[A new book investigates the lives of the hundreds of thousands of
indigenous Americans who were brought to or traveled to Europe in the
sixteenth century—a story central to the beginning of
globalization.]
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THE DISCOVERY OF EUROPE  
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Álvaro Enrigue
January 13, 2024
The New York Review
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_ A new book investigates the lives of the hundreds of thousands of
indigenous Americans who were brought to or traveled to Europe in the
sixteenth century—a story central to the beginning of globalization.
_

A faux Brazilian village constructed for Henry II and Catherine de’
Medici on the banks of the Seine in Rouen, France, and inhabited by
fifty Tupinambá people who were forcibly brought there from Brazil,
1550, Bibliothèque de l’Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art,
Paris

 

Reviewed:

On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe
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by Caroline Dodds Pennock

Knopf, 302 pp., $32.50

In 1560 Paquiquineo, a young Kiskiack or Paspahegh man from the
Chesapeake Bay area, was invited aboard a Spanish ship exploring the
coast of North America. The boat’s captain thought Paquiquineo, the
son of a chief, would be useful to Spanish forces whenever they
decided to conquer the region, so he kidnapped him and took him to
Madrid. A fast language learner, Paquiquineo turned out to be a
dexterous politician. Upon meeting King Philip II, he explained that
he didn’t want to serve as Spain’s mediator or adopt its religion.

For the Spanish Crown, royalty was royalty regardless of ethnic
origin. Philip respected Paquiquineo’s wishes and in 1562 ordered
that a ship traveling to New Spain—now Mexico—take him aboard,
with the understanding that the passenger would be brought to what is
today the mid-Atlantic coast of the US whenever a boat went north.

After his arrival in Mexico City, Paquiquineo fell seriously ill and
asked to be baptized—just in case. He was given the Christian name
Luis de Velasco in honor of the viceroy of New Spain. As an aristocrat
he had the right to the title “don,” which he used for a few
years.

Paquiquineo convalesced in the Dominican monastery. After he
recuperated, friar Pedro de Feria, the contentious superior of the
order in New Spain, decided to keep him there more or less by force,
hoping to gain an advantage over the Franciscans as both groups of
friars positioned for religious control of the unconquered lands to
the north. (The dispute between the orders continued for four years,
until King Philip resolved it by giving spiritual authority over
Paquiquineo’s homeland to the Jesuits.)

During his long stay in Mexico City (formerly Tenochtitlan),
Paquiquineo learned Nahuatl—the language of the Mexica, the correct
name of the people later called Aztecs—and made enough acquaintances
to understand the tumultuous political moment the city was going
through. In 1521, after his surrender, Emperor Cuauhtemoc had agreed
to a capitulation—no copy of which survives—by which the Mexica
would be exempt from taxes if they stayed in Tenochtitlan, kept the
imperial administration working, and constructed a Spanish town there,
rather than disbanding the defeated capital, as had been customary in
Mesoamerica. By the 1560s the Spanish Crown had broken the pact,
sparking a rebellion that ended in the brutal repression of the local
people and the punishment of their leaders. Paquiquineo saw all of it
and took silent note.

After spending four years in Cuba, in 1570 Paquiquineo was sent on a
Jesuit mission to Virginia as its official translator. A Spanish town
was peacefully established near what is today the James River. Then,
after the boats that had carried the missionaries left, Paquiquineo
led a rebellion in which all but one of the Europeans were killed and
the town was razed. When Philip II heard the news, he cancelled all
future explorations of what is now the eastern seaboard of the United
States. If even the Catholic convert Don Luis de Velasco could act in
such a treacherous and brutal way, it meant that a successful
occupation would cost too many Spanish lives.

The Spanish medievalist Carmen Benito-Vessels has called
Paquiquineo’s story—which was recently recounted in Camilla
Townsend’s _Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs—the case of a
historical character desperately looking for a novelist. She is right,
and one could even claim that the first presidents of the United
States were not Spanish-speaking Catholics in large part because the
British eventually took advantage of Paquiquineo’s strategic
thinking and brave behavior._

_In On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe_,
the English historian Caroline Dodds Pennock doesn’t expand on
existing accounts of Paquiquineo’s life, maybe because he is already
known to those familiar with the history of early modern North
America. She does, however, follow him through the archives of Spain,
where she found lists of his expenses during the time he spent at
court in Madrid: good European clothes, haircuts, theater tickets,
even alms for the poor. (Since he was considered a diplomat, he had
social responsibilities.) According to the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas
he was a subject of the Spanish king, and the New Laws of 1542 placed
him under the king’s direct protection—although he surely didn’t
know this when he was captured—so the Spanish Crown paid all his
bills.

