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Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Samba schools used the carnival to foreground overlooked histories"
Kavita Puri on the important role of carnivals in remembering neglected histories
I was recently in Rio de Janeiro, in a warehouse on the outskirts of the city, admiring some of the brightly coloured floats that had featured in this year’s world-famous carnival. Each spring, just before the start of Lent, hundreds of thousands of people attend the parades in the city’s Sambadrome stadium and enjoy watching the floats. Like pieces of art many metres high, they are designed and intricately handmade in Rio’s numerous escolas de samba (samba schools), each strongly identified with a local neighbourhood. The schools are organised into leagues for the carnival, during which they compete for the prestigious design award. Pre-Lenten festivities in Brazil began in the early 18th century, during the Portuguese colonial era. The Catholic influence is evident in the name of the event, which is believed to derive from the Latin carnem vale (farewell to meat) or carnem levare (remove meat), referring to the 40-day period of abstinence leading up to Easter. It’s said that the earliest form of the festivities in Brazil evolved from the pre-Lenten Entrudo, celebrated by immigrants from other Portuguese colonies on the Azores, Madeira and Cabo Verde. During that festival, people soaked each other with buckets of water and hurled mud and food, wreaking cheery mayhem that often degenerated into street brawls. Read more | Brazil: a society shaped by slavery In the 19th century, more organised parades attracted elite participants: even the Portuguese emperor joined in the celebrations, together with aristocrats wearing masks and extravagant costumes. Carnival balls were arranged, with music from Europe such as polkas and waltzes becoming popular. By the middle of that century, street parades with horse-drawn floats and military bands had become the focal points. It wasn’t until the early 20th century that samba – the music and dance style most strongly associated with carnival today – was developed by Afro-Brazilians whose ancestors had been transported to South America, many of them enslaved, over the preceding centuries. Brazil declared independence from Portugal in 1822, but slavery was not abolished there until 1888 – more than 65 years later. One of the first escolas de samba was established in 1928 in the barrio (district) of Mangueira, a little west of the city’s historic centre. More soon sprang up, enjoying strong community links – particularly in the poorer favelas (shanty towns), where they offered people a way to come together and organise themselves while avoiding police oppression. The schools’ theme songs and floats became outlets for political expression, voicing concerns about dictatorship, hunger, the environment, education – and, perhaps most tellingly, the Afro-Brazilian experience, social inequalities and indigenous rights. The schools have also used appearances in the competition – now held in the Sambadrome stadium built for the purpose in 1984 – to foreground overlooked histories. Last year, the Portela school highlighted the extraordinary story of Luíz Gama. Born in 1830 to a trafficked African woman, he escaped enslavement and went on to become a lawyer (in fact, he is considered by many to be Brazil’s first black lawyer) and a leading abolitionist. His story was retold through four incarnations of his figure on a float. Watched live by tens of thousands of spectators in the Sambadrome and broadcast around the country, it introduced him to a vast new audience. Read more | Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "We mustn’t overlook the toll of surfacing traumatic histories" The music, dance, costumes and extraordinary floats of carnival represent a huge source of local pride. The schools spend much of each year raising money, working in the communities, and planning and preparing for the next competition. Though a joyous and hugely fun event for all, Rio’s carnival plays an important role in highlighting long-neglected stories, histories and issues. This column was first published in the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
"If you represent Pinochet in this case, I will divorce you”: the sensational trial of the Chilean dictator
Philippe Sands tells Rob Attar about his involvement in the sensational trial of the Chilean dictator, and how it connects to a Nazi on the run
Rob Attar: In 1998, the former dictator of Chile, Augusto Pinochet, was arrested in London. How seismic a moment was this? Philippe Sands: I remember the moment of learning of Pinochet’s arrest. It was a Saturday afternoon. It happened to be my birthday, and I was settling down to watch the football results at five o’clock when the news came on and they announced that Augusto Pinochet had been arrested for murder and crimes against humanity. It was huge. It was the first time that a former head of state, while travelling abroad, had been arrested on international crimes. Someone not familiar with the story might wonder why this was happening in London, not Santiago. What can you tell us about the geography of these events? By way of background, in September 1973 Augusto Pinochet, head of the Chilean military, seized power in a coup d’etat and remained there for 17 years. Over that period, hundreds of thousands were arrested, tens of thousands were tortured and ‘disappeared’, and many remain so to this day. There are about 1,300 people unaccounted for. This had attracted considerable interest around the world, because these are actions