On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe, by Caroline Dodds Pennock

This book is an example of the worst sort of contemporary historical trends, written and “researched” during Covid times by the laziest sort of historian, someone who imagines facts where not in evidence, speculates on the slightest hint of possibilities, and never lets the nature of the historical record get in the way of pushing a leftist agenda. The hypocrisy and lack of professional integrity for this historian–and others of her ilk–is quite breathtaking. Her desire to absolve the native American tribes of savagery (in large part because they can be interpreted of living according to the neo-pagan ways of many contemporary morons of the academic class like the author), leads the author to the rather farcical conclusion (expressed in the title) that the Native Americans were truly civilized and that the Europeans were savages. The accounts for this, of course, were written by largely dissident European voices for political effect–mostly people of the same moron class as the author, unfortunately, and yet the author takes these for authentic truths rather than partisan political records, and takes them as the genuine feelings of the traveling people of North America themselves, most of whom found themselves as susceptible to European diseases in Europe as their kinfolk were in their native areas. The result is a book that is nearly fact-free, an impressive achievement for an ambitious historian who will likely gain a lot of social credit from this intellectually and morally worthless screed against European society and its settler colonies.

This book is nearly 250 pages of tedious and often highly made-up material based on the slimmest of archival sources that the author was able to read during Covid times when she was unable to engage in research but still had the itch to write historical fantasy. The book begins with a timeline, a laughable section called “why words matters,” in which the author lectures the reader on leftist language policing, and a somewhat large introduction where the author discusses her vapid and biased approach. The book’s contents are then divided into six chapters which relate the boxes in which she puts the sort of interactions between natives of the Americas and Europeans. She starts with a chapter on slavery (1), which argues for a broad definition of slavery that includes peonage, indentured labor, and working off debts, so as to make Europeans seem as exploitative as possible against others. The author then spends a chapter talking about go-betweens, often of mixed parentage (and thus both of European and native background) who served as diplomats and mediators of the interactions between Europeans and native peoples (2). This is followed by a chapter that discusses natives who served as married or blood relations to Europeans (often also of mixed backgrounds) who found themselves between the Old and New worlds (3). The author also spends a lot of time talking about the stuff of life that was originally to be found in the New World that eventually greatly enriched the cuisine and lives of the people of the Old World, ranging from potatoes to chili peppers to corn to chocolate to tobacco (4). This is followed by a discussion of later diplomatic efforts in which the local tribes of the Americas, quite understandably, sought the protection and support of European nations in their own squabbles and vice versa (5). The last chapter then discusses the role of some indigenous peoples as being subjects of spectacle and curiosity for Europeans, something that was almost certainly true the other way around, though it is framed negatively here against Europeans because the author is too biased to recognize mutual strangeness well (6). The book then ends with an afterword, glossary, acknowledgements, notes, picture credits, and an index.

Whether one deals with the naming of people or peoples, the author’s attempt to psychoanalyze people of native and mixed background and their reception into European society and the often ambiguous position they found themselves in when seeking to represent themselves in metropolitan centers of imperial power in Europe, or whether one deals with the author’s continual attempts to bend the logic of her writing into pretzels to simultaneously absolve the natives of any savagery (even accounting to whitewashing the fact of human sacrifice) while at the same time condemning the Europeans of savagery (on grounds that resemble the double standards offered by contemporary leftists in all manner of areas), this book is complete trash. About the only worth that this book has–and that worth is slight–is that knowing how ridiculous the arguments and the level of scholarship in this book is present, any book which cites this book as an authority is similarly devoid of worth. Few books offer such a clear-cut example of an author who lacks any sort of integrity. To call this work intellectual prostitution is to be unkind to the superior moral virtue of prostitutes when compared with contemporary academics like this author. The level of fiction in this book is such that the author makes large arguments about the behavior of natives and Europeans out of possibly legendary accounts of people who may not have ever existed but whose existence is viewed as convenient to the twisted and perverted case of the writer, and hence is considered to be true. Even Parson Weems, for all the criticism he receives as an author, is at least of superior historical judgment to this author when it comes to dealing with the colonial period, and as someone who is less credulous when it comes to convenient myths and tall tales that would have suited his purposes.