On Savage Shores

<b>AN <i>ECONOMIST </i>AND <i>SMITHSONIAN </i>BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - 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 <p/><i>On Savage Shores</i> not only changes how we think about the first contact between America and Europe but also sets the methodological standard for a new way of understanding the origin of the modern world. --<i>New York Review of Books</i></b> <p/>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 in this groundbreaking book for tens of thousands of Aztecs Maya Totonacs Inuit and others--enslaved people diplomats explorers servants traders--the reverse was true: they discovered Europe. <p/>For them Europe comprised savage shores a land of riches and marvels yet 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 of apocalypse--a story that has largely been absent from our collective imagination of the times. <p/>From the Brazilian king who met Henry VIII to the Aztecs who mocked up human sacrifice at the court of Charles V; from the Inuk baby who was put on show in a London pub to the <i>mestizo</i> children of Spaniards who returned home with their fathers; from the Inuit who harpooned ducks on the Avon river 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. <p/>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.