On Savage Shores

On Savage Shores, by Caroline Dodds Pennock

This book is written by an academic and was not an easy read. Amidst the details and recurring need to identify so many wrongs, the core point raises an intriguing question and anecdotes follow that I found fascinating.

I was raised on stories about explorers and settlers in the Americas:  There was of course, Columbus but to a young boy, Cortez, Pizarro, Sir Walter Raleigh, and the Pilgrims all were digested and considered heroic and amazing.  When no longer a boy, and with more information, the perspective of course, changed and continues to change. But what about indigenous Americans, meeting up with Europeans  and traveling East during this same time frame?  A later recognizable example is informative:  Pocahontas had a legend built around her and the surviving portrait of her finds her in Elizabethan dress, the artist tactfully lightening her skin color. She died of unclear causes when she was twenty-two years old, while initiating a trip back to Virginia, while married to an English farmer (after becoming christened Rebecca and professing Christian faith). How old was she when she got married? What motivated her conversion to Christianity. She was the daughter of a chief—was she an envoy of sorts?  Did she acclimate to England with respect to both the weather and society?

The first explorers, the Spanish (though it is argued that Basque fishermen touched ashore from fishing the Grand Banks and may have initiated contact and spread diseases before the English and Dutch began to colonize) won the European race to the Americas. The reality on the ground for the indigenous peoples encountering the Spanish and Portuguese was very different that that which those facing the French, Dutch, and English, a century later. Caribbean natives were the first to go to Spain. These  natives had no choice in the matter—they were forced to travel East by Columbus and his writing supports the notion that he thought of them as resources for the crown. Queen Isabella had a different view and regarded these first people as emissaries whom had not been treated particularly well. They were not dressed for the cold weather, for example—and she had them dressed in European clothes for when they were presented in court. Queen Isabella would question actions by Columbus as he instituted a successful trade in slaves—and her point was, “Who was this Columbus to do this to her subjects?” After she died, any support to her point of view withered as her husband was of the same opinion as the majority Spanish interests in the New World—-and slaves they became. Tens of thousands of native Americans were sent to Spain as slaves. As with Africans headed in the opposite direction, the records are incomplete and the numbers a function of historical guess work. Iberia with a long history of racial mixing from Africa could easily have had intermarriage of such natives with no racial prejudice—their offspring in this setting would have looked like many native peoples in Spain and Portugal. This would not be the case in Northern Europe.

With time, after the conquest, there were mixed reasons for natives to land in Spain. They were curiosities and one famous group, in indigenous costumes, would demonstrate their skills: balancing acts, a game with a rubber ball, and different forms of gambling. Such people were noted in diary entries and paintings and once the novelty wore off, disappeared—-no one knows where or how. There are records in Spain that show that impoverished native Americans requested and received benefits from the crown: medical care, hair cuts, clothing, and burial expenses. Regarding medical care, exposure to European diseases was just as lethal in Europe as it was in the Americas.

With time, the legal system in Spain had to deal with the issue of slavery in some detail. Slaves generally filled three categories of work:  indoor services (livery, housecleaning) and out door labor (field work, mines)  and sex. A friend of Columbus on the second voyage wrote: “While I was in the boat I laid my hands on a gorgeous Cannibal woman whom the lord admiral granted me; when I had her in my quarters, naked, as is their custom, I felt a craving to sport with her. When I tried to satisfy may craving, she, wanting none of it, gave emergency such a treatment with her nails that at that point, I wished I had never started. At this, to tell you how it ended, I got hold of a rope and thrashed her so thoroughly that she raised unheard-of cries that you would never believe. Finally we were of such accord that, in the act, I can tell you, she seemed to have been trained in a school of harlots…….”  People in this setting were of varying ages and for example, one could go to court showing that you were not “of age” when enslaved and be granted freedom, usually with some money as compensation. Sometimes a trip home was paid for though the land that had been left was usually transformed to be unrecognizable. The North American natives would refer to the time of initial colonization as, “the great dying” as disease swept in and depopulated the Eastern and Southern Seaboards, the Caribbean, and Latin America. If such people stayed in Europe, they were commonly disfigured by facial branding and smallpox scars such that regardless of their legal status, were easily be identified as slaves to the casual observer..