_Reading Dodds Pennock’s book, one discovers that Paquiquineo’s
experience was not unique. His case is well known because he left
archival traces, but hundreds of thousands of other indigenous people
went to Europe during the sixteenth century. Their lives and
contributions are essential to understanding the beginning of
globalization, which, for good and ill, has helped create the modern
world._

_The vast majority of indigenous people in Europe were brought there
as slaves. Although the New Laws unequivocally stated that
“naturals,” as people from the Americas were called, could not be
enslaved, Dodds Pennock finds credible the estimate that there were
650,000 American slaves in Spain alone. Many of these captives died in
servitude, but some sued for and won not only their freedom but return
tickets and compensation for labor unwillingly provided._

Others went to Europe—as advocates, entertainers, or spouses—and
established themselves in royal, religious, and legal courts.
Representatives of indigenous nations crossed the Atlantic with friars
like Bartolomé de las Casas, who sided with them in denouncing the
abuses of Europeans during their occupations of indigenous lands. Many
helped negotiate the colonization process and defend their communities
in courts of law. There were cultural specialists who came to teach
Europeans: it may be intuitive to plant a tomato and make sauce with
it, but to make chocolate from cacao beans is less obvious. There were
men and women—acrobats, musicians, animal tamers—who displayed
their spectacular abilities and stayed in Europe simply because nobody
took them back home once the tour was done. They married, had
children, and were buried in cemeteries where they are still not
commemorated as early agents of globalization.

For some five hundred years we have studied the Atlantic cultural and
commercial exchange as a pipeline through which Europe sent people to
the Americas and the Americas sent back commodities. In Dodds
Pennock’s comprehensive study, this idea, like so many we have about
the period, is revealed to be a Eurocentric fantasy. “We need to
invert our understanding of encounter to see transatlantic migration
and connection,” she writes, “not just as stretching to the west,
but also as originating there.”

The indigenous people of the Americas created spaces of their own,
initially in the European courts and then in the kitchens, dining
rooms, living rooms, streets, and gene pools of the countries they
landed in. Cities in Extremadura, Spain, were home to Inca royalty,
and towns on the Atlantic coast of France and Portugal had entire
neighborhoods of people from Brazil. These migrants, while adapting to
change, also changed the places that received them—even though the
reception of the newcomers was, then as now, reluctant when not
overtly hostile. Europeans brutally colonized the Americas, but in
exchange the European imagination was colonized, first by the
traveling exhibitions of American wonders and later by actual
cohabitation with American bodies.

In 1550 in the port city of Rouen, France, an enormous pageant was
staged to honor the visit of the royal couple Henry II and Catherine
de’ Medici. Among the spectacles presented for the monarchs’
amusement as they floated down the Seine were mock sea battles,
gladiators’ duels, representations of famous events in French
history, and a performance of life as it was imagined to be in what is
today the bay of Rio de Janeiro, featuring fifty naked Tupinambá men,
women, and children who had been forcibly taken to the city, along
with 250 French sailors who had visited Brazil and who acted as
indigenous people.

The pageant organizers constructed a replica of a Tupinambá
village—which didn’t look at all like the real ones—and painted
tree trunks red so they would resemble brazilwood,_ _the first
commodity sent to Europe from the region. They also set loose parrots,
marmosets, and monkeys to add a soundscape to the performance, which
culminated in an attack on and burning of an enemy village—but not,
as many in the audience probably imagined or hoped, with a feast of
human flesh.

Michel de Montaigne, who witnessed the Rouen pageant and interviewed a
few Tupinambá men who were part of the performance, famously
concluded in his essay “On the Cannibals” that the ritual
ingestion of human flesh is not necessarily a barbaric custom, because
it honors the eaten person by making them part of the body and
heritage of the eater. For Montaigne, Europeans surpassed the
Tupinambá people “in every kind of barbarity.” The number of
enemies the Tupinambá captain he interviewed would sacrifice in all
his life as a warrior was negligible compared with the number of
French Protestants Catherine and her son Charles IX would let be
murdered a couple of decades later in the St. Bartholomew’s Day
Massacre.

