Ideas - How Indigenous Americans discovered Europe

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

Indigenous Americans on European soil can be found throughout historical records, but historian Caroline Dodds Pennock says they have largely been ignored. In her book, On Savage Shores, she traces the history of Indigenous lives in Europe during the 1500s. The author told IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed about her research collecting evidence of the widespread Indigenous presence in Portugal, Spain, France, and England in the 100 years before Britain attempted to establish its first North American colony. *This episode originally aired on April 5, 2023.We'd love to hear from you. Fill out our listener survey here.

Every day, your eyes are working overtime, from squinting at screens and navigating bright sun to late-night drives and early morning commutes. They do so much to help you experience the world. That's why regular eye exams are so important. Comprehensive eye exams at Spec Savers are designed to check your vision and overall eye health. Every standard eye exam includes an OCT 3D eye scan. Advanced technology that helps your optometrist detect early signs of eye and health conditions. conditions like glaucoma, cataracts, or even diabetes. It's a quick, non-invasive scan that provides a detailed look at what's happening beneath the surface. Don't wait. Give your eyes the care they deserve.

Book an eye exam at Specsavers from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cavers.cai.a. Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexavers.cavers.cai to learn more. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. It's a vantage point rarely adopted by European historians. The experiences of thousands of indigenous people from what we now call North and South America, crossing from west to east across the Atlantic. Sometimes voluntarily, more commonly,

against their will and in conditions of severe violence, fighting for freedom and survival on European shores in the 1500s. One theme that keeps coming up over and over again is surprise and discussed at the inequalities they see in Europe. They weren't used to seeing extreme poverty alongside extreme wealth. The stories of these encounters on European soil can be found throughout the historical record. But they're almost entirely ignored

in Europe's own narrative of its past. The more I worked on it, the more I realized that there are indigenous people, thousands of indigenous people traveling to Europe whose stories just people do not know about. Of course, descendant communities know about these things, and there has been scholarly work on quite a number of these travelers. But for some reason, that work hasn't made a day,

on popular understandings of this period of history. Caroline Dodds Penach teaches international history at the University of Sheffield in the UK. What I work on is indigenous, particularly Aztec-Mashika histories, and more recently there travels to Europe in the 16th and early 17th century. Her book is titled On Savage Shores, how indigenous Americans discovered Europe. Take us back to 1493.

The first indigenous islanders are setting foot on European soil. Who were they? These are a group of Lukai and Taino people who Christopher Columbus has kidnapped on his first voyage. Arrives, of course, in the Caribbean in 1492, and he immediately sets about kidnapping indigenous. as Taino people or what we now call Taino people to bring to Europe. We think maybe about 12 or so survive the voyage

because quite a lot of them die on the voyage. We know very little about them except that there are men, women and children who set out, that we don't know if any children survive the voyage. And we know of just one family where Columbus has kidnapped the wife and the son and two daughters and the man rose out to the boat and begs to be allowed on. board so that he can travel with his family. And that group is the one identifiable group that we know are amongst the people who set out. Whether they arrive, survive the voyage we don't know. And to what end were they kidnapped? Columbus talks an awful lot about enslaving people. He thinks

they will be very suitable for slavery, he says, from the very beginning. He also wants translators, go-between people who can help him communicate with this new culture, and also to show off this society. There's also a hint that some of them may have traveled voluntarily. It's a little bit difficult to tell, but some sources from the 18th century suggest that some of them are high status figures who voluntarily go as ambassadors of the rulers of the Hispaniola, Guacanagari. Some of his relatives, it seems, were on these early voyages and are among the first to survive and be baptized. What can you say about the kind of reception they would have had. What was awaiting them and what did they make of it?

It's very hard to tell exactly what they made of it because we don't have their voices recorded. What we know is that they land in April 1493 at Palos on the coast and about six or seven are selected to be taken to see the king and queen, Ferdinand and Isabella. And they create a great sensation. People are amazed by them by these new people. There must have been a lot of people peering at them very curious. And they travel via Seville to Barcelona, where they're presented to the king and queen in the cathedral. And it must have been a really overwhelming experience

because first Columbus presents all this treasure, much of which is actually gifts from Taino rulers, including some of these amazing what are called Guaises, which are Faces of the Living, is the translation. They're little masks which denote kinship, alliance, relationships. And so they say something really interesting about what the indigenous rulers think is going to happen,

that these are gifted. So anyway, all these treasure is gifted to the rulers. And then when the indigenous people are brought forward, these six or seven Thainos, Ferdinand and Isabella fall at their feet, weeping, and the choir burst into song, which must have been quite a remarkable experience. We don't know what on earth they thought was going on.

