... a work of historical recovery ... The history examined here has been carefully assembled from shattered fragments; tiny shards of historical detail from which Pennock builds a larger mosaic ... In one of her early chapters Pennock urges us to to “imagine the sixteenth century a little differently”. Despite the enormous challenges presented by the sources and the inevitably fragmentary nature of the lives that appear from within them, few books make as compelling a case for such a reimagining.
Determined not to be clouded by a white imperial perspective, Dodds Pennock tries hard to avoid the pitfalls of traditional 'explorer' narratives. That is to be applauded, but occasionally her overly righteous academic analysis pulls the reader too far from the experiences of her subjects. Her mission to change our perspective can also veer towards the moralistic, which is a shame, because the stories and lives she has unearthed are fascinating in themselves ... Mostly, though, Dodds Pennock’s unpeeling of the indigenous experience from obscure manuscripts and her imaginative attempts to fill the gaps is a much-needed and refreshing take on our all-too Eurocentric telling of the past.
In principle all this sounds fascinating, and at its heart is a very imaginative premise. What undermines it, though, is that Dodds Pennock’s stories don’t go anywhere ... On Savage Shores isn’t just a history book but an earnest polemic, ending with a hand-wringing tirade about western museums as sites of 'oppression' ... Dodds Pennock’s publisher claims her book “shatters Eurocentric understandings of the Age of Discovery”. That strikes me as completely untrue, since so many historians have done similar work already. Indeed, I suspect many readers will find it preachy, overwrought and sometimes downright ridiculous.
Unhelpfully, Caroline Dodds Pennock excludes indigenous people’s archives as a means of illuminating their feelings. She mistakenly supposes that ‘we rarely are able to hear indigenous voices’; but she is right in saying ‘it is easier to find documents about European attitudes to indigenous peoples than about indigenous attitudes to Europeans’ ... She assembles her tales diligently, albeit selectively, but quotes no sources to enhance our picture of their perceptions. Instead, she falls back on putting thoughts into their heads, or speculating on what they ‘must’ have felt ... Ignorance and insensitivity combine, and the author’s lack of imaginative identification with people in the past is troubling.
... a difficult, dense read that soundly challenges many modern ideas ... Will fit well in public and academic libraries with collections in the history of the Americas.
Pennock is good on the particularities... which she describes pithily and sympathetically. When it comes to the general, however, she is all over the place. Her estimates of the numbers of indigenous Americans in Europe are understandably vague, given the patchiness of records. But they are also consistently inconsistent ... If Pennock had trimmed her ambitions to the shortcomings of the sources, this would scarcely matter. Yet for some reason, they lead her to double down ... That reason may lie in the sense of mission that infuses this book. Pennock seems to have conceived of her work not merely as an act of recovery but as one of reparation too.
Diligently and creatively mining primary source material, Dodds Pennock illuminates the Indigenous impact on European culture, including... the invaluable, if often unacknowledged, role Native peoples served in helping Europeans navigate the diverse cultures and geographies of colonized lands. This innovative and powerful account breaks down long-standing historical assumptions.
In bringing these stories to light, Pennock creates a sharp challenge to Eurocentrism during the Colonial age ... A convincing history of Indigenous peoples’ deep integration into—and surprising influence on—European politics and culture.
