On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe

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These original visitors were treated with great kindness and courtesy, as they worked to learn the language of the old world. But it wasn't unusual for them to be made members of the King's retinue and to live as did the nobles. Later when the Conquistadors returned to Spain/Portugal the returned with the first Mettzos (children of the sailors and native woman). It wasn't very long before they became servants for the nobility. For them, Europe comprised savage shores, a land of riches and marvels, yet perplexing for its brutal disparities of wealth and qualityof 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, of apocalypse—a story that has largely been absent from our collective imagination of the times.

Have scientists really found the germ responsible for killing 15m Aztecs?’, The Conversation (January 2018) Don’t be too put off. The book is well worth reading for the fascinating material it contains. But just be aware that an excessive desire to help oppressed people in the past – who are, alas, beyond such assistance – can become rather a hindrance to the reader. As well as writing articles for popular publications such as History Today and BBC History Magazine, I have also consulted on a number of fiction and children’s books, as well as blogging for History Matters. I was also invited to be a guest blogger for Scientific American on ' The 2012 Apocalypse, or Why the World Won’t End This Week'. Her own work in the book does not prove this. Over and over again the scant evidence in the records were that of the Natives begging the Crown for their OWN FREEDOM! Their inheritance, begging for alms, etc.Europeans were eager for Native Americans to tell them the location of precious metals and the source of beaver pelts. But less practical Indigenous knowledge needed either to be assimilated into the existing intellectual scheme of the world or placed outside it as a monstrous anomaly. Like the jumbled artefacts in Renaissance Wunderkammern, Indigenous travellers to Europe were made into spectacles: ethnographic specimens and sensational sideshows. Guaraní children abducted from what is now southern Brazil and Paraguay were shipped to Portugal as ‘curiosities’, just as Inuk people from modern Canada made forced journeys to European cities. In 1566, when a man from Nunatsiavut was murdered trying to defend his family, his wife became ‘raving and mad’ at the prospect of leaving behind their seven-year-old daughter. So mother and child were both taken to Antwerp to be gawped at in their sealskin clothes. An Inuk hunter was brought to London in 1576 and hastily subjected to the European gaze – painted by a Flemish artist and togged up in English apparel – before he died, possibly of pneumonia. The presence of four Mohawk and Mahican chiefs at a West End performance of Macbeth in 1710 proved so distracting to the audience that their seats were moved onstage where they could be seen clearly without commotion. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Some time in the early 1990s, during my first venture to grad school, I had a photo on my office wall of an Indigenous People’s demonstration in Cairns (or maybe Townsville) in North Queensland. Prominent in that mid-to-late-1980s picture was someone holding a placard that read ‘Aboriginal People discovered Captain Cook in 1770’. This agitated one of my fellow grad students, who was quite adamant that only the ‘explorer’ Cook could have made any discoveries because only he ‘left home’ and went looking, which caused me to wonder, who has agency here? I recall reflecting on the contrast with Alexander Fleming, whose ‘discovery’ of penicillin was, in the popular version of the story at least, the product of either an open window or a messy lab: it was a culture that by this popular account he stumbled on by accident when working on something else. Yet Fleming’s ‘discovery’ implicitly attributed agency to him, in a way my workmate refused to grant any agency to Indigenous people in what is now North Queensland. 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.

I have been at Sheffield since 2010, and am probably best known as the only British Aztec historian, though my current research has branched out across the Atlantic, bringing Indigenous histories into a global framework. I would have preferred a slightly more academic style of writing. The author made a lot of personal commentary on the subject and often told us how we should feel about something rather than letting us come to our own conclusions. Sometimes it was rather redundant, such as when she described something that was obviously bad and then still felt the need to tell us that this was a bad thing. The author premises that these enslaved "indios" or people from the New World were diplomatic and advocated for their tribe, Nation, population. I am keen to supervise research students in Indigenous American (particularly Mexican), Spanish American, colonial and Atlantic history, particularly those interested in Native travellers, gender, violence and early colonial sources. I would also be happy to discuss projects related to cultural exchange, imperial and Indigenous histories and Native American cultures. Completed students

The book explores stories like those of Nutaaq, a tiny Inuk (Inuit) baby, who is represented in the paintings of John White. Brought to England in 1577, he was put on display at a London pub, but tragically died after only eight days in the capital. He was buried in an unmarked grave at St Olave’s, a tiny church that still stands on the corner of Seething Lane in the City. Why do you think history has traditionally focused on the experiences of the Europeans rather than those of the indigenous peoples?

For the Indigenous travelers in my work, Europe was the 'savage shore'; a land of incomprehensible inequality and poverty that defied pre-invasion values and logics, where resources were hoarded, children ruled great kingdoms, and common people were meant meekly to accept injustices without dissent." A landmark work of narrative historythat shatters our previous Eurocentric understanding of the Age of Discovery by telling the story of theIndigenous Americans who journeyed across the Atlantic to Europe after 1492

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Many of these people, in Spain and Portugal, had been brought against their will – starting with whole groups of men and women kidnapped by the early explorers. Formal slavery existed in at least the first half-century after Columbus, until the enslavement of “Indians” was outlawed by the Spanish government in 1542 (though Queen Isabella had tried to stop it as early as 1500). There are no reliable totals, but it’s clear that at least several thousand had been shipped to Spain during that time. Magazine's History Extra podcast, Dan Snow’s History Hit and Suzannah Lipscomb’s Not Just The Tudors. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. In January 2023, On Savage Shores was the Radio 4 Book of the Week and I appeared discussing my research on Radio 4’s Start the Week and Radio 3’s Free Thinking. I also discussed my book on podcasts including Not Just the Tudors, History Hit, and BBC History Extra as well as being interviewed by the Smithsonian Magazine and BBC History Magazine.