They then are baptized, one as Fernando or Ferdinand Varagon after the king, and one as Juan de Castile, John of Castile after his son. Those are the high status men. And also one as Diego Colon, Columbus after Columbus, who becomes his translator, actually. Yeah. What would have been sort of the sum total of knowledge in Europe at the time about indigenous people prior to this contact? Well, absolutely nothing about the indigenous people of the Americas so far as we know.

Though there is the possibility that there were earlier isolated voyages. There are some medieval records that suggest maybe some people were shipwrecked in Europe. But essentially, Columbus, as we know, from the fact he called these people Indians, thought he had arrived in India. So indigenous people in this period are often seen through the lens of other kinds of non-Christian peoples. People believe either that they're going to be perfect converts or that they're pagans or heretics or in some cases that this might be a garden of Eden where they can create a new primitive church, as they call it.

So it's very little knowledge. So these indigenous people are part of creating the understandings of their societies from the very beginning. We often see it as a purely European encounter, something that happens amongst intellectuals in Europe and travellers. But actually, indigenous people are traveling to Europe and being part of this discussion, of this creation of knowledge right from the start. I'm intrigued by your quick mention of the possibility of a shipwreck that might have preceded all of this. Can you tell us what you know about that?

I don't know very much about it. I have to be honest, that is not what I have specialized in, but there are several slightly earlier records that talk of shipwrecks of dark-skinned men, men with what may have been tattoos. And some people have argued that these are the very earliest records of indigenous Americans. It also seems very likely that Basque fishermen, people on the coast of France, may have known about the cod banks off Newfoundland long before Columbus travels, because they may well be going further afield. But some of my colleagues have argued that they would have kept that knowledge to themselves because, of course, they don't want anyone else finding these rich fishing grounds. So back to the six or seven, who did actually make it in 1493, one of the captives was baptized as one. And he stayed in Spain. How come?

He does stay in Spain. According to the sources, John of Castile, the son of Ferdinand, the source says he wanted him for himself. This seems to be a high-status man, one of the relatives of Guacanagiri. and he is kept at court, according to Oviedo, who's a chronicler as the period. And Oviedo meets him some two years after he's arrived in Spain, and he's living as a nobleman, dressing as a Spanish nobleman, and also speaking Spanish fluently.

But then he dies just two years after his arrival in Spain. We don't know what he died of, but this is not unusual. Indigenous people in Europe, just like indigenous people in the America, often succumb to the many germs that they don't have any immunity to in this early period. Right. Did any of those travellers who first arrived in 1493, did any of them actually return home at any point? Yes, it seems that the majority of those that have survived are taken home. Diego Colon, who is a young man and is baptized for Columbus, becomes something of a son to him.

That's how it's written in the sources. but of course, like in many of these cases, the reality of consent is very obscure. We don't know exactly how much he's agreeing to this. But it seems like he makes the best of his situation, and he travels back and forth across the Atlantic multiple times, supporting Columbus, working for him, acting as a translator, and eventually he settles back in the Americas, starts a family, and takes advantage of his close association with the colonizers

to promote himself through the ranks, as it were. How extensive was the practice of capturing and moving indigenous people to Europe in the century after Columbus landed there? It was extremely extensive. We know from the work of Andres Resendez, his wonderful book, The Other Slavery, that indigenous enslavement is very widespread. The majority of people who are enslaved are not shipped across the Atlantic, but it seems that the numbers are in the tens of thousands in the first. hundred years. So, for example, Amerigo Vespucci in 1499 travels with a man called Orcheda, he's the captain, and

they take 222 slaves, as he calls it. 222 slaves is the quote from the Bahamas, who are, and these enslaved people, those that survive, are sold in Cadiz in Spain. The Portuguese enslaved many, many people, each captain

is entitled to bring a certain number of enslaved people just as a kind of bonus, along with every cargo they bring. without taxation. The difficulty is that because indigenous enslavement is illegal, except under certain circumstances, especially after 1542, when all of the loopholes are theoretically closed,

these people are often not recorded very clearly. So it's hard for us to get good figures. We have an awful lot of enslaved people who are recorded in these first few years. So Columbus, perhaps 3,000 people he ships to Europe, just Columbus alone. But then you also have lots of other people who are coming, and instead of calling them Indios, which is the term for indigenous people in the records, Indians, they call them brown people, for example, Loro, and that's to get

round the laws around indigenous enslavement. You're speaking about a period, you know, that basically the 16th century. I just wonder if you could just imagine with us what it is, what kind of world it would have been that indigenous people would have been discovering on what you describe in your title as at Savage Shores. Of course, the experience would have varied tremendously depending on who you were. So for people from, for example, the coast of North Carolina, who in the late 1500s come, they're from the Algonquian-speaking people, and they're from the generation after the first great dying.