that would be characterised as international crimes within the meaning of the 1945 Nuremberg trials and definitions. And that is coupled with a principle known as universal jurisdiction, where when certain crimes take place, the courts of any country in the world may exercise jurisdiction. In October 1998 a Spanish judge named Baltasar Garzón decided to issue an arrest warrant for Senator Pinochet, while he was in London receiving medical treatment, for international crimes. That was the start of this part of the story. The connection with Spain is interesting because Pinochet’s relationship with the west was quite complex. He had a lot of friends in western countries, particularly America and Britain, for example. Pinochet did indeed have friends, on the political right, in the United States and in Britain. He was a good friend of Margaret Thatcher, and, in fact, shortly before he was arrested, they spent time together. Spain had also long had an interest in him, because many Chilean refugees who had fled his regime ended up in Spain, and indeed it was the relations and descendants of some of his victims in Spain who went to the legal authorities and got the proceedings up and running. To put this in its broader context, for people in Spain who had been opposed to General Franco, there was a connection between Franco and Pinochet. And, in fact, Pinochet was one of the very few international leaders to attend Franco’s funeral. For many people in Spain, if you were for or against Franco, you were also for or against Pinochet. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/05/GettyImages-524132324-a0cf772.jpg" width="2717" height="1809" alt="3 men in uniforms, two wearing sunglasses. They are all saluting. Alongside them, a soldier plays a large drum" title="Pinochet (centre) pictured in Santiago in September 1973 shortly after seizing power in a military coup. Over the following 17 years, his regime would torture and ‘disappear’ tens of thousands of Chileans" /> How did you become involved in this case? After Pinochet was arrested, I did what everyone else did, which was to follow the news with great interest. I am a teacher of international law, so this was fascinating for me. I did a few newspaper interviews and a couple for the BBC, and then I went off to Paris for a day to attend a ceremony at the grave of my grandfather, who had recently died. As I was leaving my hotel, I received a phone call from my barristers’ chambers saying that Senator Pinochet’s lawyers had been in touch, and that they would like to instruct me to be part of the team arguing that, as a former head of state, he had complete immunity from the jurisdiction of the English courts – including in relation to international crime. Because I was off to the cemetery, I said: “I need to call you back tomorrow once I’m back in London.” I got to the cemetery and there met my wife who had come in separately. She has a Spanish mother and is descended from refugees from the civil war in Spain. So these issues are pertinent in her family. I explained to her what had happened. To be honest, I told her with some excitement that Pinochet’s lawyers had been in touch and that I might be involved in the case. This was the biggest international criminal case since Nuremberg and that really was rather exciting. And she asked me: “Will you do it?” Read more | How Italian dictator Benito Mussolini became the first face of fascism I said: “Well, you know the cab rank principle: the rule that requires barristers to take on every case that comes in, just as though you’re a taxi driver. You can’t say no to someone because you don’t like the cut of their jib or their politics. So, yes, I am going to do it.” And she looked at me again and said: “So will you do it?” And I said: “Yes, I’ve got no option but to do it.” She said: “Okay, well, you can if you want to. But if you do it, I will divorce you.” And that, of course, was because of her own family background. This was 25 years ago, and we are still very happily married. So I opted against divorce and against acting for Pinochet, and thought that that was the end of the matter. But then, about four days later, the other side came along, Human Rights Watch, and said we would like to instruct you, and I acted for them as counsel. How were you able to avoid representing Pinochet, considering that cab rank principle? The beauty of the English Bar is that for every rule there are at least 37 exceptions. And one of them is known as the professional embarrassment exception. About five days before my trip to Paris I was asked to give an interview to Zeinab Badawi for the BBC World Service, and she asked me a series of very well-prepared questions. One of them was: has he got a right to immunity? And I said: “We don’t know because this has never happened before. We’ve never had a case in which a former head of state has turned up in another country and been subjected to the jurisdiction of that country’s courts. Frankly I don’t know what the English courts will do.” But she pushed and asked me: “What do you think ought to happen?” And I said: “I can quite see why you would have immunity for a serving head of state, but I can’t really see the logic for a former head of state. So, no, in my view, there should not be an entitlement to immunity.” Those words, publicly stated, meant that I would effectively have been arguing for Senator Pinochet in the context of having made a public statement that he should not have immunity. And on that basis, I was able to decline to accept instructions. So, was the key issue here not so much whether Pinochet was responsible for these crimes, but whether as a former head of