Scan barcode
A review by rosiecotton_dancing
On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe by Caroline Dodds Pennock
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
Few people walking past St Olaves, a tiny medieval church on the corner of Seething Lane, know of the two Inuit buried in its graveyard. The church looks, from the outside, much as it did in the 1570s, though it had to be restored after the Blitz, having survived the Great Fire of London intact. The graveyard's most famous remains belong to the diarist Samuel Pepys, who worshipped and was buried at St Olave's, along with his wife. It is a stark contrast: the two Inuit who left so few traces, whose opinions we can only guess at through the sparse words of others, and who lie buried and unmarked; and, nearby, one of the most prolific journal writers in history, a man who left almost no inner thought unrecorded, about whom we know every tiny detail of his experience, buried in honour under the nave, close to a memorial of himself. Pepys is larger in history than he was in life, but we have to look hard at the past to see tiny Nutaaq, peering out at us from his mother's hood.