So they're used to quite small communities. They would come to places like London, where the population is pushing 200,000. And it must have been an absolutely astonishing, noisy stone forest for us. them. For people who come from Mexico, they're used to urban settlements, for example. They have big cities. Tenochtitlana is perhaps bigger than any city in Europe, the Aztec Machika capital. It's perhaps bigger than any city in Europe at that time, certainly bigger than any city in Spain. So there would have been a rather different encounter for them. What we do know, though, is in terms of their sense of the culture, one theme that keeps coming up over and

over again, is surprise and discussed at the inequalities they see in Europe. Now, that's not to idealise indigenous societies as a kind of perfect utopia, but they weren't used to seeing extreme poverty alongside extreme wealth. There are very few indigenous communities where there isn't some form of communalistic help, even the Aztec Mishika, who have extreme differences of hierarchy, people at the bottom are supported with things like communal grain stores. So, you see, for example, Michel de Montaigne, he writes a famous essay called On the Cannibal's, and he met these indigenous people in Rouen, and he says that they say, why aren't people burning down these palaces? There's these people with all this money, and then outside of them,

people in great poverty, why on earth aren't they burning down the palaces and taking something? We don't understand. And you see this kind of idea come up again and again, including in much later sources, even travellers. in the 18th and 19th century who write their own accounts of voyages, remark on the inequalities. They say, if we were in charge here, these people would have homes, they would have food. It's really a theme that comes up repeatedly. Maybe just a word on the essay by Montania and the inaccuracies contained therein. Yes.

What was it titled again? It's called On the Cannibals. Right, which is obviously an incorrect. description. Of course, an incorrect description. And the irony is that Montaigne, of course, is using the indigenous people to critique Europe. It is a piece of rhetoric which is intended to shed light on the inequalities and violences of European society by saying, well, why on earth are we criticizing them? Look at our own culture. So it's very much a piece of rhetoric. But what's interesting for me is that the words he puts into the mouths of the people he meets do sit quite interestingly alongside other accounts. They're not out of line with other indigenous people's accounts. Jean Delieri says he meets an older man in Brazil, who he talks to about why they're shipping Brazil would to Europe.

And the man says, why are you doing this? Don't you have enough of your own? And he says, well, we do, but we want to sell it so our descendants have money. And the man is completely baffled by the idea that you might take something from one person to create excess wealth. He's got no interest, no value for that. Is there any sense in which there was an intellectual exchange between indigenous people or travelers

and intellectuals or people like Montan? I think very much so, but it is hard to see in the records. We know that indigenous people are co-creating knowledge in the Americas. We see it in their own words, and we see it in the words of Europeans. but it's very rare that you actually get to see those voices in their own words in the records. There is an exception that I can think of, though, which is the work of a man called Manteo. So in 1584, two men from the coast of North Carolina from Croatan and Roanoke called Manteo and Wanchese are brought to London.

And the traditional story goes that they meet a man called Thomas Harriet who teaches them English and he then creates the first alphabet from an Algonquin language. It's Osamokamak, in fact. The reality is that it seems that he and Manteo collaborated really closely on the creation of this document. In the archives of Westminster School is the alphabet itself. It's really an orthography rather than alphabet, but that's what it's often called the Algonquin alphabet.

And at the bottom is a signature that Cole Thrush, a wonderful scholar of Indigenous histories in Canada. He has an amazing book called Indigenous London, which goes into some of these stories. He deciphered at the bottom of that text, it says, Matteo Royden, King Mateo did this. And it is Mateo's own handwriting recording his contribution to that Algonquian alphabet,

which is just for me this incredible moment of touching that collaboration. And very rare one, I imagine. A very rare one. So the people who were captured and taken to Europe, what kind of work did they engage in? Typically, at this time, indigenous people in Europe, much like enslaved Africans and other people in Europe

are working either in domestic settings or in fields on farms. It isn't the plantation slavery that we imagine from the Caribbean later. It is a more domestic setting. I mean, that has its own horrors, of course, in terms of your vulnerability to your enslaver, especially for women and children. And what's interesting is that unlike the African trade, typically it is women and younger children

who are favoured for enslavement in Europe. Would there have been any kind of legal recourse for Indigenous people in Europe after arriving there? Absolutely. That is the fascinating thing. One of the amazing sources that we have for Indigenous people's voices is actually the records of freedom suits as they appeal to try and gain freedom from enslavement. Because, as I mentioned, theoretically at least, the slavery of Indigenous people is illegal. Before 1542, there are three justifications.

You either have to be a cannibal or declared a cannibal. You have to have been captured in just war, as they call it, or rescued from a worse fate. typically that is being rescued from being enslaved to someone else because it's obviously much worse to be enslaved to a non-Christian than a Christian or being rescued from being a sacrificial victim so you get these triumphalist rescue narratives and then after 1542 it's completely illegal to enslave indigenous people in theory as I say at least

so we have lots of wonderful records wonderful from the point of view of the historian where we actually get indigenous people's own testimonies about what happened to them as they try and gain freedom from their enslavers. So there's one example that comes to mind where a young man called Martin appeals for freedom from actually quite a famous figure in Mexican history called Gonzalo de Salazar.