state he was immune from prosecution? In the English proceedings, which lasted for about 18 months, there was no question of making a determination as to whether he was responsible for any of the alleged acts or crimes. That was always going to be a matter for the courts of Spain, if he was extradited. The only issue for the English courts was whether, as a former head of state, he could claim immunity. And that was a completely new situation. We were in untried and untested waters. What were your experiences of being in court for this case? How different was it from other trials you’ve witnessed? I was there every day; I didn’t miss a single moment. It ended up being very complex, with three separate proceedings before the House of Lords. And it was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before, and nothing I have experienced since. Everyone who was in the room – which was packed with lawyers, observers, journalists and interested bystanders – understood that this was something of huge significance because it would set a precedent at a time when the world was changing and the rules of law were changing. Each day was electric, even though much of the legal procedure was quite mundane, dull and technical. The fact that people were so divided in the room, the fact that the stakes were so high, and the fact that the arguments were so novel made it unique in my professional experience. Read more | What the OJ Simpson trial revealed about modern America The second key character in your book is Walter Rauff, an important figure in the Nazi state who later ended up in Chile. What can you tell us about him? 38 Londres Street tells two stories in parallel. I’d been involved in the Pinochet case from 1998 to 2000, and about 15 years later I started working on a book called The Ratline, where the main protagonist is a man called Otto Wächter, a senior Nazi who was responsible for mass murder in occupied Poland, including the city of Lviv, where my grandfather was from. He’d had a role in the elimination of my grandfather’s entire family. I was doing some archival research and came across a letter written in May 1949 to Wächter from someone living in Damascus, Syria. And the writer of the letter was Walter Rauff, whose name was vaguely familiar to me, but I wasn’t sure why. I started doing some research and quickly learned that Walter Rauff was the man who operated, invented and ran the mobile gas vans that were used in 1941 and 1942 in Nazi-occupied Europe to eliminate groups of up to 50 people at a time, by locking them in the back of a van and gassing them to death. He had been hunted after the war for mass murder, but had escaped and disappeared. I carried on reading and learned that Rauff had ended up in Chile, living in one of the most southerly towns in the world: Punta Arenas. And the idea arrived in the back of my head: could there be a connection between Walter Rauff and Augusto Pinochet? That became the seed of this book. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/05/2HTD2JP-e5b6549.jpg" width="3267" height="2176" alt="A black and white image of two men in military uniform. The person in the foreground where's a cap with two cords across the front" title="Walter Rauff pictured during his arrest in 1945. He later escaped from Allied custody and was living in Chile when Pinochet came to power" /> It wasn’t a secret that Rauff had moved to Chile after the war, so why was he never brought to justice for his role in the Holocaust? Rauff ended up in Punta Arenas in about 1958, and became the manager of a king crab cannery, processing crab meat for export to Europeans. Then, in December 1962, the West Germans finally caught up with him and they issued an arrest warrant, indicting him for mass murder and sending a request for his extradition from Chile. He was arrested and taken to Santiago where he was subjected to legal proceedings. The issue in his case was not immunity from jurisdiction of the Chilean courts, but whether the Chilean courts had the right to extradite him to West Germany. In Chile there was a 15-year statute of limitations. In other words, you can’t extradite or prosecute someone if more than 15 years has passed since the alleged crime was committed. In this case, more than 15 years had passed, and the Chilean Supreme Court ruled by six votes to one in 1963 that he could not be extradited. So Rauff went back to Punta Arenas and resumed his life as the manager of a king crab cannery. And all this time he remained unrepentant? He was an unrepentant, racist, homophobic antisemite throughout his entire life. To the end of his days, he celebrated the birthday of Adolf Hitler and longed for a return to the good old days. So I think we can conclude he was not a delightful individual with the kind of values and views we can celebrate. On the other hand, I’ve come to know his grandchildren, who describe a decent and loving grandfather. He was the most famous Nazi living in Chile, and after the proceedings in Santiago, when he returned to Punta Arenas, everyone knew who he was, and that did not stop many of them from taking him to their breasts and showing friendship. I’ve met some of the people he employed in that period. They describe a stern, unbending individual who treated his workers well and with respect, but was prone to rages and fury and had strongly held political views. A central question of your book is whether Rauff became involved in the repressive apparatus of the Pinochet regime. I won’t ask you to give away your conclusion, but could you tell us about the kinds of things that took place at the time? The year after Pinochet took power, he created a secret intelligence