On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe

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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. Columbus and his huge (for the time) ship attracted a lot of attention, and people came to engage with him. Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction, 2(29), 141-141. 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.

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. It’s not that historians have never written about this; I’m standing on the shoulders of other scholars in my work. Dr Dodds Pennock’s work shows us how stories like Nutaaq’s don't vanish from history, just from the parts of it we regularly see and hear about, and are significant in their own right, as well as in how they shaped our understanding of a global past.

You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. But how many people know that there was a Brazilian king at the court of Henry VIII, or that there were tens of thousands of enslaved Indigenous people in Spain? For instance, one Indigenous Peruvian woman, Isabel, was brought to Castile by a Spanish man, Pedro de Oropesa, whom she recognised as her legitimate partner, but he decided to marry a European woman instead. From a distance, King Henri II, his wife, Catherine de’ Medici, and the assembled French court watched in fascination.

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.

In this fascinating and fluidly written revisionist history, Dodds Pennock ( Bonds of Blood), a senior lecturer in international history at the University of Sheffield, pieces together a “mosaic of glimmering fragments” to explore how Indigenous people encountered and perceived European colonizers. In the mid-16th century, members of the Inca dynasty – which had, until its deposition by Pizarro, ruled Peru – could be found living out their days in the Castilian town of Trujillo. Some proved to be remarkable marksmen or canoeists, and many picked up their hosts’ languages and became go-betweens. Local records talk about how the man, Kalicho, hunted ducks with a “dart” on the river Avon to demonstrate how he would harpoon seals. On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe, written by Dr Caroline Dodds Pennock, Senior Lecturer in International History at the University of Sheffield, highlights how, as Europe supposedly ‘discovered’ the Americas, tens of thousands of Indigenous Americans simultaneously made the journey across the Atlantic, and forged the course of European civilisation just as Europe also changed America.

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. A more long-term method involved conquistadors acquiring local women as wives or mistresses, and bringing up bilingual children. I have just published a major trade book, On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe, telling the stories of the Indigenous Americans who ‘discovered’ Europe in the sixteenth century. The English were worried about the fate of the hostage, but the people in Brazil understood, and allowed the hostage to go free.Slavery, caused numerous Natives to commit suicide rather than be taken by for example, English “cannibals”. For them, Europe comprised savage shores, a land of riches and marvels, yet perplexing for its brutal disparities of wealth and qualityof life, and its baffling beliefs. And Malintzin, a woman of the Nahua people, whose skills as a translator allowed the conquistador Hernán Cortés to communicate with both his allies and enemies during the conquest of the Aztec empire. A number of high-status Indigenous people came to England, either to assist the English in their explorations or in some cases to meet with the monarch.

As well as writing for The Conversation, I was interviewed by both Inside Science and Making History on Radio 4.Pennock CD (2007) Earth Women and Eagle Warriors: Revealing Aztec gender roles through ritual violence In Watson KD (Ed. 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. These peoples are now starting to try to reclaim the bodies and the belongings of their ancestors from European institutes, to recover their heritage and to repair these wounds where they can. 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. Artists flocked to paint them; memorable images drawn of them by John White show the infant, Nutaaq, peeking out of his mother, Arnaq’s, hood.