This is a solid look at how Indigeneous Americans encountered early modern Europe: from the enslaved women who brought knowledge of various foodways to Spain and Portugal, to the visitors to various royal courts in western Europe, to the Inuk infant who was displayed in a London tavern before his untimely death so far from home.

Caroline Dodds Pennock brings together a very fragmentary sourcebase, and does a great job at reading it closely and with sensitivity. I'm a bit bemused by the other reviews I've seen on here which complain either that Dodds Pennock isn't covering "new" ground, or that she engages in repetitive/pointless speculation about people and events. I don't think that's a fair reading of what she's trying to do here, which is to think carefully through the nature of the surviving sources, to think about what they can (and cannot) show us, and to walk the reader through how a historian thinks about these issues. On Savage Shores is a book that's clearly written in the tradition of works inspired by Stoler's Along the Archival Grain and Saidiya Hartman's "Venus in Two Acts", scholarship which demonstrates that the archives are never neutral.

A powerful reminder that encounter is always a mutual act.