service called the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA). And the DINA was authorised to do anything necessary to take out opponents of the regime, including to kill or to disappear them. The DINA established a series of detention centres and torture centres and places of disappearance. These were not only in obscure places; many of them were in downtown Santiago. And in fact, the one that gives the book its title is in a small street in central Santiago. Number 38 was the former headquarters of the Socialist Party. It is a central place in relation to Pinochet’s apparatus, and, without giving too much away, the events there and what certain detainees saw or heard became an absolutely crucial part of the story in relation to whether Walter Rauff had any role in all of this. Why was it so important for you to establish whether Rauff was involved in Pinochet’s repressions? Maybe because I’m an obsessive. In my own household, years ago, people wanted me to stop talking about Rauff because they were sick to death of it. But I think it’s that litigator’s instinct: you have a sort of sixth sense that there is something there and you can’t let go. You leave no stone unturned in wanting to get to the truth. There’s the expression ‘there’s no smoke without fire’, and there was too much smoke. There were too many people who said to me: “I saw him”, or “I heard him”, or “I heard word of him”, and I needed to get to the heart of those claims. In the end I did, but it was immensely time-consuming. Read more | The "outwardly respectable" man who had a body in his basement: how the Dr Crippen case shocked Britain My first interview for the book, which was with Baltasar Garzón, the Spanish judge, was in 2015. We’re now in 2025 and the book is just about to come out. So it was a 10-year investigation. And it was a double investigation. I was looking not only at the question of whether there had been a connection between Rauff and Pinochet, but also looking for the answer to another question: how did Pinochet end up back in Chile? Because, coming back to the earlier part of our conversation, the Pinochet case lasted a very long time before the English courts. And in the end, things took a strange turn. There were allegations that the old man had fallen ill. He couldn’t face trial and he must go home. My instinct was that some sort of a deal had been done to get him back, but there was no evidence of any deal. And so essentially I went on a double investigative path. Was there a deal to get Pinochet home? Did Pinochet work with Rauff? And that double story reaches a climax only right at the end of the book. There are two words that come through a lot in your book: ‘immunity’ and ‘impunity’. How far do the stories of Pinochet and Rauff illuminate those concepts? The concepts of immunity and impunity are very significant for our times. Immunity connotes a sort of freedom from being subjected to criminal or legal process or prosecution. And impunity connotes a total absence of justice. And I think in the case of Walter Rauff, who was involved in mass murder and never held to account, the case of impunity reigns absolutely. The case of Augusto Pinochet is more complex. He did not succeed in his claim to immunity and so the proceedings went on. But, for reasons I describe in the book, he was eventually allowed to leave the United Kingdom and go back to Santiago early. He never was sent to Spain, though the idea was that he would face justice in Chile, and to a certain extent he did. At the time of his death in 2006 he was indicted, he was under house arrest, his reputation was in tatters. So that is not an example of total impunity. But he was never convicted of a crime – and, for many, that still remains a very painful fact. This article was first published in the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Shipwrecked: the 18th-century looters who endured five months of hell
In the brutal world of 18th-century privateering, one remarkable expedition stands above the rest. The tumultuous voyage would lead to disaster, dissention, and one of the most desperate gambles in the annals of naval history. Matthew Doherty tells the tale...
In the dying light of 25 May 1720, the 22-gun privateer ship Speedwell was trapped against a jagged, rocky coastline in the lonely waters of the Pacific. Anchored off the Juan Fernández Islands, its captain – George Shelvocke – had noted a “hard gale” developing out to sea. Before they could slip away there came “a great, tumbling swell” that threw the little wooden vessel hard into the rocks. The ship began to break to pieces – and Shelvocke had to hold fast to a scrap of rigging to avoid being thrown overboard. Struggling to shore, the bewildered crew collected just in time to witness all three masts of their ship collapse. Shelvocke recalled poignantly that, “Words cannot express the wretched condition we were in, or the surprise we were under at being so unfortunately shipwrecked, or the dread we had upon us of starving on the uninhabited island we were thrown upon.” The story of Speedwell’s wrecking began two years before. In 1718, a meeting took place in London between a cabal of less-than-reputable English merchants who saw a golden opportunity in the coming war with Spain. It was Spain that had control of South America, and Spain that regularly shipped wealth from its colonies back home. This cabal called themselves the Gentleman Adventurers. Headed up by Edward Hughes, a former Royal Navy man-turned-wealthy trader, they decided to finance a privateering expedition to the far side of the world. What was privateering? Privateering was legalised piracy. A ship’s