LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: How indigenous Americans discovered Europe

IN 1528, Hernan Cortes, the Spanish conquistador, returned home from his travels in South America with “a large group of Nahua nobles”, along with entertainers, tumblers, dwarves, jaguars and an armadillo.

He also brought a team of about a dozen men who played a game of ullamaliztli, “the traditional Mesoamerican ball game”. They were brought home for the entertainment of the King of Spain. In the words of one Spanish observer, the ball itself was “made from the sap of certain trees and other mixtures, which made the ball bounce greatly”.

Caroline Dodds Pennock’s utterly original new book, On Savage Shores, is full of such remarkable stories.

Her aim is to show us a kind of mirror-image of our familiar history: not of Western travellers in the New World, but of the remarkable number of native Americans who also made it over here. There were far more of them than most of us realised, and among other things, they may have introduced us to the joys of the bouncing rubber ball.

But in this great and often tragic clash of cultures, there are inevitably sadder stories of people lost, uprooted, or stricken with strange new diseases.

In 1576, the English explorer, Martin Frobisher, lost five of his crewmen, perhaps murdered, off the coast of Baffin Island, northern Canada. A year later he returned, still hoping to find his lost men – along with the legendary North West Passage to the Indies.

TOUCHING FRAGMENTS

AS a kind of bargaining chip, he seized a native man, woman and her baby, and brought them back to Bristol in October 1577. The Inuits’ names were Kalicho, Arnaq and Nutaaq, the baby’s name meaning, “Someone New”.

Pennock says Kalicho quickly became a local celebrity. Portraying the image of an Inuit hunter in Elizabethan Bristol, she writes: “Paddling up and down the river Avon at high tide in his canoe, and hunting ducks with bow and harpoon.”

Their lives were not long ones, however – nor were Elizabethan lives generally. Kalicho fell ill, tended by one Dr Edward Dodding, and died singing hymns “like the swan who foresees what good there is in death”. He was buried in St Stephen’s, Bristol, along with Arnaq, who probably died of measles.

Little Nutaaq was sent to London but had probably contracted measles as well. He was buried after only eight days in the churchyard of St Olave’s, in the City of London.

It is a touching fragment. But, as with so many stories uncovered here, it offers only a glimpse. Of the inner thoughts and lives of our New World visitors, we know nothing. Did they even want to go back? It’s unclear.

The author claims they were marginalised, silenced or even “erased” by their European hosts. A much more likely explanation is that they didn’t record such things in writing. Incidentally, we know barely anything of Shakespeare’s views and opinions, either.

Closer to us in time is the superbly sardonic account written by a Chippewa chieftain, Maungwudaus, who was part of a travelling show in the 19th century.

He was distinctly unimpressed by the apparent fragility of English gentlewomen: “English women cannot walk alone; they must always be assisted by the men.”

They are brought to the tea table “like sick women”, where they hold their knives and forks with two forefingers and thumb, the other two fingers of each hand “sticking out like fish-spears”.

Priceless. But the gentlemen fare little better, their luxuriant Victorian moustaches making them appear “as if they had black squirrels’ tails sticking out on each side of their mouths”.

The thorough-going bias of the book is tiresome. Pennock rightly criticises the old habit of calling native Americans “savages”, and then in the title applies it herself – to Europe!

An even-handed account would have been much better, with all those centuries of misunderstandings and conflicts, followed by treaties and other trade agreements.

One might prefer the account of Sir Walter Raleigh and his devoted native manservant, Harry, for an example of how people can transcend their narrow views and prejudices and become simply friends.

When Raleigh fell from grace in 1603 and was confined to the Tower, an indigenous man known only as Harry stayed with him for two years as his manservant. Later, it seems, Harry was given his freedom and returned home to the Americas.

When Raleigh was finally freed in 1616, he sailed again, “in one last search for gold and glory”.

Arriving at the mouth of the Cayenne River, “I sent my barge ashore to enquire for my servant Harry the Indien [sic]”.

Harry duly arrived with enough provisions for the English for at least a week. Raleigh, somewhat sick from the exhausting voyage, was carried kindly ashore and rested in a tent, eating pineapples, roasted peccary and armadillo.

He records his deep gratitude at “being fedd and assisted by the Indyans of my ould acquaintance with a greate deal of love and respect [sic]”.

As such anecdotes show, history is multi-faceted, and people are complicated.

Sometimes European colonists cruelly chained and enslaved native Americans; sometimes they actually rescued them, as the author hurriedly admits, from being sacrificed and even eaten by their own people.

Retrospective finger-wagging, or dividing the historical past into Goodies and Baddies, is just daft. Still, if you can put up with the authorial one-sidedness, there is much to learn and enjoy in this unusual history of a forgotten corner of our past.

– On Savage Shores by Caroline Dodds Pennock is published by Weidenfeld, 320pp