Martin is from Tenay Yucan, and it seems that Salazar, who's this brutal administrator and conquistro, he comes to Tenor Yukan, and says to the community, is there a young man here who could be my page? And the community agreed to send Martine, who believes he's going as a free servant with Salazar. But the moment that he becomes his servant, he is branded on the face, which must have been this extreme personal violation for him.

Martin has this really fascinating life, according to his own testimony. He's a translator for Cortez for a while. But then when Salazar is exiled to Spain for his awful behaviour, Martin goes with him. And Martin works in quite a few different places in Segovia, Seville, Granada, before he decides to appeal for his freedom when Salazar tries to make him return to his household. The records of the suit, which just give us so much of what it must have been like to be an enslaved person, the moment he appeals for his freedom in 1536, Salazar, according to the records, grabs him, bangs his head into a wall, and according to Martin, he would have killed me, if not I was saved by some bystanders. The court take him out of Salazar's hands while the court case proceeds.

Sadly, a lot of people aren't given that opportunity. And there's an awful lot of back and forth, but eventually in 1537 he is declared a free man. And then what happens to him? He returns to Mexico. the Crown pay for any Indigenous enslaved person who wishes to return to their homeland. And so he goes back to Mexico paid for by the Crown. What an incredible story.

Is there any sense in which, you know, that it was actually widespread the knowledge of their status in Europe among indigenous people? Absolutely, because we have hundreds of records of people attempting to gain their freedom. often, and the crown, I mean, we don't want to valorise the crown, but they do seem to take quite seriously their responsibility to free indigenous people. They appoint an investigator, a man called Gregorio Lopez, to go around and check whether indigenous people are being

held legally. Now, if you're not from a Spanish territory, so if you're from Brazil, a Portuguese territory, well, then you're out of luck. You can be enslaved. That's not their problem in their mind. But if you can prove that you were from Spanish territories and that you shouldn't be held, so Martine is appealing in 1536, even before what are called the new laws of 1542, but he proves that he must have been a boy when he was enslaved. And that was illegal. So he gains his freedom. And we see more and more indigenous people appealing and gaining their freedom in the middle part of the 16th century. So it's quite clear that the knowledge is spreading. and the Crown are doing their best to officially spread that information as well.

So on that point, the knowledge spreading, how much do we know about how connected indigenous people were to each other in Europe? Well, in Spain and Portugal, there are very much communities. And we know this because indigenous people appear repeatedly in court cases on each other's behalf. So in Martin's court case, a young man appears who he says he knew in Mexico, He knew him as a boy and now still is in contact with him in Spain. We have people who are family groups who appeal for freedom together along with other people they've traveled with. And when they asked someone in a court case, do you know any people of the Indies?

He said, yes, I know lots of people who are from both Spain and the Indies. So they seem to, meaning, you know, from both places, it seems that at least in areas connected to Seville and the transatlantic networks, there are quite recognizable communities of people. So maybe 12 or 15 people in one village alone that is about half an hour to an hour away from Seville. There are these relatively connected networks. And beyond legal recourse, would they have had any other means of trying to escape the predicament that they found themselves in? We do see people running away. The records show people simply fleeing one year.

young man who tries to reach the French border, for example, and is captured and brought back as an enslaved person. He's not prepared to wait for legal recourse. The problem we have is that people who simply run away frequently don't appear in the records. So we have no good way of knowing how many of those people there are, because if you successfully run away, it simply isn't recorded. We don't have an equivalent of, in the 18th century, for example, you have these advertisements for escaped, enslaved people in London. We just don't have an equivalent of that. Other Indigenous people do make the best of their situation such as it is,

and they marry Europeans or they work as go-betweens for Europeans and gain status in that way. There are also, of course, some very high-status travellers in Europe who are there as diplomats or representatives of their people, and they're, of course, treated very differently. You're listening to Ideas, We're a broadcast and a podcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America, on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts.

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Caroline Dodds Pennock is a historian at the University of Sheffield in England. The title of her book, On Savage Shores, refers to the, harshness of the European experience for thousands of indigenous people from the Americas. Most, though not all, traveled against their will, captured and shipped across the Atlantic, destined to be enslaved on farms or in households throughout Europe. I'm sure that there are descendants of people living there. Since the book came out, I've had people emailing me and saying, oh, I had a DNA test a number of years ago and I learned I was part indigenous.