captain would be granted a commission from a government to cruise against its nation’s enemies. But the line between privateering and piracy often blurred, especially in the lawless waters outside Europe. The aim of the Gentleman Adventurers’ expedition was simple – loot the Pacific side of Spanish America for all it was worth. This would involve seizing Spanish ships, raiding Spanish harbours, and, if possible, carrying off a great prize of the South Seas – one of the silver-laden La Nao de China, or Manila Galleon. While the plan was ambitious, there was every reason to hope for success. Previous English sea dogs, including privateers Sir Francis Drake and Woodes Rogers, had made their fortunes raiding the same waters, with the latter returning to England in 1711 with loot worth 200,000 pounds (31 million dollars in today’s money). Choosing a commander The Gentleman Adventurers were quick to purchase two ships and hire crew. But the question of who should command the expedition plagued their discussions for months. George Shelvocke was not the obvious choice for a privateer captain – at least at first glance. He was born around 1675 and entered the Royal Navy when he was just 15 years old. By 1703, he was the sailing master of HMS Scarborough. However, he was paid off and made redundant in 1713, having never commanded a vessel of his own. Read more | The sinking of the Gloucester: the shipwreck that rocked Restoration England For the Gentleman Adventurers, connection appears to have counted for far more than experience. Hughes and Shelvocke were on friendly terms, having both been shipmates during the recent War of Spanish Succession. A chance meeting in London led the pair to Hughes’ lavish country mansion. Shelvocke – who was living in poverty – was awed by the wealth of his former shipmate. When told that an expedition was to be launched, he jumped at the chance and immediately agreed to sail as a lowly boatswain’s mate, if necessary. We can only imagine Shelvocke’s speechlessness when Hughes offered him command of the entire venture. Hughes likely thought that Shelvocke’s financial woes would keep him loyal to his backers – that he would, in effect, be a staunch 'company man'. How wrong he turned out to be. The plan Two ships would be sent on the expedition: the Success, under Captain John Clipperton, and the Speedwell, under Shelvocke. Clipperton was a South Seas veteran with a volatile temper and a tendency to drink in front of his crew. He had previously led a mutiny with 20 other men on an earlier expedition commanded by William Dampier, a famous buccaneer and scientist. Shelvocke and Clipperton were both extremely quarrelsome and mistrustful of one another. Clipperton deeply resented the fact that Shelvocke was well-regarded by Hughes; Shelvocke, meanwhile, believed Clipperton was little more than an incompetent alcoholic. Shelvocke’s ship, the Speedwell of “200 tonnes, 22 guns, and 106 souls” had a mixed bag for a crew. Some were men like him – skilled ex-sailors out of work after the War of the Spanish Succession fought between 1701–14. Others were “wretched landsmen” who knew little of the sea and less of navy discipline. But all the key officers were veterans, including a sailing master named Blowfield Coldsea. Early calamities Before the expedition could begin, a series of misjudged decisions occurred. These included overlavish, brandy-fueled parties hosted by Shelvocke; the acceptance of a series of dubious privateering commissions from the Holy Roman emperor of Austria; and the unapproved hiring of 96 Flemish sailors. Because of these alarming developments, the Gentleman Adventurers (Hughes included) decided to transfer command of the expedition from Shelvocke to Clipperton. Shelvocke would still captain the Speedwell, but he would do so under Clipperton’s orders. The growing resentment between the two captains subsequently deteriorated into mutual loathing. Read more | Stede Bonnet, Gentleman Pirate: how a mid-life crisis created the 'worst pirate of all time' In December 1718, Britain declared war on Spain in what would become known as the War of the Quadruple Alliance. English privateering commissions were quickly obtained for the Success and Speedwell, while the Flemings in the Speedwell were unceremoniously returned to Flanders. None of this sorry affair boded well for the future of the expedition. But too much money was riding on Shelvocke and Clipperton to delay the scheme any further. On 13 February 1719, the ships set sail into the Channel. Speedwell separates Ferocious winter storms battered the privateers as they slowly fought against wind and tide. The landsmen in Speedwell performed particularly badly; many were seasick, while others were afraid to venture above deck, convinced the ship would break to pieces on the towering waves. On Sunday, 15 February, Shelvocke brought Speedwell close to the Success and used a speaking trumpet to shout that his ship was “crank” – in this case meaning she was top-heavy and unseaworthy. Clipperton either did not hear the message or chose not to reply. Slowly but surely, Speedwell fell behind Success until around midnight of the 20th, when they lost sight of her altogether. That Shelvocke, an experienced mariner, should have only then realised his ship was unseaworthy is probably unlikely. William Betagh, the Irish captain of marines on Speedwell, certainly believed that the ship was not so “crank” as Shelvocke made out, and that his captain was using Speedwell’s slowness as an excuse to separate from Clipperton. Matters came to a head one evening when Betagh proposed a toast to the Gentlemen Adventurers. Shelvocke, apparently drunk, flung