We discussed her important new book, On Savage Shores, which
upends the familiar Eurocentric perspective of the Age of Discovery by
exploring the stories of the tens of thousands of indigenous travellers, royal
diplomats, slaves, servants, translators, and performers in 16th century
Europe, all of them “explorers” in their own right, who had a lasting impact on
the European societies they visited, lived in and integrated into. Many of
these stories are being told in English for the first time in her book.
On Savage Shores is an absorbing, sensitive and eye-opening
read, and this interview gives a flavour of the vivid stories and startling
insight that recommend it.
Colette Bernasconi: I suppose the story of
the Indigenous discovery of Europe begins in 1492 with the men, women and
children that Columbus kidnapped. Can we start there?
Dr Dodds Pennock: Yes, so people focus on Columbus
going to the Americas of course, his “discovery” – I always use air quotes when
I say discovery because it seems really weird to talk about discovery of a
place people already live. It’s like me going round and discovering your house. So from 1492 he brings back Indigenous
peoples to Europe. There are Indigenous peoples in Europe from the very moment
Columbus returns. He brings back a group of Taíno people from the Caribbean, a
relatively small group of people. We think he kidnapped about 20 people,
although maybe a few of them are high-profile people who volunteered to go with
him. It’s hard to tell, this is always the problem in the sources. But they are
brought to Spain and those who survived are brought to the Spanish court and
there they met Ferdinand and Isabella and they are baptised and given
godparents from among the royal family.
One of them becomes Columbus’ translator and is adopted as
his godson almost – Diego Colón he becomes – and he’s incorporated into
European society. Another becomes a kind of spectacle at court, the prince
wants to keep him and some of the others simply kind of go back and we don’t
know what happens to them next. This is often what happens in these stories,
you have little fragments. But Columbus is then responsible for bringing large
numbers of Indigenous people. He is the single largest trader in enslaved Indigenous
people in the first few years. Three thousand he enslaves in the first decade.
So you then have large numbers of people coming to Europe enslaved as well.
Colette: I had no idea about the scale of
the Indigenous enslavement. There are some huge numbers in there and the book
starts with the chapter on slavery because of what a huge part that was. I
learned in your book that 650,000 Indigenous people were taken away from their
homelands and enslaved elsewhere in the 16th century, and this at a
time when it was technically illegal in Spain. So what can you tell us about
this “lesser-known slavery”?
Dr Dodds Pennock: It's really fascinating that the
enslavement of Indigenous people happened on such a large scale and hasn’t
become part of our understandings really either of global history or of
transatlantic history or of the slave trade more widely. Andrés Reséndez has a
wonderful book called The Other Slavery, which was written for a popular
audience, so it’s as readable as a book about slavery can be, but he estimates
that between 2.4 and 5 million native American people were enslaved up to 1900.
Not all of them were shipped across the Atlantic.
It is, as you say, illegal to enslave Indigenous people in
Spain, so those people are enslaved all across the Americas. But in Spain in
the period that I’m studying in particular, it is the Spanish and Portuguese
who do most of the enslaving and this is at a time when they see the Indigenous
people as vassals, as potential Christians, so they’re not supposed to just go
around enslaving them. So what we have in the first 50 years is loopholes. Once
they decide that these people shouldn’t be enslaved, they create loopholes in
the law that allow enslavement. One loophole is if you are a cannibal. And of
course what happens it that they then go around declaring whole areas cannibal
islands, that’s where [the word Caribbean comes from, from “Carib” peoples who
were alleged to be cannibals]. You can be enslaved if you subject to a thing
called “rescate”, which means like ransom or rescue, which is being rescued
from a worse fate, so essentially either being enslaved to someone who’s not
Christian because of course that must be worse, or being rescued from human
sacrifice, so you see Europeans going around saying, “They were going to be
sacrificial victims and we rescued them!” Or if you were captured in a “just
war”, and of course you run into the question of what it means to be in a “just
war”. And so there are all these loopholes that allow for legal enslavement.
And what that creates is a situation in which people are arguing not about
whether people should be enslaved but about whether they’re legally enslaved.
Which seems really strange to us from the contemporary point of view but is
incredibly important to me as a historian because one of the most important
sources for Indigenous peoples’ experiences in Europe is the suits that they
try to win their freedom in the courts and in those freedom suits they tell
their stories of how they ended up in Europe so we get quite a lot of their own
personal testimony.