I always wondered where that came from. Of course, those people have no claim to Indigenous community and identity because it's so many generations back. They don't have any connection any more than I might to any of my Viking ancestry. But it is undoubtedly the case that thousands of Indigenous people blend into European society and become part of that culture. And in some cases remain quite prominent. So the children of Moctezuma continue to assert their identity as Indigenous

nobility, even up into the present day. How is that seen in a European society? Well, I think it's not really prominent in people's imagination, but there was a case about a decade ago, I think, where they tried to reassert their right to a pension from the Spanish crown. They weren't successful, but when you go to Spain, you can still see, for example, in Trujillo, where the Inca princess, Francisco Pizarro-Jubanki was exiled. You can still see the palace that she built with her husband and her face is engraved on the palace.

It's just remarkable how these traces are there when you start looking for them. There are indigenous people buried at Bristol. These are Inuit people who are buried at Bristol in the UK, in England. There's some buried in London. When you start looking these people really and their traces, their legacy is very, very present in European society. but you have to look a bit harder for it, I think, than you maybe do for the legacy of the Black Atlantic where so many millions of people were transported

and it went on for such a long time that horror of the transatlantic slave trade that, you know, their legacy has been much more visible. Yeah. I'm glad you raised Francesca Youpenky because I wanted to ask about indigenous people in Europe who were not enslaved because there were some who were, you know, it's not everyone's story. Can you talk a little bit more about her case and the kind of life that she led in Europe?

Yes, so she is the daughter of a conquistador and an Inca Nusta or princess. Francisco is exiled to Spain in 1551 because there's a fight going on in Peru over who's going to be in charge, essentially. And they want her out of the way because they think that she would be disruptive. And so she's exiled to Trujillo, and we have these amazing account records of her voyage, so we know. that she did all this shopping for luxuries, that she bought a table, a hat for the boat. She travels in an enormous luxury. When she arrives in Spain,

her uncle manages to marry her, and she actually lives in a prison with him because he's imprisoned at that time. She has five children, I think it is, of which three survive, and she's part of this small circle of Incape. We know that her brother also goes with her to Spain, and there are some other relatives of hers who appear in the records in Trujillo. She is eventually freed.

She isn't ever in prison, but when her husband is in prison, she stays with him. This is quite a luxurious prison, I should say. And when they're freed, they set about building what's known as the palace of the conquest. When people go to Trujillo, they always go and they look at the statue of Francisco Pizarro. But just around the corner is this palace that she built with her first place. husband. After he dies, because like many women in this period, she's much younger than her husband, she remarries and sets about asserting her rights to her inheritance. And she's quite influential. She brings legal case after legal case to try and gain the rewards she believes

she's entitled to. She's quite typical of indigenous diplomats, actually, in that period, in that we have record after record of these petitions to the crown. So hers was one particular experience of someone with mixed heritage, but what about others who had more ordinary lineages? How are they received in Spain? There actually are quite a number of mestizo or mixed heritage people who come to Spain, and in actual fact, the Crown exempts Mestizo children from their prohibitions on indigenous people traveling. They try and stop indigenous people coming. They want them to stay in their own homelands and appeal for things there. They're not very successful in prohibiting people. But they exempt mestizo children because they think that if they

can convert them and Hispanize them, that they will then serve to convert the rest of the population. They see them as evangelical ambassadors, essentially. So they're making their way into European society. It can be quite precarious in a way being in that position, because even though for the crown at this time, and under the law, being Christian was what mattered. And there weren't so many racial categories in the 16th century. What we see in reality is that they are often the subject of prejudice. So in 1570, for example, a Peruvian woman called Isabel, she comes to Spain with like her common law husband, essentially. But then for some reason, when they've been settled quite a while, and they have two mixed heritage children, Lorenzo and

Gaspar, he abruptly marries another woman who is also conveniently called Isabel, which makes telling their story quite complicated. And then he dies all of a sudden. And Isabel, the Spanish woman, tries to claim that the Peruvian Isabel was enslaved and so were her children. And they have to fight for freedom. And in that, you see the racism experienced by Lorenzo and Gaspar. Lorenzo, I think, was very angry at being called a moorish dog. So presumably his darker skin had led to people being racist against him.

They do, in fact, gain their freedom and some compensation. but it's quite a precarious existence. People can try and assert superiority over you, dominance or legal ownership based on that heritage, even if they shouldn't really be able to. I wanted to switch gears a bit and talk a little more about your motivation and what you address in your own introduction to the book. As you point out, you're a white historian working in Sheffield, England. I wonder what concerns you have with the idea. that indigenous experiences, whether then or now, may not be your story to tell?

I was very concerned about that, especially as in the last 10 years or so, I've been privileged to know more indigenous scholars and indigenous communities to connect with them virtually to a much greater degree digitally and as a colleague, and to listen to indigenous peoples, because I don't take lightly the responsibility of being the person to bring these stories to a wider audience. I've been working on this project for about 15 years. My last book was a long time ago. And it's something that is built up over a very long time and doesn't speak to just one indigenous community.

