I needed. Also a lot of throat-clearing and correctness, but that’s to be expected with such a difficult history. A lot of very sad stories, to be sure.

[spencer wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I may not agree with everything the author writes in this book (some theories are tenuous), I admire someone willing to go against conventional writing, and I'm in complete support of asking questions that may not have been asked before, or may not have been considered worth asking.

[Shelby Blevins · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5; the author concentrated on the impact of the indigenous peoples of turtle islands' visits on the development of Europe to the detriment of their own peoples.

[Mason Wyss · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s funny to read the negative reviews of this book. One side views it as too deferential to native people, the other side as not enough.

Personally, I tend towards the former. Calling myths “empowering stories” was a bit much for me. Surely we can call a spade a spade. Europeans have myths too, Genesis foremost amongst them. Truth exists in my opinion.

And the sparsity of reliable sources makes this brutal to read. The author at one point tells the story of a man named Bino the Elder who maybe was taken to France at 15, depending how you read the sources, but then reveals that actually a lot of the story comes from his descendants who were motivated to prove this because they were trying to claim native identity for tax purposes over 100 years later. And a lot of the anecdotes go something like this.

Dodds Pennock also falls into the tradition of people who will call anything resistance. A man sang an Inuit song while on his deathbed in the care of English physicians, and somehow this is resistance. How? Why?

To me, the exchanges of ideas like with Adario were most interesting, and I would have liked to have heard more about Native perspectives on European society.

[Jifu · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Note: I received an advanced reader copy of this book courtesy of NetGalley)

This is one of my favorite kinds of history reads - one in which voices long left out of the greater historical narrative are finally given a chance to speak. In this case, author Caroline Pennock gives a spotlight to the countless indigenous Americans who made the journey from their homelands to Europe during the age of colonization and so-called “exploration.” It immediately made for reading that was both fascinating also frequently heart-wrenching. Although a fair amount of diplomats, emissaries, and various go-betweens consented to make the Atlantic trip, more often than not these women and men did not have any say in the matter as they were taken abroad as slaves, servants or to displayed and gawked at as exotic oddities.

Based upon the book’s own official summary, I anticipated a sizable amount of first-hand indigenous accounts. However, this turned out to be misleading, for the very eclectic collection of records and accounts referenced here are overwhelmingly from a European perspective. Pennock ends up doing a considerable amount of speculation based on the limited resources. That, and she occasionally does some meandering from her own narrative at times, which is while always well-intentioned did at times interrupt the reading flow. Overall though, I think she does a great job here synthesizing what she could find in the historical record and providing as full a picture as she could of the experiences of these women and men.

Having just been introduced to this topic, I do hope that much more will be researched and written on this topic, either by Pennock or others. In the meantime though, On Savage Shores is a fantastic start to filling in a major modern-day knowledge gap.

[Jan Wignall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating book about this lesser covered topic. Lots of interesting analyses of native experiences in Europe. I didn't realize how many native americans ended up in Seville or in France for example.

Only criticism is the constant use of quotations around phrases (ofc that are not being cited), and a sort of "contemptuous" or snarky description of various European claims/explorers. Feels a bit weird to phrase it as "Explorer X discovered Land Y, which must have come as a surprise to those already living there". This isn't the giant epic own, it just feels childish. The author also spends quite a lot of time apologizing for not being Native American.

All in all, these stories are great to read about and are important to tell, but perhaps if written differently.

[Ed Stoddard · Rating 4 out of 5]

A riveting and often shocking passage through a little-known chapter in history: the Indigenous Americans who were brought to Europe, mostly under coercion. They came as slaves, curiosities and even diplomats, and Pennock has filled this gap in history in a concise and highly-readable fashion. Much of the focus is on the 16th century and Spain and its New World conquests, but the English, French and Portuguese also brought untold numbers of indigenous Americans to their shores.
This excellent book places current debates around cultural appropriation and theft in an insightful context. An important work or history.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

*I know it's dumb to read any reviews online and some of the ones for this book are just excruciatingly dumb. But I thought it was funny that some reviews are mad that the author is too woke and some are mad that the author is not woke enough. Fwiw I thought it was appropriately woke ¯\_(ツ)_/¯*

This book was fascinating! I was glad to learn about historical figures I'd never heard of. I didn't know that so much exploitation of Native Americans happened in the Old World too. I can't speak to how this book compares to other scholarship but I found it compelling.

[Donna Marlatte · Rating 5 out of 5]

An enthralling, monumental history of First Nation peoples from South America and North America, travelling to Europe. Some invited and consenting, most forcibly taken, many enslaved. A reveal of their insights into European peoples, especially their astonishment at economic disparities. Stories of adroit use of the laws and politics of European countries to regain their freedom, to plead for the welfare of their homelands and to be repatriated. Although I was sometimes swamped by detail, I am in awe of this book, the research it entailed and the compelling stories it told.

[Lubna · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s an interesting book, written by a historian who has done a lot of research on the subject. It was interesting to learn about the stories of Indigenous people from North and South America going to Europe, often abducted and brought against their will. Some of them actually prospered and integrated into the society, some of them not so much. The author was able to reconstruct the stories of some of them, but in the absence of much information, it was often guesswork.

[Liz Dzwonczyk · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was like listening to a fascinating lecture on the history that is skipped in school. Very interesting and very sad but relevant and important to acknowledge.
It is written by a historian and could be challenging for a non-academic audience.