Caroline Dodds Pennock

This is a solid look at how Indigeneous Americans encountered early modern Europe: from the enslaved women who brought knowledge of various foodways to Spain and Portugal, to the visitors to various royal courts in western Europe, to the Inuk infant who was displayed in a London tavern before his untimely death so far from home.

Caroline Dodds Pennock brings together a very fragmentary sourcebase, and does a great job at reading it closely and with sensitivity. I'm a bit bemused by the other reviews I've seen on here which complain either that Dodds Pennock isn't covering "new" ground, or that she engages in repetitive/pointless speculation about people and events. I don't think that's a fair reading of what she's trying to do here, which is to think carefully through the nature of the surviving sources, to think about what they can (and cannot) show us, and to walk the reader through how a historian thinks about these issues. On Savage Shores is a book that's clearly written in the tradition of works inspired by Stoler's Along the Archival Grain and Saidiya Hartman's "Venus in Two Acts", scholarship which demonstrates that the archives are never neutral.

A powerful reminder that encounter is always a mutual act.… (altro)

Even keeping in mind that I'm probably not the target audience for this book, having done a fair amount of the study on the period and the issues, on the whole, I found it unsatisfactory. The basic issue is that Dr. Pennock is basically producing a critique of Western Civilization, using the experiences of the those natives of the Western Hemisphere that were dragged back by assorted voyagers, soldiers, and merchant adventurers as a mirror. However, she doesn't have enough testimony from the indigenous folk to hold up that end of the equation, whereas I think that the nature of the book requires her to offer an analysis of the mentality that rationalized conquest and exploitation; at least that is what I'd expect from a working academician. This being the case, I can only offer the tepid recommendation that if you really know nothing about the period besides Christopher Columbus hitting the beach in the "New World" in 1492, you'll probably get something out of this book. Otherwise, the best praise that I can give it is that I sense a strong opinion piece struggling to escaped a half-baked monograph.… (altro)

Caroline Dodds Pennock's On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe is a remarkable piece of work. The task she's set for herself is to explore the flip side of Europeans' "discovery" of the Americas: indigenous Americans' "discovery" of Europe. Drawing on the available evidence—there's more of it than one might have expected, but still less than one might have hoped—she examines the identities of indigenous Americans who traveled or were taken to Europe; their status, raging from slavery to reception as "sibling" royalty by the king of Spain; and how they attempted to use contact with Europe as a way of defending existing indigenous hierarchies or to advocate for indigenous communities as a whole. In some ways, this is a frustrating read because there is so much that's not known, but Pennock makes good use of the information available, both to document events known to have happened and to consider what extrapolations can reasonably be made from those events.

If you're at all interested in the history of contact, On Savage Shores is a must-read for the perspective it provides that has been missing from this literature. I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own.… (altro)

In the decades after 1492, thousands of native Americans travelled from America to Europe. They came as slaves, as curiosities to be exhibited, as interpreters for use in future voyages, and sometimes as emissaries. Unfortunately, their stories are rarely mentioned in our histories of the age of exploration. Recreating their stories today is a challenge since only fragments remain of their presence.

Caroline Dodds Pennock has done a remarkable job of collecting those fragments into a coherent and compelling story. Out of the fragments presented, the reader gains a real impression of what their travels meant to those Americans as well as to the Europeans they met. Pennock is occasionally forced to speculate about how they felt about their visit. Her speculations force the reader to imagine their feelings having been (often) forced to leave their families to leave for a strange and brutal land.

The book focuses primarily on the 16th century and the Spanish colonies with some excursions to Portugal and France as well as a miniscule look at England. The reader is left curious about later years and other countries.… (altro)