So it has peoples all the way from the Taino in the Caribbean to the Inuit in Nunavut and the Tupi people in Brazil. And so it is a very wide perspective, and I'm very aware that I'm putting forward the stories of all kinds of different indigenous communities who may feel very differently about these experiences. And so what I've tried to avoid doing is ventriloquizing for those people. Wherever I can, I've used their own voices. I've tried to take the opportunity to signpost work by Indigenous scholars. And just to ask people to listen a little bit harder for Indigenous. voices today as well as in the past. And, of course, I can't represent every indigenous point of view.

There are many people who would disagree with each other, I'm sure. Sure. Nor do I want to claim that I am speaking for them. I'm just doing my best to put forward their voices and their histories and to try and draw people's attention to them where I possibly can. Yeah. And you've consulted widely. Was that, in some sense, asking permission to tell those stories?

or was it something different? That's a really good question. I haven't specifically sought permission from indigenous communities, nor have I revealed any privileged knowledge. Everything that I'm talking about pretty much is published elsewhere, so I'm working with written sources.

I certainly would not take oral sources and then use them without permission, if that makes sense. I don't know. It's really difficult because how do you ask permission for a book that covers so many different communities? I feel a really enormous responsibility not to misrepresent them, to do my very best to sensitively and accurately and without causing further damage to communities. that have been and often still are

marginalized and discriminated against to tell those histories. And maybe just as a last thing on this, just how surely going into this project you would have felt the weight of that responsibility and would have known the pitfalls sort of going into it. I wonder if you could recall the moment you decided to go ahead anyway and why you did.

The interesting thing about this project is I didn't sort of decide, to do it. I kind of fell into it. So I was studying Aztec Mishika people and I kept wondering why we heard so much about white men travelling West and so little about Indigenous people travelling the other way. And so I just sort of started looking for them and noting them down whenever I saw them and they just turned out to be really large numbers of them. And this was originally going to be a specialist book about

Mexican and Caribbean people traveling to Spain, kind of a scholarly work. And the more I worked on it, the more I realized that there are indigenous people, thousands of indigenous people traveling to Europe whose stories just people do not know about. Now, it's not that there is no scholarly awareness. Of course, descendant communities know about these things. And there has been scholarly work on quite a number of these travellers but for some reason that work hasn't made a dent on popular understandings

of this period of history people think they know this period really well it's the period of the Renaissance and the Reformation of Henry the Eight the Golden Age of Spain people in Europe think they understand this period but how many people know that there was a Brazilian king at the Court of Henry the Eighth

I was speaking to a specialist in Henry the Eighth and she didn't know that Wow. And so the more I worked on it, the more I realized that there was a transformative history of Europe to be told here. It's not just about Indigenous peoples, it's about helping people in Europe understand the diversity of their past, the origins of so many foods and words and culture and places. And people just didn't recognise that. In Britain, people often start the story of migration with Windrush. with the Windrush generation

in the middle part of the 20th century but it's a much longer deeper history and I feel that the histories of these indigenous people are so important in their own right it's so important as a project of recovery but it's also incredibly important for helping people

both in Europe and the Americas recognize these longer, deeper connections that indigenous people are so much part of. Yeah. As you say an important work of recovery but also I sense important, particularly in this time, in this age? Absolutely. I think for me this is an ethical consideration that it's so vital for us to

recognize that we are, I mean, how far do you want to go back? We could go back to the Romans or to the Vikings or the Angles and Saxons in Britain to tell a story of migration. But the moment where we start thinking about globalization, about the beginnings of the modern age is 1492 and onwards. And so often, Indigenous peoples are missing from those stories that we tell of travel, of migration. It's so vital, I think, that we recognise that we are all migrants, for want of a better word, our histories, our cultures, things that people think of as inherently European. So imagine Italian cooking without tomatoes.

Imagine Asian cooking without chilies or West African cooking without peanuts or chilies. I mean, it's ridiculous when you think of. these things as being so recent. And even when people tell stories of those commodities, the indigenous people who came with them are often cut out of it. So in England, people think of Walter Rale as bringing tobacco and potatoes to Britain. But people are eating potatoes and smoking in Europe long before Walter Raleigh crosses the Atlantic. And we know indigenous people are smoking in Europe that they're bringing these commodities. It's such a vital story, I think. If you went to the Tower of London in 1603, you might encounter an indigenous man going by the name of Harry. Yes. But he wasn't a

