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

A landmark work of narrative history that shatters our previous Eurocentric understanding of the "Age of Discovery" by telling the story of the Indigenous Americans who journeyed across the Atlantic to Europe after 1492.

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. But, as Caroline Dodds Pennock conclusively shows of thousands of Aztecs, Maya, Totonacs, Inuit, and others- enslaved people, diplomats, explorers, servants, traders- the reverse was true: they discovered Europe. For them, Europe comprised savage shores, a land of riches and marvels, yet it was perplexing for its brutal disparities of wealth and quality of life, and its baffling beliefs.

The story of these Indigenous Americans abroad is a story of abduction, loss, cultural appropriation, and, as they saw it, apocalypse- a story that has largely been absent from our collective imagination of the times. From the Brazilian "king" who met Henry VIII to the Aztecs who simulated human sacrifice at the court of Charles V; from the Inuk baby who was put on display in a London pub to the mestizo children of Spaniards who returned "home" with their fathers; from the Inuit who harpooned ducks on the River Avon to the many servants employed by Europeans of every rank: here are a people who were rendered exotic, demeaned, and marginalized, but whose worldviews and cultures had a profound impact on European civilization. Drawing on their surviving literature and poetry and subtly layering European eyewitness accounts against the grain, Pennock gives us a sweeping account of the Indigenous American presence in, and impact on, early modern Europe.

Hard Cover.

About the author: Caroline Dodds Pennock is one of the world's leading authorities on the Aztecs. Trained at Oxford, she is senior lecturer in international history at the University of Sheffield. Her study of Aztec human sacrifice, Bonds of Blood, won the Royal Historical Society's Gladstone Prize in 2008. She has appeared on history series on the BBC and Netflix, and has written for BBC History Magazine, History Today, and Scientific American.