On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe

Contemporary historians’ collective ability to transform the public's understanding of the past is on bold display in On Savage Shores. This book is a landmark feat of popular history, often thrillingly written. It will introduce a generation of nonexperts to Indigenous history, much like the successful revisionist works of Charles C. Mann or David Graeber and David Wengrow. Readers, much like the book's Indigenous discoverers, will encounter anew the Old World itself.On Savage Shores also constitutes a contribution to scholarship in the field, along with works like Esteban Mira Caballos's Indios y mestizos americanos en la España del siglo XVI (2000) and El descubrimiento de Europa: Indígenas y mestizos en el Viejo Mundo (2023), Jace Weaver's The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927 (2014), Éric Taladoire's D'Amérique en Europe: Quand les Indiens découvraient l'Ancien Monde (1493–1892) (2014), Nancy van Deusen's Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain (2015), Coll Thrush's Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (2016), and José Carlos de la Puente Luna's Andean Cosmopolitans: Seeking Justice and Reward at the Spanish Royal Court (2018), among others. Historians will regard On Savage Shores as part of these scholars’ foundational first steps toward rethinking Indigenous mobility and cosmopolitanism—although it goes further than these denser, more scholarly works through its more ambitious weaving together of much of the New World with much of Europe. Caroline Dodds Pennock surveys stories of Indigenous traveler-discoverers from the south—Guaraní, Tupi, Achuar, Quechua, Muisca—from the middle—Taíno, Lucayo, Maya, Totonac, Nahua, Tocobaga—and from the north—including Algonquian, Apache, Creek, Iroquois, Lakota, and Inuit. These peoples also play many roles—from slaves and servants to performers, translators, and emissaries. They move within many European empires—Spanish primarily, but also English, Portuguese, and French (the Dutch and Danish empires are omitted, as are Indigenous travelers to Poland; East Asian and islander Indigenous likewise do not appear). Dodds Pennock's specialty in the Mexica shines most of all.On Savage Shores lays forth a clear argument: Indigenous discoverers of the Old World began a transformation of themselves, Europe, and the planet. The book's structure is straightforward. Each thematic chapter features strings of vivid stories. Chapter 1 overviews cases of those Indigenous people enslaved and sent to Europe. Chapter 2 pivots to traveling translators and go-betweens. Chapter 3 discusses part-Indigenous families’ travels to the Old World, and chapter 4 examines Indigenous individuals’ historically transformative exchanges of goods with Western actors. Chapter 5 examines what Dodds Pennock calls Indigenous diplomacy, and chapter 6 examines how Indigenous peoples were both witnesses of grandeur and objects of Europeans’ curiosity.The book evinces great sensitivity to Indigenous peoples’ trials, and Dodds Pennock gestures at what they might have thought about their actions and circumstances. Her examinations of Nahua writings on transatlantic travel are a clear highlight, and one even wishes for more (see her 2020 American Historical Review article, “Aztecs Abroad? Uncovering the Early Indigenous Atlantic”). On Savage Shores also regularly highlights contemporary stakes of debates that began in the late 1400s. These stakes range from museum repatriation to onomastics, from handling of human remains to human zoos. This book derives its clear current appeal to readers not only from these debates but from its haunting, tragic stories, like that of Inuk infant Nutaaq.Yet the book is not without its occasional flaws, largely consequences of its own sweeping, admirable, and almost always successful scope. Dodds Pennock cites mestizo Jesuit Blas Valera's story through Sabine Hyland's account, which is based heavily on the infamous forged papers of the Italian heiress and occultist Clara Miccinelli. Tahuantinsuyo refers not to four ruling lineages but to the four quarters of the Inca realm (p. 199). Dodds Pennock might have also included Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala's cantankerous and brilliant vision of the world (for although he did not himself leave Peru, he nonetheless “discovered” Europe too). Lastly, it is important to underscore that this book focuses on moments of “discovery,” a frame that necessarily excludes other globetrotting Europeanized Indigenous intellectuals like the sixteenth-century part-Tlaxcalteca Renaissance theologian-psychologist-educator-grammarian-mendicant extraordinaire Diego Valadés, the eighteenth-century Chimú crusader for equality don Vicente Morachimo, and other actors so well explored by Sean McEnroe, Luis Glave, Alcira Dueñas, and José Carlos de la Puente Luna (among many others).These quibbles detract little from the overall work. The best books are those that inspire us to embark on daunting new projects—and On Savage Shores is certainly one of these. Its daring course raises many generous and exciting new questions that scholars are likely to pursue. How did Indigenous peoples engage with European diversity—its Muslims, Jews, schismatics, and oddball cosmopolitans at court? How did they learn about the wider Old World? And how did so many make Europe their willing or unwilling home? The broad sweep of this story invites further studies on early modern cosmopolitan Indigenous subjects just as ambitious and wide-eyed as Dodds Pennock's. For showing the way, scholars and the public will find in her engaging new book much to give thanks for.

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