prisoner. What was he doing that? He was a servant of Walter Raleigh. So Walter Raleigh traveled across the Atlantic multiple times, of course. But in 1603, after Elizabeth I, his patron has died, he's been thrown in the tower for suspected conspiracy. And it seems that one of the two servants he was permitted to have with him in the Tower was an indigenous man from Guyana called Harry. And people think about Walter Raleigh in the Tower, writing his history of the world, trying to grow tobacco and sassafras, but they don't think that there is an indigenous man at his side throughout all that time. It's hard to tell how consensual this position is, whether Harry's been kidnapped or whether he's agreed to come. What is fascinating is that later,

in 1617, when much older Raleigh goes back to Guyana, he inquires for Harry at a place called Kalyana, and Harry at that time, who is a very high-status individual, it seems he's a chief of some kind, makes Rally wait before he comes. And when he does come, he provides him with incredibly lavish hospitality. So he's showing very much that he's not a servant to Raleigh, that he has status of his own.

Now, what little we know suggests that, in fact, he might have had quite a friendly relationship with Raleigh that they may have been quite close and Raleigh does have a reputation in history for inspiring great loyalty from the people around him so it's not impossible that they've become quite close friends but certainly there's an amazing transatlantic connection and relationship there and just something people don't think of

that ubiquity of indigenous people in these famous stories but is there I mean you sort of alluded to this but is there any sense in which Harry actually wanted to be working for Walter? We don't know. We don't know because we know that he has two indigenous servants. Harry is just one of two.

It seems they were brought from a previous expedition, but we have so many of these words in the sources, words like brought and taken, that just don't tell us whether those people had consented to come. There are some cases, the Brazilian king at the Court of Henry VIII,

seems to have consented very much so because they leave as a ransom for his safe return. They leave one of their company in the Brazilian King's homeland. Now, actually, the King dies on the return voyage, but his community are persuaded of the good dealing of the English and let him go. But there are some cases where people have quite clearly consented, but so often I'm dealing with sources that simply use words like brought or taken,

and we cannot tell whether these people are, effectively enslaved or coerced, or whether they've chosen to travel. There are some who quite clearly are choosing to travel. Cortez brings an enormous group with him in 1528 when he returns for the first time after he's defeated the Aztec Mishika. He brings a big group of people, and a lot of those are nobles, and one of them even just goes to Rome to see the Pope as far as you can tell. It's just a sort of man called Benito Matatlakeni is just a kind of sightseer as far as in Rome.

But then there are also musicians and dancers who are sent to Rome to entertain the Pope and how consensual is that we don't know. So there's all these different layers of presence. And you have to be so alert to that all the time that even people who appear to be of reasonably high status or quite important in European society may not have chosen to make the voyage. Yes. So given that, what limits do you set for you? yourself when you're trying to recover a story of someone like Harry?

Well, I find as much as I possibly can. And I think it is important to speculate, but to be very, very careful about flagging where you are speculating. So I know other colleagues who've taken different approaches to this. So I was reading a wonderful history book by a friend. And they've said, well, I'm going to try and avoid using too many words like perhaps or maybe or possibly. But that was a history of European migration,

of European colonisation. For me, I think it's not my right to obscure that speculation, to show where I'm making a conceptual leap where I'm saying this seems probable or this seems likely. It's not for me to ventriloquise those people. So I give as much information as I possibly can. I use Indigenous sources where I possibly can, and I make clear to my reader what we can and can't know

and invite them just to think harder to look beyond the simple explanation. Yeah. Could you tell us the story of the Inuit, I guess, family, for lack of a better description, although it wasn't quite a family, was it? No. Can you just go back and tell us a little bit about those three individuals who came from what would later become, known as Canada.

Yes, in the 1570s, an English explorer called Martin Froebyshire has been travelling to what became Nunavut. And in 1576, he takes an Inukman to London, who creates a great sensation, but dies of an injury he's incurred in his capture after just two weeks. The following year, Froebyshire returns to Nunavut in an attempt to explore further to find some crew members he thinks he's lost. And while he's there, he captures three indigenous Inuit people. They're known to us as Kalacho, Arnach and Nuttak, but Arnac and Nuttak just mean woman and child. Nutak is Arnak's baby. Calicho is an unrelated man. But it seems

that the Europeans think, the English think that by putting them together, it will create a sort of family. But actually, fascinatingly, the records of the English say that they're very careful around each other. supportive, but they never show each other their private parts, things like that. They're very polite around each other. And they are all brought to England. They arrive in 1577, and they create a great sensation at Bristol on the coast. So Calichot, the man, harpoons, ducks in order to show his skill with the spear for harpooning seals. And it's this wonderful little vignette, but behind that sort of jolly almost image is really a very dark reality, which is that it seems he's been

very badly injured during his capture, and he dies only a couple of weeks after arriving in England. A man called Dodding does an autopsy, which he treats him during his illness and then does an autopsy, and we have the record of this autopsy. And it shows that Kalichow had some kind of brain injury, which explains why he had so many headaches, and also has at least two broken ribs incurred in his capture, it seems. Wow. Now, Dodding forces Arnak to witness the burial of the dismembered corpse of Kalachow, which is just horrendous, because he thinks that will reassure her that the English aren't cannibals.