Some natives “integrated” into Spanish society. Columbus adapted a child with a native woman and he served as an interpreter and was assigned work when left behind to administer a colony in Hispaniola.  Famously, Malinche interpreted for Cortez —and was instrumental in his success during the conquest of Mexico. He took her as a “wife”. Their son (Martin) was raised as a European, went to Europe and became a page to the King of Spain. He in turn died fighting in the King’s service. Montezuma’s daughter: Doña Isabel Moctezuma was married six times in her life but was”adapted” by Cortez after her husband (the last Aztec emperor, Cuauhtemoc) died (tortured and suffocated) and she became a Catholic —and had a child fathered by Cortez (one cannot make this stuff up!). Her last marriage was with Juan Cano de Saavedra—he instigated a campaign to secure her inheritance as she was the only legitimate heiress to Moctezuma. This family lives on today in Spain, the Toledo Moctezumas.

Other Indian nobles who allied with Cortez against the Aztecs presented to court and were awarded rights and privileges. Nobles from Tlaxclala (the city state that allied with Cortez to take down the Aztecs) became adept in Royal Courts to maintain their position as allies—still crucial in the ruling of Mexico. They became Catholic, rebuilt their city in a European model, and went to court in Spain to secure status which worked out as their city became perpetually self governing under direct Crown control and free from local interference. Indigenous Indians from the old Mexican society demonstrated the ability to work the Spanish Legal and Political systems to their advantage.

It was the Renaissance in the 1500’s, and the English finally landed some colonists in North American, late in the century following Columbus’ four voyages. Sir Walter Raleigh famously brought two natives from the Carolinas (near the Roanoke Colony) —Wanchese and Chief Manteo were a hit! There were presented to the royal court. Manteo assisted the scientist Thomas Harriet to decipher and render the Algonquian language into a readable format. This required some early thinking about how to translate sounds using an alphabet based on another language. Wanchese had little interest in assimilating but Manteo learned to speak English. Returning to the Carolinas years later, Wanchese, suspicious of the English motives melted back into the coastal forests with his people advocating to them to have no contact with Europeans. Manteo stayed in the Roanoke colony and like the English colonists there had disappeared by the time supply ships found the site— abandoned with no sign of violence. The, “lost colony” remains a mystery.

French explorers brought a Brazilian native, a son of a chief, to France but the ship was wrecked on the coast before it could get to port in France in the first half of the 1500’s. This native was saved and raised in Honfleur which is a port town in Normandy that served as the hub of many French exploratory and colonial sailings to the New World. This Brazilian was raised by a local family and became a success. He fathered many children through many marriages and eventually achieved a royal rank. His ancestors a hundred years later were served with a tax as the treasury considered them “foreigners.”  They went to court and won. As this story is told, the Brazilian assumed the name of his French adopters and so, some historians doubt that this story is as told.

Natives traveling to all the colonial powers in Europe commented on certain themes which reflected basic differences in their respective societies and points of view. Poverty extremes as well as the dramatic disparities of wealth commonly found in Europe were dramatically less and foreign to native Americans. Likewise, they were critical of corporeal punishments done commonly and in public. Along this theme, they did not understand how Europeans could mistreat small children as they did. While such thoughts have been documented, what is unclear is the impression the large cities made on them. The implications of massed humanity were not lost—Wanchese for example saw the danger and advertised it to his people when he came back to the Carolinas. Many expressed wonder at the technology demonstrated to them as these things seemed nothing less than magical to one from a pre-industrial society. That wonder easily fed the sense of superiority Europeans felt about about themselves as they came upon virtually all peoples of other continents.