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

Author:Caroline Dodds Pennock [Pennock, Caroline Dodds]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

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The Q’eqchi’ chiefs brought an array of other foods and plants from their homeland, including chillies, beans and maize. The abundance of American plant life was remarkable, and fundamentally changed the European diet, while the introduction of European livestock and farming methods to the Indigenous world transformed their lived environment in myriad ways, reshaping the ecology and remaking the land. Before contact with the Americas, Europe (and indeed the rest of the world) had no potatoes, squash, maize or beans.[*15] Many of these foodstuffs became entangled with European beliefs about America and its original inhabitants, being viewed with suspicion or curiosity. Even chocolate was at first viewed with misgivings. After spending time in the coastal regions of what is now Nicaragua and Costa Rica, Oviedo found the Nicarao practice of drinking chocolate mixed with achiote spice repellent, because it dyed the lips and mouths red. Believing that ‘these people liked drinking blood’, the effect was a ‘horrendous thing’.[35]

The way in which potatoes filtered into European diets is fairly typical of responses to Indigenous foods. Columbus first brought sweet potatoes from Hispaniola in 1493 and, although it is frequently claimed that the common potato only made its way into European diets in the 1570s, it already formed part of many Atlantic ships’ stores by the mid-sixteenth century. Indigenous foods may not have been fashionable among the elite – unless they were an extraordinary novelty – but they were seen as more than acceptable for the poor, enslaved and ordinary workers. In Seville, unsurprisingly, potatoes were common in the marketplace by the early 1570s, and they were being cultivated in gardens as far afield as Germany and Italy by the following decade. When J. G. Hawkes and J. Francisco-Ortega analysed the sixteenth-century account books of the Hospital de la Sangre – a hospital for the poor and infirm in Seville, and hardly a place for extravagance – they found potatoes, squashes, and chillies among their purchases. Potatoes in particular, seem to have been bought in quite significant quantities from the 1580s. Working people understood not only the nutritional value of these tubers, but also their relative obscurity from the authorities who often requisitioned a share of their crops. In England, the account books of the Earl of Northumberland show expensive, imported, sweet potatoes among the purchases for the supplies of Alnwick Castle in the late-sixteenth century and they were clearly common enough by the turn of the seventeenth century for Shakespeare to have Falstaff cry ‘let the sky rain potatoes’! While ordinary people seized on the humble potato, and colonists quickly saw their value, in Europe the elites viewed them either as cures or causes of disease. In 1619 they were banned by Burgundy as a possible cause of leprosy (due to the marks on the skin), and just the following year they were being applauded by the English doctor Tobias Venner as a cure for consumption (tuberculosis), who found potatoes ‘surpassing the nourishment of all other roots or fruits’.[36]

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