a tankard at Betagh’s head and screamed, “Sir, you insult my authority! You can be sure that the precious owners will be cunning enough on our return to defraud us of our proper dividends!” Whatever the truth of this incident, Betagh and Shelvocke remained on acrimonious terms throughout the rest of their lives. Read more | Was walking the plank a real pirate punishment? A slow run across the Atlantic allowed Shelvocke to whip his landsmen into something resembling an organised body of sailors. At noon on Saturday 14 November, after a passage around Cape Horn marred by atrocious weather, Speedwell finally sighted the coast of Chile. Shelvocke and his band of gold-hungry raiders had just broken into the Spanish Pacific. The next months brought some success. Minor Spanish vessels were taken, and valuable plunder gained. Shelvocke’s second in command, Simon Hatley, and marine captain William Betagh were both sent to crew prize ships, reducing Speedwell’s number of competent sailors. Before long, the whole of Spanish America was on the alert that an English ship was ranging along the coast. Speedwell vs Peregrine Speedwell’s most significant action during this time was the capture of the town of Payta. After Shelvocke’s small band of sailors (dressed in grenadier caps to make them look fiercer) stormed the beach, they put flight to the local Spanish militia. Most of Payta’s civilians had fled along with their valuables, so Shelvocke threatened to torch the town unless a ransom of 10,000 pieces of eight was paid. The governor pleaded with the privateers not to burn the Catholic churches, requesting time to come up with the money. After the deadline elapsed, Shelvocke ordered the town (churches included) to be set ablaze. The wanton destruction was only cut short when the arrival of a 50-gun Spanish warship – the Peregrine – struck panic into Shelvocke’s privateers. Sailing master Blowfield Coldsea had been left in command of Speedwell with just nine men. To make matters worse, a contrary wind had run Speedwell aground. Peregrine approached at speed, but Coldsea was ready, firing off six guns so smartly that the Spanish ship slowed, with many of her crew deserting their guns. Nevertheless, the Spanish captain eventually persuaded his men to return to their stations and let loose a thundering broadside. Listen on the podcast The golden age of piracy: everything you wanted to know Listen now <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2021/05/Pod-Rebecca-Simon-WL-cdf513e.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Rebecca Simon responds to your questions on the ‘golden age’ of piracy, when bands of buccaneers menaced the high seas, preying on merchant vessels" title="Rebecca Simon responds to your questions on the ‘golden age’ of piracy, when bands of buccaneers menaced the high seas, preying on merchant vessels" /> Shelvocke ferried his men back to the Speedwell as gun smoke obscured both ships. As the last man came aboard, Shelvocke cut his anchor, then engaged in an hour-long firefight with the Spanish behemoth. Speedwell finally managed to slip away, and despite sustaining severe damage to the hull and much of her rigging shot to pieces, not a single casualty had been sustained. Speedwell now limped to the Juan Fernández Archipelago [off the coast of Chile] – one of the agreed rendezvous points with Clipperton. It was at Juan Fernández that the famous mariner Alexander Selkirk (the real-life inspiration for Robinson Crusoe) had been marooned. Shelvocke hoped that Clipperton would already be there, ready to resupply him, but the Success was nowhere in sight. Further calamity occurred on the night of 25 May 1720, when a fierce gale blew Speedwell onto the rocks, breaking the ship to pieces and stranding the privateers ashore. The Castaways They managed to salvage little from the wreck, save one cask of beef, some rotten bread, and a few of the navigational instruments. The exhausted men attempted to rest their weary bodies “in a very wet, uncomfortable condition”. Next morning the survivors collected on the beach. Shelvocke took a quick roll call and found only one man had died during the disaster – seaman John Hannah. Recriminations over the wrecking flared up immediately and Shelvocke noted the pessimistic attitude of his crew – many of whom now believed all was lost. He decided to consult the ship’s carpenter about the prospect of building a new vessel, but the man walked away “in a surly humour” replying that “he could not make brick without straw”. However, the cruel necessity of their condition persuaded the crew to begin work on a new craft under Shelvocke’s direction. It would have to be a small vessel, and most of the materials would come from the half-submerged Speedwell. Men waded out to the wreck, working themselves into a stupor by prizing the very timbers of the ship apart. A few days into the scheme, the carpenter told Shelvocke he would be no man’s slave and that he now thought of them as on equal footing. The incident prompted Shelvocke to beat the man “somewhat roughly” with his cane. But the carpenter’s outburst was a precursor to a more serious rebellion against the captain’s authority. Shelvocke’s crew had assembled at a landmark they ominously named “the great tree” and were murmuring discontent. Eventually, they approached Shelvocke in an armed body and demanded new articles to be drawn up, regulating themselves “according to the Jamaica Discipline”. Jamaica Discipline The “Jamaica Discipline” was at the time synonymous with Caribbean pirates such as ‘Calico Jack’ Rackham, and Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach. These new articles proposed cutting