On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe

Pennock (history, Univ. of Sheffield; Bonds of Blood) has published extensively on Aztec history. In this work, she explores the European “discovery” of the Americas from the lens of the Indigenous peoples and their history, focusing on Central and South American experiences. Drawing from both European and Indigenous writings, the author provides examples of the large number of Indigenous people—Aztecs, Mayans, Totonacs, Inuits, and others—who journeyed across the Atlantic to Europe. The narratives in this book depict how the Indigenous people perceived encounters with European colonizers. The book also shows the Indigenous peoples’ impact on European culture, including their introduction of a number of today’s common foods, such as potatoes and tomatoes. There’s also mention of how thousands of enslaved people were shipped to Spain and Portugal, until the Spanish queen protested this treatment. The Americas were a rich, complex target for exploitation, while disease and internal conflicts devastated local populations and reshaped the cultures. This is a difficult, dense read that soundly challenges many modern ideas.