On Savage Shores

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,

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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

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