the Gentleman Adventurers out of any future prize money and distributing it more evenly among the crew. Shelvocke would be granted a much larger share if he decided to continue as captain. If he did not agree, the mutineers would elect another man to lead them. Shelvocke’s initial reaction to this was cold rage. If he agreed to the new articles, he would be responsible for defrauding the Adventurers (and Hughes) of prize money. If he did not agree, he would be immediately deposed as captain and none of them might ever get off the island. He reluctantly signed, declaring it an “indispensable necessity”. Betagh later claimed that the captain had deliberately wrecked his own ship to achieve better terms of pay. But as the prospects for survival were grim in the extreme, Betagh’s accusation might seem almost deranged in its bitterness. (In fact, Shelvocke ultimately received a far greater share of prize money from the mutineers than he ever would had under the contract with the Gentleman Adventurers.) But until the group – now starving – found a way off the island, talk of new terms and more equal shares was utterly pointless. Every day held the potential for a Spanish warship to visit Juan Fernandez. If that happened and the crew was captured, the best they could hope for was to be reduced to slavery. The rules of war were brutal outside of Europe. It was much more likely they would be imprisoned, tortured, and then executed. On 15 August 1720, the castaways’ worst fears were realised when they caught sight of a large Spanish ship crossing the bay. Shelvocke determined it was the 50-gun Peregrine – their former opponent. Fires were doused and the Speedwell crew scrambled inland to hide, but fortunately Peregrine did not anchor and instead slipped away beyond the horizon. Work on the crew’s new vessel now proceeded at a furious pace until the carpenter declared it was time to test her. They poured water into the vessel. Unfortunately it was not particularly well caulked and began to leak from stem to stern. Some in the group noted she was “a sieve!” Over the next days, the hungry men worked to make the boat seaworthy, sealing gaps in the hull as best they could. The evening of 6 October saw everyone who wished to leave board the somewhat hopefully named Recovery – and push it out to sea. A desperate gamble A hellish cruise followed – more than 40 men were crammed into the tiny boat alongside rotting eels (the only preservable food source). To make matters worse, Recovery was still a “sieve”, and all hands had to continually bail water to keep her afloat. Shelvocke set out for the Bay of Concepción on Chile’s coast, in the vague hope of coming across a Spanish vessel they could capture. Four days from Juan Fernandez, he spied a much larger warship. It was the Margarita (200 tonnes, 18–40 guns). Recovery – with her single cannon – was comically mismatched. When a volley of shots from the Margarita almost cut Recovery’s pitifully small mainmast in two, Shelvocke quickly diverted course. It was only when Recovery sailed into the anchorage of Pisco they spied the Jesus Maria, a merchantman of 200 tonnes. Again, the odds were deplorable, but once more the men had little choice; they grabbed their remaining cutlasses and dragged the cannon forward, loading it with a collection of bolts, nails, and stones. Recovery then rowed as fast as she could straight at the Spanish vessel. The three working muskets were thrust in the hands of the best marksmen – and the solo cannon on board was used. Shelvocke and his desperate band must have made for a truly terrifying sight because, on reaching the quarterdeck, they found the Spanish captain and all his officers “with their hats off, in the most submissive manner, asking for quarter”. Seaworthy once more Transferring to the Jesus Maria, Shelvocke and his men had many more adventures before they made it home. In California they discovered gold dust, at sea they had an extremely unfruitful meeting with Captain Clipperton, and in Canton they became involved in some particularly shady dealings with avaricious Chinese port officials. Shelvocke himself managed to return to England in July 1722 on board an East India Company ship after a circumnavigation lasting almost three and a half years, his pockets allegedly laden with Spanish silver. But on entering London, he was immediately placed under arrest for piracy and fraud. He proceeded to muddy the legal waters considerably, claiming (with some degree of truth) that he still officially held a commission from the Holy Roman emperor of Austria in addition to his English privateering commission. Even the judge had to admit that the case for proving piracy was both “intricate and doubtful”. The trial became farcical when Shelvocke escaped from captivity and went into hiding, eventually publishing his own book in 1726 – A Voyage Round the World – which portrayed him as a loyal yet put-upon sailor. At this point, nothing could stop Shelvocke from becoming a major London celebrity. His book was a bestseller, and he likely made a great deal of money from it. As for the Gentleman Adventurers – they never did make a profit on the expedition, continuing to bring unsuccessful lawsuits against their former employee for many years. While George Shelvocke certainly had a talent for making enemies, even his most ardent critics would allow that his voyage around the world was a tale of resourceful men overcoming desperate odds – the very stuff of high adventure. Matthew Doherty is a writer, editor, and teacher, specializing in all things military history related. His work has been published in the UK Defence Journal and the Small Wars Journal.
