Dodds Pennock’s book treads similar territory to The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David Wengrow, a more broad ranging book but one which also sought to reverse the mirror, examining indigenous American attitudes to Europe, as opposed to the other way round. Where The Dawn of Everything lent heavily on the interpreted perspective of the Wendat leader Kondiaronk, (also mentioned in this book), On Savage Shores seeks to harvest multiple indigenous points of view, noting that within a decade of Colombus having landed in the Americas, the cross-Atlantic peregrinations went two ways. The Native American visitors sometimes came as dignitaries and sometimes as servants or slaves. Dodds Pennock faces the age-old problem that so far, few written accounts of these visits to European shores have emerged. Where there is information, it tends to be cursory or viewed as a depiction of “the other”, even when the author’s take is sympathetic (cf Montaigne). Surprisingly Dodds Pennock doesn’t really tackle Caliban, and even more surprisingly to this reader, there appeared to be no reference to Garcilaso de la Vega. Nevertheless, Dodds Pennock assiduously mines the records and addendums to find traces of these early visitors, and the book is perhaps at its strongest when the author seeks to convey an idea of the way the indigenous people might have blended in to societies that were already more cosmopolitan than orthodox (school) history would tend to suggest. On Savage Shores does a great job of revealing the way that the Americas (for want of a better word) insinuated themselves into global culture, a process that involved both goods and people, although it could be said that the greatest riches of the Americas, their philosophies and cosmologies, have sadly struggled to make as much of an impact.
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