Colette: One fact that again was totally
new to me was how while a lot of these slaves’ journeys start with things like
facial branding and kidnapping, really brutal stuff, a lot of those journeys
end with the slaves successfully petitioning for their own freedom in Spanish
courts. There are quite a few interesting stories in the book around that. I
don’t know if you’d like to tell us one of the stories.
Dr Dodds Pennock: Well, I was thinking, you were
talking about being branded on the face, one of the most detailed stories that
we have is about a young man called Martín, who appeals for his freedom in 1537
and this is before the New Laws of 1542 which supposedly make it illegal to
enslave people at all. So he is from a place called Tenayucan, near Mexico City
and what happens is that a man called Gonzalo de Salazar – who is really famous
in Mexico as a brutal tyrant – goes to the village and says to the elders, “Do
you have a young man that you’d like to give to me as a page?” And it’s quite
clear, they keep repeating this in the testimony, that he is a free man of a
free people. And so Martín agrees to go as a page, or is given by his
community, his parents, it’s not quite clear, and as soon as he goes, Gonzalo
de Salazar brands him on the face. And that must have been absolutely
horrifying as a free young man to be subject to that.
He spends some time in Mexico, he’s actually a translator in
the house of the conquistador Hernando Cortést then his master is exiled to Spain,
for being a brutal tyrant pretty much, and he takes Martín with him. Martín
then spends some time working in the households of people who are connected to Salazar,
not in his household. And he seems quite happy with that, or as happy as far as
we can tell; he doesn’t have any complaints about it. But then one of his
masters dies and Salazar decides he wants to take him back to his house, and at
that time Martín decides to appeal for freedom and it’s quite clear that he’s
not prepared to go back to Salazar’s home. Perhaps he’s also learned that in
Spain he can appeal for his freedom; he’s learned about the law courts.
And so he lodges an appeal, and at that time Salazar
essentially tries to murder him. He brutally attacks him and according to Martín
if some people hadn’t been there to pull him off he would have been killed. So Martín
appeals to be taken out of his home while the case is settled and fortunately
they do do that. They don’t always. Sometimes they leave them in the homes of
these people. So imagine you’ve asked your brutal owner for freedom, you’ve
appealed for freedom and then the courts say you’re just going to have to stay
in the house with them for a year or so while we sort this out. That happens a
lot. But, in Martín’s case, he does manage to get out of the house. There’s a
fascinating argument about some clothes, he wants to be given some clothes and
Salazar, even though they can’t be worth anything to him, refuses. But, for Martín,
these clothes clearly are a symbol of his independence and the few assets that
he’s got. And he spends a lot of time trying to get them back, and he does
eventually, and then it’s quite a long court case in which Martín asserts that
he was enslaved as a child, which even then was not legal. Salazar’s case rests
on the fact that he [Martín] was legally enslaved and also that he’s been well
treated and he ought to think himself lucky. And there’s quite a lot of
testimony – it’s all in the book I’m not going to go into it all now – but
what’s interesting is that the brand which Salazar argues shows he is the legal
owner is actually why he loses in the end, because Martín was too young to have
been branded legally. He’s only in his early twenties when he petitions for his
freedom and so he must have been a child when he was branded and brought to
Spain, and it was declared that he was illegally enslaved and he is free. And
then he disappears from the records. I mean if I had my entire life to trawl
through Spanish and Mexican records I might find him. But probably not because
his name is Martín which is one of the five most common names in Mexico. So
it’s really frustrating to see these rich lives and then them just sort of
disappearing.
Colette: And apart from slavery what kind
of lives were people living in 16th century Europe?
Dr Dodds Pennock: Well, incredibly diverse. You have
a lot of people come as translators and go-betweens. Some people who come as
family members of Europeans come to Spain and Portugal but also to France. And
there are a lot of people in Normandy and around the coastal regions and the
Basque regions, especially from Brazil, as part of the brazilwood trade, which
is massive in France. And people are just kind of living normal lives alongside
Europeans; they would have been a common sight. You have a lot of people who
are brought as, it’s an uncomfortable word, as a ‘spectacle’, things to look
at.