And she's very passive during all of this. And Dodding puts this down to her being either very brave or how. having absolutely no emotions. It seems much more likely she's traumatised and shocked by what has happened. And she herself is sick, probably with measles, and she dies soon afterwards. And both Kalacho and Arnak are buried at a church called St. Stevens in Bristol. They are recorded in the parish register, their names and burial. Nutak, who is probably a toddler by this time, 14 or 15 months. He is left in the very dubious care of the cafe company and they bring him to London and put him on show at a pub called The Three Swans.

He's about 15 months. About 14, 15 months, we think. And he dies after only eight days in the capital and is buried at St. Olavs, coincidentally enough, alongside the Inukman who had been brought in 1576. So there are two. Inuk people who are unrecorded in the parish registers buried in the grounds of St. Olavs in London. And what's most remarkable about them, one of the reasons this, it's this, I think of all the histories in the book, this is the one that stuck with me the most, is this story of this small child, Nuthak, being taken to London, not speaking the language, not knowing what's happening almost certainly, brought by a wetness, and to a busy pub.

But beyond that, we actually have a picture of Nutak. John White, who is so famous for his pictures of the coastal indigenous peoples of North America, painted Kalacho, Arnak and Nutak in England from life. And there's this amazing picture of Arnack, and with her hood up, she's got her Parker hood up. And if you look carefully, you can see Nutak's little face

peeping out from her Parker. And it's just spruce. speaks across the centuries so dramatically to be able to see his face and to be aware that he's buried in a churchyard in London that people just walk past every day and have no idea that he's there. It's a horrific story. It is absolutely horrific and just so unbelievably tragic. Any sense at all of how much of that story is known among Inuit people in Canada? Did you follow that trail at all? There is a book of testimonies, oral testimonies, that were collected of indigenous people. And they do talk about the arrival of the Europeans and what happened to them.

They spoke to elders, including Anuki Adami, who was a respected elder, about the arrival of those Europeans and those early histories. And they're certainly aware of the Froebyshire voyages. They're not very impressed with European clothes, for example. They think they might as well have been wearing rags. They're so cold. but there's very little about the travellers themselves. Yeah. I wondered if you could just once again speak about your approach to dealing with the so much out there that we just don't know in writing not just the story of indigenous people in Europe, but in writing history books in general.

There is so much in history that we don't know and this book is so vast. It takes me so far beyond the ability to specialize in one story. And so often, these people appear in the sources for a moment and then disappear again. And it may be that if I spent my entire career searching in the Mexican records that I would find a few more fragments regarding these travellers. But so much of their lives is inevitably unrecorded because often they are illiterate or are literate in other forms of recording, ones that have not come down the centuries to us.

And so it feels like putting together a mosaic almost of tiny pieces that you try and put together into something coherent, where you can't hear one person's voice, you perhaps find the story of someone slightly later, who seems to have had a similar experience where you can shed some possible light. and you're very careful always to say, possibly. And by putting together all of these fragments,

I hope that it creates a picture that this is a history that is so much bigger and more pervasive than people recognize it to be. This isn't, as is so often the case, in telling these stories, these people aren't an exception. It's not just someone who's a curiosity or is unusual. These people are ubiquitous.

So very often when people tell the story, for example, of Cortez, who comes with his big entourage in 1528, people say, oh, this is a remarkable, dramatic, unusual event. But actually, there are indigenous ambassadors at court all the time. They're there year on year on year. There are indigenous enslaved people, go-betweens, children, traveling backwards and forwards. If you look at, we've talked mostly about Spain, but if you look at northern France, the records around the coast in northern France where they have all the... connections to the Brazil would trade show indigenous people being baptized very, very early in the 1500s. You have regular connections that include indigenous people as sailors, as family members, as workers, sometimes as incredible curiosities from very, very early on. And that's what I want

to try and do in the book is to give that sense that these people are not exceptions, that they are part of European society from the very beginning and that they are transformative of it. Caroline, thank you so much for your insights. Really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. On Ideas, you heard Caroline Dodds Penach. Her book is On Savage Shores, How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe. Caroline let us know that her publisher Knopf is offering a free copy of her book to any indigenous community library, Friendship Center, or similar organization. Follow the links on our website, cbc.ca slash Ideas, to find out how to receive yours. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast. If you like the episode you just heard, check out our podcast feeds Vast Archive, where you can find more than 300 of our

past episodes. Technical production, Danielle Duval, web producer Lisa Ayuso, senior producer Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyed. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.a.