On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe by Caroline Dodds Pennock

Once the first shocks of invasion were past, the Native men (and occasionally women) who crossed the Atlantic for political purposes were ordinarily not isolated pioneers striking out into the unknown. They were sophisticated diplomats, aware of the nuances of what we would all international law (the foundations of which were being laid in this period, often in response to the challenges of indigenous diplomacy), and able to draw on the experience and support of previous travellers, legal advocates and colonial officials.

I'm looking forward to when, in a couple weeks, my friends and I return to Ocracoke Island in North Carolina, where we've been going every February for over a decade. The island is already rich with history--it was the favorite haunt of Blackbeard--but when I go this time, I'll be thinking of a story Caroline Dodds Pennock tells in her history On Savage Shores: Manteo and Wanchese, two Croatan men who had traveled to England in the late 16th century to meet Sir Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth I, were on their way home when, off the shore of Ocracoke, then called Wococon, their ship ran aground and begun to sink. "We can only imagine the feelings of Manteo and Wanchese," Pennock writes, "after nearly a year away, fearing that they would die only metres from the soil of their homeland."

Today, Manteo and Wanchese are the names of the two towns on Roanoke island: Manteo "nicer" and Wanchese, perhaps, more "rustic." There's something in that that matches the separate paths of their lives; Manteo stayed loyal to the English and their interests in the New World, whereas Wanchese turned against the English and fomented resistance among the Croatan. What must have Wanchese seen in England that turned him against his former friends? Was it, like a Powhatan man who accompanied Matoaka (Pocahontas) on her journey, that he was shocked by the abundance of corn and wheat among the English who putatively had arrived in North America looking for resources? Or, as many other Indigenous sources report on their sojourns, was he aghast at the rampant inequality among Europeans? Or was he simply feeling jealous of the greater prestige given to Manteo who--as I did not know, despite having learned all about Manteo and Wanchese as a kid in North Carolina--helped to create the first Algonquin alphabet while in England?

As Pennock shows, we often think about the arrival of Europeans in the New World as a one-way endeavor: they arrived, took root, did some rather dirty deeds, and stayed. Our historical narratives, too, tend to face from west to east, looking through the eyes of the Europeans at a strange world full of resources and plunder. Rarely do we think about how Indigenous people looked back at Europe, or what they saw when they traveled there. As they did, apparently, in numbers that might seem to us surprising. Pennock splits these narratives up into six categories: "Slavery," which tells the stories of those who were forcibly removed from North America and whose labor was exploited in Europe; "Go-Betweens," for those who, like Manteo and Wanchese, acted as interpreters and envoys for European colonizers; "Kith and Kin," for those Indigenous people who married into European families and their children, who inherited lineages from two hemispheres; "The Stuff of Life," about the many resources, including tomatoes, potatoes, and tobacco, that crossed the Atlantic during the Columbian exchange and those who supplied them; "Diplomacy"--rather self-explanatory--; and "Spectacle and Curiosity," which tells stories like the tale of the Inuk man who wowed crowds by fishing in the Thames with a spear.

Just to consider the chapter titles is to understand how diverse the experiences of Indigenous people in Europe were. Some arrived in chains, but others arrived in full regalia, and were treated--after some prodding--as the kings they were. On Savage Shores recently attracted some negative attention from the kind of people who are devoted to coloring-book notions of European colonialism. Too bad they didn't really read it, because if they had, they might have noted that several stories in Pennock's book resist easy lefty narratives about colonial violence. Many Indigenous people were quite happy to ally themselves to European power for assistance in conquering their local enemies; others were simply politically def. For example, the city of Tlaxcala was pretty Machiavellian in the way it used Cortes and the Spanish to bring down its rival, Tenochtitlan; the Inca ensured some measure of survival by doing what European powers did, marrying into Spanish families. Which is not to say Pennock is anything but clear about the horrors of colonialism; one of the book's great challenges is to tease out stories and voices that were intentionally elided from the historical record. While factually scrupulous, Pennock engages in a necessary amount of supposition--What must Manteo and Wanchese have seen? Of course, what the book's malcontents really object to is the inclusion of Indigenous voices at all.

Here's one specific thing I didn't appreciate until reading On Savage Shores: not only did the Spanish really get to the Americas before the English and French, their approach to the Indigenous people they found there was totally different. They weren't any less brutal, really, but Indigenous people were assimilated into Spanish society more readily than that of their northern rivals. Sometimes that meant forced enslavement--I was shocked to read about how many Indigenous slaves there were in Spain, and how often they sued for their freedom by arguing that their enslavement was illegal, not to mention how often they succeeded--and sometimes it meant intermarriage. That alone goes a long way in explaining the contemporary differences between American and Canadian relationship to Indigenous people and Mexican or Latin American ones. I had often wondered why Mexican culture values the idea of mestizaje--a shared Indigenous heritage--in a way that's totally foreign to us up here.

The best thing I can say about On Savage Shores is this: it's one of those history books that seems so obviously needed, you wonder why nobody's written it before. Its simple reframing--what did Europe look like through Indigenous eyes?--turns so much of what we think we know about history on its head.