So there’s this amazing case in France, in the middle part
of the 16th century, where they set up a whole Brazilian village on
the banks of the Seine and they bring over what they say are 50 genuine
“sauvages” is the word they use and translated is “savages” but I tend to avoid
that if I can, because it’s considered a racial slur in the Americas, but this
is the word used at the time. I’m rambling now but they bring these people and
a whole village with monkeys and parrots and trees painted to look like
Brazilian trees and all the cream of the European aristocracy are there, all
the French monarchs even maybe Mary Queen of Scots is there, this incredible
audience. And they have a fake battle between different kinds of Indigenous
people. And the way people have tended to study this is as a spectacle of European
power. It’s about Indigenous people as objects and about European power. But
there are actual people there. What do these people do? What do they think they’re
doing? What happens to them after this?
And the other big category of people that we have quite a
lot of records of is diplomats, people who come to Europe as representatives of
their families and their communities. There is a Brazilian king at the court of
Henry VIII. Hardly anybody seems to know that. I was speaking to Suzannah
Lipscomb on her podcast – she’s a Tudor specialist and she didn’t know that.
But it’s not hidden, it’s in the published records and he seems to be there as
a diplomatic representative of his community.
And then there are nobles in France and Spain and we have
the records of their appeals. There’s an Inkan princess who’s exiled to
Trujillo in western Spain and she and her family lived there. You can go and
see the Palace of the Conquest. People go to Trujillo to see statues of
Francisco Pizarro and his horse. It’s a place of conquistadors, but just around
the corner there’s the Palace of the Conquest and there’s her husband and her
face on the palace, the face of an Inkan princess on a Spanish palace in a
corner of western Spain. It’s astonishing how diverse, how embedded in European
society they were.
Colette: In the chapter Spectacle and Curiosity,
you’re describing how these Indigenous people are also looking back at
Europeans, a gaze referred to in the title of your book. What do we know about
how they saw European society?
Dr Dodds Pennock: It is hard to tell because a lot of
the sources that we have are from the point of view of Europeans who kidnapped
them or saw them and wrote about them, but we do have some fragments that show
us what Indigenous people thought. But I wouldn’t say all Indigenous people felt
the same way, of course they didn’t. So we have to be careful not to say, “Indigenous
people all felt like this,” but one of the very common themes that seems to
come up is how horrified they are by the inequalities in Europe. Now that’s not
to say that the Americas are an idyll of egalitarianism, that varies
enormously. But what they don’t have are extremes of poverty. It’s very, very
rare, even in the Aztec world where you have these very rich rulers, living in
extraordinary luxury, because people then also have systems of communal care
and agricultural grain storage to ensure that everybody gets enough.
So you have, for example, the writings of Michel de Montaigne,
who says he met two Indigenous people at Rouen just a couple of years after
that grand spectacle. They’re all over, they are there all the time, and he
says the people he met ask, “Why aren’t people burning down these palaces, why
aren’t people in the streets?”
And this is reflected then in the writings of later Indigenous
travellers, they say, “Why on earth aren’t you caring for your elderly, for
your poor, what’s going on there?” A young man who goes to France is very
shocked by capital punishment and by the beating of children. He doesn’t
understand why we would parent like that. He's from the northeast in what is
now the United States.
You quite commonly see people not understanding why you
would have primogeniture. Why would you make a young boy into a king? Wouldn’t
you need somebody competent in charge? Why are all these grand warriors
following this young boy-king around?
We don’t really see them commenting on gender roles, but it
would almost certainly have been a big shock for them because actually women
tend to be extremely important in Indigenous societies. So I would love to know
what the people who went to see Elizabeth I thought, because that’s actually a
totally different kind of power structure, but with a woman in charge.
You often have to speculate, but then you have this amazing
song from Mexico, which is translated in the book, where the stories of Indigenous
travellers have made their way into the kind of collective memory of what’s
been going on and there’s this composition that talks about these different
travels to Europe and it seems like they’ve kind of blended the pope and God in
the imagination a little bit. Along with gold, gold has a lot to do with it.
And you have these wonderful images of the papal basilica as this glittering,
womb-like space. And we know that some Indigenous people from Mexico went to
the papal court, so it’s coming from their observations; it's very, very
interesting.
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