As Dodds Pennock notes, most of the Tupinambá taken to the north of
France—like most of the people kidnapped in America and brought to
Spain or England—left no trace apart from a few gravestones; family
trees didn’t grow from the intermarriage of common people. But the
high social status of many migrants in their communities of origin was
often respected in Europe, so their blood ended up mixing with that of
European nobility and the newly empowered bourgeoisie. Dodds Pennock
recounts some of their histories.

In 1505 a native Carijó man from Brazil named Essomericq arrived in
Honfleur, France. He was the son of a chief and an associate of the
ship captain and explorer Binot Paulmier de Gonneville. Essomericq
married one of Gonneville’s close descendants and inherited the
family name and coat of arms. He became a rich merchant dealing in
hosiery and died at ninety in Lisieux. One of his mestizo
grandchildren was an official at the royal treasury and married a
marquise. Meanwhile, the descendants of Tecuichpo—also known as
Isabel de Moctezuma, the eldest daughter of the famous Mexica
emperor—still hold high titles in Spain.

Indigenous Americans shaped European intellectual life as well. Among
the prominent figures discussed by Dodds Pennock is the polyglot Diego
Valadés, a mestizo of Nahua origin who was the first indigenous
person to be ordained a Franciscan friar in the Americas. His work as
a scholar took him to Spain and France and eventually to a senior
position at the Vatican, where he wrote _Rhetorica
christiana_ (1579). This volume, composed in Latin, was the most used
manual for the evangelization of the peoples of the Americas.

The mestizo Blas Valera—born in the Andes to a Quechua-speaking
noblewoman and the son of a conquistador—became a professor of
humanities in the Jesuit College of Cádiz after being prosecuted in
Peru because of his dangerous ideas. In his preaching and lectures he
established the bases for an indigenous Catholic theology. His
writings were burned by British and Dutch invaders in the 1596 sack of
Cádiz, but his calls for an inclusive, flexible faith survived as
part of the Jesuits’ eclectic providentialism—which was essential
for the globalization of European values. The echoes of his silenced
voice resounded in the liberation theology that flourished in Latin
America during the cold war, and they can still be heard in the ideas
of Pope Francis, an Argentine Jesuit.

_On Savage Shores_—which begins with the mesmerized accounts by the
humanist Pedro Mártir de Anglería of the human loot that Hernán
Cortés sent to the young emperor Charles V after the fall of
Tenochtitlan and ends with Lakota men touring Europe in Buffalo
Bill’s Wild West show—could have presented indigenous experiences
in Europe as a collection of signatures in an old hotel guest book.
Like all histories of the slow, colossal, and merciless occupation of
the Americas, it risks flattening a wide array of experiences,
including those of millions of people who still resist the adoption of
European languages and ways of living. The Americas are too vast and
their cultures, languages, and nations too diverse to try to fit them
all in any linear narrative; in Bolivia alone there are thirty-seven
official languages, thirteen more than in the European Union.

To give her book shape, Dodds Pennock organizes the results of her
research under six themes: slavery, mediators, families, cultural
changers, diplomatic missions, and showmanship. The result is a big
collection of stories that can be illustrative, depressing,
infuriating, vindictive, or hilarious, but the only thread tying all
her subjects together is their common origin in the western
hemisphere.

Dodds Pennock’s previous book, _Bonds of Blood_ (2008), is a study
of gender and ritual in the Mexica culture before the arrival of the
Spaniards. There are thousands of books on Mexica culture, so she was
able to focus on a few aspects of it and propose solid explanations
about practices in education, family relations, and retirement. Her
chapter on human sacrifice is an especially memorable defense of the
most notorious of the Mexica’s religious rites. Expanding on Eduardo
Matos Moctezuma’s groundbreaking _Muerte a filo de
obsidiana_ (Death by obsidian blade) (1975), she explains to
English-speaking readers the political and religious bases of a ritual
that was sensationalized by the European invaders in order to justify
the perpetual occupation of Tenochtitlan.

_On Savage Shores_ feels loose by comparison, but this is because it
opens a new field of study. Until now the experiences of indigenous
Americans in Europe had not been put together in one place. There are
bits and pieces, articles and chapters about the subject, but as far
as I know no one had attempted to tell a comprehensive history of
eastward migration. (The movement of people from Africa and Asia to
the Americas in the early years of the occupation has been better
studied.) _On Savage Shores_ 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.

