When we realise that there were thousands of Indigenous people in Europe from as early as the 1490s, it becomes impossible to dismiss them as insignificant oddities. Across Spain and Portugal, France, Italy, England, and the Low Countries, Europeans were meeting Indigenous people, as diplomats, performers, translators, sailors, servants, family members, and enslaved people. A majority were involuntary migrants -- kidnapped or coerced from their homes -- but there were also a significant number of free people, travelling individually or in small groups. Most went to Spain and Portugal rather than England, the Tudors being busy with their domestic issues and giving little time to overseas exploration until Elizabeth I's disastrous Roanoke venture in the 1580s. But even England had several high-profile Native visitors, including Manteo and Wanchese, the Coastal Algonquin men who -- as we'll see -- became a critical part of early imperial enterprises, translating for Walter Ralegh and helping to compose an orthography for the Ossomocomuck Angonquian language in London. These men's explicit role as go-betweens, helping to translate the novelties of the 'New World' and inform European views of the Americas, is obvious, but a similar role was being played by Indigenous people at every level of European society, from the enslaved to the nobility.

Caroline Dodds Pennock, a British historian who specializes in Aztec history, took on an ambitious project: searching the historic record (and drawing on other historians' work) for people from the Americas who went to Europe (for both brief and extended periods) during the first century or two of globalization. The documents that have survived include very little actual narration (or extremely biased narration), so often she (and others who came before her) must rely on court documents (including appeals to the European courts to right the wrongs perpetrated by conquistadors and other Europeans), financial records (such as expenses approved to clothe, house, and otherwise support foreign royalty and others out of the crown's coffers), and other vague references to visitors from the Western Hemisphere. A certain amount of speculation is necessary to put the pieces together, but at times it feels like entire pages are constructed out of Ms. Pennock's conjectures about what people might have experienced and how they might have perceived European culture based on the differences from their own cultures.

Overall, a fairly interesting study, taking a different perspective on history, but less speculation could have made it a stronger (and shorter) read.