“On Savage Shores” shatters the Eurocentric assumption that, half a millennium ago, people and ideas flowed in only one direction
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskAccording to Caroline Dodds Pennock’s absorbing account of indigenous peoples in 16th-century Europe, their roles in earlier history have been simplified or erased, too. “On Savage Shores” shatters the Eurocentric assumption that, half a millennium ago, people and ideas flowed in, from the old world to the “new”.
Long before Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows began touring Europe in the late 19th century—and even before the first permanent English settlement in North America, at Jamestown in 1607—indigenous people lived in European courts and cities. Ms Dodds Pennock, a scholar of Mesoamerica, mainly focuses on the peoples of Central and South America, which were invaded and exploited by conquistadors from Spain and Portugal.
After trumpeting his “discovery” of America in 1492, on his next trip Christopher Columbus focused on kidnapping Taíno people from the Caribbean to sell as slaves at home. One Taíno boy he “adopted” as his own was the first of many émigrés forcibly Christianised to justify the Spaniards’ “civilising mission”. For his part, after laying waste to the Aztec capital in 1519,sent the gifts offered by its ruler, Moctezuma, back to the Spanish king.
Only through oral histories and forensic reading of archival documents can the voices of such travellers be heard, the author writes. By 1600 as many as 2m people from the Americas were enslaved, she recounts, many of them transported to Europe. Some high-ranking travellers came as diplomats trying to broker better conditions for their people; others were forced into service as interpreters.
The impact on European culture of these travellers is hard to measure. It is clear in language: Quechua provided
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