Toward the end of his essay on cannibalism, Montaigne recounts a very
rare testimony: the opinion of indigenous Americans about life in
Europe. “They have a way in their language of speaking of men as
halves of one another,” the essayist explains.

They had noticed that there were among us men full and gorged with all
sorts of good things, and that their other halves were beggars at
their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty; and they thought it
strange that these needy halves could endure such an injustice, and
did not take the others by the throat, or set fire to their houses.

The question of inequality, which Dodds Pennock explores in the final
pages of _On Savage Shores_, is central to David Graeber and David
Wengrow’s _The Dawn of Everything_ (2021), in which they argue
that the “indigenous critique” of Europe threatened established
social hierarchies. Europeans saw the indigenous way of life as
precarious, while indigenous Americans of various backgrounds believed
that equality and the fair distribution of goods were essential to
keeping a community tightly knit together. _On Savage
Shores_ and _The Dawn of Everything_ are very different
books—_The Dawn of Everything_ is primarily a study of ancient
cultures that flourished without a central government—but both are
guided by despair over contemporary wealth disparities and use
indigenous arguments against what Dodds Pennock calls “the
‘savage’ qualities of European society” to make readers question
inequality in a world where there are enough resources to give a
decent life to all.

Graeber and Wengrow’s “indigenous critique” draws on the widely
read _Mémoires de l’Amérique septentrionale_ (1703), by Baron
Louis-Armand Lahontan. Lahontan was an officer in the French army who
served in Canada and became an acquaintance of a Wendat leader known
as Kandiaronk. After his return to France, the baron published a
version of their dialogues in which Kandiaronk, under the name Adario,
pointed out the tremendous inequalities he saw in New France and the
lack of freedom that French people suffered in exchange for a strong
government. According to Graeber and Wengrow, this book started the
European discussion on rights and freedom that was crystallized in
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s _Discourse on Inequality_ (1755), which
proposed that private property and a strong state—and hence
inequality—originated in the expansion of agricultural techniques in
Eurasia.

As Kwame Anthony Appiah noted in his review in these pages of _The
Dawn of Everything_, Graeber and Wengrow avoided the exegetical work
of determining which ideas in Baron Lahontan’s book came from
Kandiaronk and which were his own.

 Dodds Pennock too warns:

As with many of our sources, we again have to be cautious at the ways
in which this text “ventriloquises” the Indigenous informant, a
European “giving voice” to Native people rather than allowing them
to speak directly for themselves.

The problem is unavoidable with most of the sources we have: letters,
journal entries, and judicial affidavits from which indigenous
Americans’ own voices are mostly absent. From Christopher
Columbus’s “Letter on the First Voyage” of 1493 to John Carey
Cremony’s _Life Among the Apaches_ (1868) or even _Our Word Is
Our Weapon_ (2002), by the Mexican indigenous rights guerrilla
fighter Subcomandante Marcos, Europeans and their descendants have
described Native Americans, told their stories, and written about them
with different degrees of amusement, admiration, or contempt.

Dodds Pennock is careful to include the voices of Native Americans in
Europe when she can. Addressing the Temperance Society of Birmingham,
England, during the first half of the nineteenth century, the Ioway
(Báxoje) leader Senontiyah expressed his dismay with the European way
of doing things: “My Friends,—it makes us unhappy, in a country
where there is so much wealth, to see so many poor and hungry.”
Maungwudaus, a Mississauga Chippewa chief traveling through Europe in
the same period, put it succinctly after his visit to England. While
he considered London a “wonderful city,” the people, he lamented,
were like the mosquitoes in America, “biting one another to get a
living. Many very rich, and many very poor.” Though briefer than
Kandiaronk’s views on French settlements, these observations might
have given firmer support to Graeber and Wengrow’s notion of
“indigenous critique.”

Of course, the indigenous peoples in the Americas have never been
silent concerning the abuses of European colonialism. Strong Native
voices, like that of the sixteenth-century Quechua nobleman and
chronicler Felipe Guáman Poma de Ayala, have reshaped the way we
understand the history of the western hemisphere, while writers such
as Ignacio Manuel Altamirano—an indigenous novelist and poet who
founded and edited _El Renacimiento_, the most influential literary
magazine in nineteenth-century Mexico—among many others, have made
important contributions to modern political views and literary
traditions.

