Like other historians writing about the age of encounter and conquest that swept across the Americas from the late 15th century, Caroline Dodds Pennock begins her new book with an account of a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. What is different is that this journey, of 1519, was from west to east – from the so-called “New World” back towards Europe.
The ship was loaded with so much treasure that gold was used as ballast; a first addictive hit of the vast mineral wealth of the Americas that was to flow around an increasingly interconnected global economy. However, it is the people on board, rather than the treasure in the hold, that are the focus here: not the European conquistadors but the indigenous people, in this case a group of Totonac men and women from what is now Mexico.
