The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Your highness, meet the Tupinamba
The tribes who performed for Henri II weren’t alone, as a history of Americans in 1500s Europe proves
Native American languages gave us ‘tapioca’, ‘anorak’ and ‘canoe’
ON SAVAGE SHORES by Caroline Dodds Pennock 320pp, W&N, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £22, ebook £12.99
Anyone entering Rouen from the direction of Paris on October 1 1550 was in for a big surprise. On a stretch of land just outside the city walls, a bizarre living tableau of a Brazilian village had been created, to entertain Henri II as he arrived to conduct a royal visit. Monkeys scampered through the trees, and parakeets fluttered around, while naked “savages” lounged in hammocks below them.
There were roughly 300 such naked people in this pop-up Renaissance Disneyland, and what made it completely extraordinary was that 50 of them really were Tupinamba people from Brazil. (Those, presumably, included the ones who were able to pick off the occasional parakeet with their bows and arrows.) The tableau ended with a mock-battle between the Tupinamba and their local enemies, the Tabajara; the former set fire to the huts of the latter – which, for naked people in northern
France in October, may have given some welcome relief to both.
Ever since Columbus first returned from the New World, native Americans had been paraded in Europe as objects of wonder and curiosity. Sometimes they were presented as savages, to fit stereotypes of barbarians that went back to the ancient world; but their skills and artefacts were highly admired, and objects such as mirrors of polished obsidian or cloaks shimmering with exotic feathers entered the collections of kings and emperors.
An interesting book could be written just about the curiosity this engendered, and the showmanship with which these unfamiliar people were presented to European culture and society. But Caroline Dodds Pennock’s new history goes much further than that. By teasing out the whole range of connections which brought these people to Europe, she shows that in some places, at least, they must have become a familiar presence. Indeed, the sheer scale of that presence – again, in some places – will come as a surprise to most readers.
Those Tupinamba people in Rouen, for example, were there because the French port had become a hub for the thriving trade in “brazilwood”, a valuable commodity yielding a bright red dye. Other ports serving the New World, such as Lisbon and Seville, acquired large numbers of native American residents; their languages could be heard on street corners, and their liking for tobacco and chocolate stimulated local tastes.
Many of these people, in Spain and Portugal, had been brought against their will – starting with whole groups of men and women kidnapped by the early explorers. Formal slavery existed in at least the first half-century after Columbus, until the enslavement of “Indians” was outlawed by the Spanish government in 1542 (though Queen Isabella had tried to stop it as early as 1500). There are no reliable totals, but it’s clear that at least several thousand had been shipped to Spain during that time.
Some were kidnapped not for enslavement but for a very specific purpose: the European invaders needed interpreters, and the simplest way to get them was to grab young people and immerse them in the Spanish language. A more longterm method involved conquistadors acquiring local women as wives or mistresses, and bringing up bilingual children. Dodds Pennock is particularly interested in such cultural go-betweens, and makes every effort to understand what their position felt like from their point of view – especially, how they could use it for their own purposes.
This whole approach to history follows a powerful modern mantra: we must restore “agency” to people in the past. Looked at in one way, the principle is obviously right: where traditional, one-sided accounts have obscured the active role people really played, we should correct that error. Yet the modern tendency goes much further, privileging any interpretation, however strained, that can turn people from patients into agents. The cause may be a generous moral impulse on the part of the historian; but the consequence, all too often, is more error, just of a different kind.
As its teasing subtitle promises or warns – “How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe” – this book is agency-fixated. It tells, for example, the story of Manteo, an Algonquian who was taken from Virginia to London in 1584. Historians have long known that he taught his language to Sir Walter Raleigh’s adviser, Thomas Hariot, who invented a phonetic alphabet in order to write it down. Dodds Pennock ticks them off for imagining that this was just “European research, a white man’s hard work”, and insists that the process was collaborative (as if that had ever been doubted). She claims that in a document where Hariot set out his alphabet, Manteo wrote the phrase “Manteo roi done”, meaning “King Manteo did this”; but this is simply nonsense. The phrase has been misread, and the man surely had enough of a job learning English without resorting to French as well.
Similarly, Dodds Pennock writes, of a group of native Mexicans shipped to Spain for presentation at court, that “No less than the Spanish conquistadors, they too were explorers, pioneers, pathfinders… and ambassadors.” No less? As she later admits, we do not know whether they went voluntarily at all; they may just have been sent for show. Once Spanish rule is established, almost any worthy native who went to Spain to ask for privileges for his people is described here as a “diplomat” or “ambassador”; and those who petitioned for better treatment are said to have engaged in an act of “resistance”.
No exaggeration is left unattempted, so long as it serves the purpose of restoring agency. Those native American so-called diplomats “helped to shape European society”; by the 1580s “indigenous people pervaded Tudor England”; and they also “profoundly changed European languages” – a reference to the advent of a number of words such as “canoe”, “hammock”, “piranha”, “tapioca” and “anorak”.
Don’t be too put off. The book is well worth reading for the fascinating material it contains. But just be aware that an excessive desire to help oppressed people in the past – who are, alas, beyond such assistance – can become rather a hindrance to the reader.