In the first hundred years following the defeat of the Mexica and Inca
empires, silver mined in the Americas became a universal exchange
tool; world commerce was spurred with the creation of the Manila
galleons, which went from the Philippines to Acapulco and back; and
the basic ingredients of human diets worldwide became more
homogeneous. As Charles C. Mann pointed out in _1493: Uncovering the
New World Columbus Created _(2011), after this period enormous
intercontinental migrations became common, with people brought
forcibly from Central Africa, the Philippines, and China to the new
Spanish kingdoms in the Americas. Most residents of Mexico City or
Lima in the late sixteenth century were not of indigenous or European
descent. Common words in Mexican Spanish like _maiz_ (corn) or the
verb _chingar_ (used to describe almost any negative experience) are
respectively Taino and Bantu in origin. The indigenous priest Domingo
de San Antón Chimalpahin describes the dressing of a group of
samurais in 1610. A human exchange of this magnitude in only one
generation had never happened before.

We will never know the full truth about the first contact between the
Europeans and the great civilizations of the Americas, as we don’t
have contemporaneous indigenous perspectives to balance those of the
Spaniards. In an essay written in 2021, the five-hundredth anniversary
of the fall of Tenochtitlan, the young Mexican political philosopher
Enrique Díaz Álvarez proposed that early Spanish chroniclers wrote
about their contacts with Americans using the conventions of classic
and medieval epic fictions.

 The generation of the conquistadors was the first for which books
were private and not institutional property, and a literate soldier of
the period would have read chivalric novels and Greco-Roman epic
poems. Their extraordinary accounts of the events that changed their
lives—and the history of the world—owe as much to fiction as to
experience: in _The True History of the Conquest of New Spain_, for
example, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a soldier who entered Tenochtitlan
with Cortés, compares the Mexica capital to the imaginary kingdoms in
Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s 1508 romance _Amadís de Gaula_.
Documents like Cortés’s Second Letter to Charles V (1520) and
Díaz’s _True History_ are as literary as they are historical, and
there is little to corroborate or challenge their narratives.

The indigenous voices that recorded those same histories did it later,
well into colonial times, and they were informed by the original
Spanish accounts: all the earlier indigenous-produced codices had been
burned, although some—such as the well-known Boturini and Mendoza
codices—were later recreated under the supervision of Spanish
priests and politicians, and annotated in Nahua by indigenous
Christian converts using Latin characters.

The lack of trustworthy sources about the military conflicts that
brought us a global world has been compensated for in recent decades
with documents that don’t explicitly tell the story of the campaigns
but deal with their legal consequences. In the early 1980s the French
historian Serge Gruzinski read, translated, and collated enormous
archives of judicial papers about land disputes and the reconstitution
of _altepeme_—Nahuatl polities—as Spanish municipalities after
the fall of Tenochtitlan. The result was _La colonisation de
l’imaginaire_ (1988), in which he proposed that there was never a
“conquest” but a slow process of occupation that operated more in
writing than in reality. For centuries, Gruzinski suggested, we
understood colonization as fast and definitive because it was told
that way for the convenience of the conquistadors. The fact that the
book was infamously translated into English with the title _The
Conquest of Mexico_ (1993) serves as perfect testimony to how
difficult it is to change conventional narratives about the indigenous
populations of the Americas.

Since the publication of that book, a growing group of Anglophone
scholars have followed the path set by Gruzinski and the American
historian James Lockhart in _The Nahuas After the Conquest_ (1992).
Camilla Townsend, Barbara Mundy, and Mark Restall, to name only the
most prominent of a new generation working in US universities, have
put together new accounts that not only include the points of view of
indigenous Americans through alternative sources—the
anonymous _Annals of Tlatelolco_, Domingo Chimalpahin
Quauhtlehuanitzin’s _Annals of His Time_, and testimonies written
by the Tlaxcalteca elite, which had been known for centuries but were
ignored by historians—but also try to recount the invasion of the
continent from a less fiction-like perspective. _On Savage
Shores_ is an important addition to this brave rewriting of a story
we all think we know but don’t.

_ÁLVARO ENRIGUE is a Mexican writer and professor. He lives in New
York and teaches at Hofstra. His latest novel, You Dreamed of
Empires, was published in January. (January 2024)_

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