On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe

One day in the mid-sixteenth century, a group of Aztecs were on board a ship bound for Mexico—returning home from a visit to Europe—when their vessel got caught in a terrible storm. The ship did not sink, and one of the travelers, a musician, later wrote a song about the experience in his own language of Nahuatl. In translation, one of the stanzas reads, “The wind picks up, lightning crackles and thunder roars, so that the ocean froths as the boat creaks. We are where the power of God emerges.” The Aztec people repeated the song in the streets of Mexico City, including not only the segment about the storm at sea but also segments about such European sites as the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul. They were not at all confused, for they knew all about their century's expeditions of Indigenous people to Europe.Meanwhile, in a royal palace in Madrid, some representatives from Maya country dressed themselves in full regalia, and as they uttered the usual prayers, they gave a demonstration to a prince (soon to be King Philip II) as to how to turn cacao beans into frothing hot chocolate. The new plant and the information about it spread rapidly through Europe.Dodds Pennock in her new book points out that we have long misinterpreted Albrecht Dürer when we read the famous words he wrote in his diary in 1520 after seeing artwork from Mesoamerica: “In all the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things, for I saw among them wonderful works of art, and I marveled at the subtle ingenuity of men in foreign lands.” Dürer, Dodds Pennock tells us, was not talking about the treasure per se; he was talking about the profoundly different human beings whose potential influence over his mind he suddenly felt.For the past twenty years, it has been fashionable for historians to write about the experiences of Indigenous peoples in Europe. Truth to tell, I sometimes have grown tired of it all, thinking that for every globe-trotting man or woman, there were thousands more who stayed at home. I have wondered if we were allowing our modern preferences for the global to encourage us to stretch a point. But Dodds Pennock has proved that I was wrong. With great care, she has harvested the work of a generation of scholars. She has woven together a picture of the world as it was when the Indigenous first traveled to Europe, sometimes by force (as slaves or coerced go-betweens) and sometimes by choice (as the family members of Europeans, or as diplomats or defenders of their people's legal interests). She builds a great tableau from the stories of hundreds of individuals, as if she were working on a pointillist painting. She convinces me, at least, that the true New World was really the Whole World, once Indigenous people's imaginations began to affect imaginations everywhere.