Camilla Townsend delves into the stories, myths and legends of the Aztec people
Were the Aztecs really obsessed with death and sacrifice? Did they have a pantheon of deities similar to the ancient Greeks or Romans? And how did a magical gem change the fortune of the Aztec people? Speaking to Emily Briffett, Camilla Townsend delves into their myths, legends and folklore to reveal a society bursting with life and colour. View Green Video on the source website
Caroline Dodds Pennock considers how warfare came to be a pivotal part of Aztec society, considering superstitious traditions, sacrifices and brutal methods of attack
Why did warfare play such a pivotal role in Aztec society? How could claiming captives benefit a warrior in life and death? And what was 'Flower War'? Speaking to Emily Briffett, Caroline Dodds Pennock takes a look at the warriors and weaponry of the Aztecs to consider how warfare played a prominent part in everyday life, from the cradle to the grave – and beyond. View Green Video on the source website
Tracking down the Nazi 'Angel of Death': one man's hunt for Josef Mengele
In 1949 the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele fled to South America. Three decades later, Gerald Posner set out to track him down. Here the former lawyer tells us about his mission to catch the ‘Angel of Death’.
Matt Elton: Before we talk about the part you played in the hunt for Josef Mengele, can we briefly set out his role in the Holocaust? Gerald Posner: Mengele was a doctor at Auschwitz, where he did two things for which he’s become notorious. First, he conducted all kinds of human experiments, some on children and many on twins. And, second, he waited at the camp entrance for trains to arrive packed with people, mostly Jews, from all over Nazi-occupied Europe, and selected who lived and who died. He wasn’t the only Nazi doctor at Auschwitz, but he became the most notorious for his enthusiasm for his gruesome work – and for escaping after the war and remaining a fugitive for many decades. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/09/AKG9399538web-d66c88f.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Mengele (centre) pictured with two commandants of Auschwitz, Richard Baer (left) and Rudolf Höss, at an SS retreat in 1944. (Photo from AKG Images)" title="Mengele (centre) pictured with two commandants of Auschwitz, Richard Baer (left) and Rudolf Höss, at an SS retreat in 1944. (Photo from AKG Images)" /> Did his crimes mean he was regarded as particularly worthy of being brought to justice after the war ended? There was a limit to how many Nazis could be brought to justice. Some 50,000 worked at the camps in different positions, from guards to doctors and overseers to commandants. About 2,500 were eventually tried; thousands more returned to normal lives after the war without paying any price for their actions. It may be hard to accept, but not every Nazi at every concentration camp liked the work. Some were sadistic, and some were pathological, but for many it was not considered a great assignment. Auschwitz was in Poland, where summers were hot and winters freezing – bad for the prisoners, but also for those who worked at the camps. I don’t mean to suggest that anyone should feel sorry for the Nazis, but some of them didn’t like it. That’s not the case with Mengele. He relished it: he viewed Auschwitz as a step up in his career, as a way to make a name for himself. What did Nazis do when it became clear that the war was coming to an end? The regime started to collapse very quickly at the end of 1944, and hardline Nazi zealots had two main goals. The first was to cover up their crimes, so at camps including Auschwitz they destroyed the gas chambers and tried to destroy the crematoriums. Then they tried to escape west. They didn’t want to stay in Poland, because Soviet troops – who had a reputation for brutality – were coming, and seeking vengeance for the terrible sufferings inflicted on them during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. So Nazi officials wanted to escape – but if they couldn’t, would rather be caught by the Americans or the British. Mengele was caught twice by the Americans and released, along with many others, among the millions of displaced people after the war. Mengele spent four years in Europe – in Czechoslovakia and Germany – after the war. How was he able to stay for so long? Actually, it wasn’t so unusual. For example, the chief pharmacist at Auschwitz, Victor Capesius, who had stolen gold from the teeth of corpses, went to West Germany after the war and opened a pharmacy. Mengele knew that he was being searched for, but expected that the British and the Americans would eventually leave their occupied zones and return control of the country to the West Germans, who would say: “We’re so sorry for the terrible things that happened, but now let’s get on with fighting the Cold War.” Then, in 1948, a number of people with whom Mengele had served at Auschwitz were tried. They were being sentenced to death or to long prison sentences. So at that point, Mengele opted to go to South America. Why was South America such a popular destination for Nazis? Because it was far away! But the reason that Argentina was the nation to which most of the Nazis went was because, although it was neutral in the war, it had a large German community who thought that the Germans had been punished too much after the conflict ended. The Allies put Nazis on trial for war crimes – but if it had been the other way around, and Germany had won, they thought that there may instead have been trials of the British pilots who had firebombed Dresden and the American pilots who had dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That’s not a moral equivalency, but it’s how they justified it to themselves. So when Mengele and other Nazis arrived in Argentina, they found a country in which there was already a network of Nazi sympathisers and a large German community to welcome them. How was it possible for Mengele to stay undetected in South America for decades? He arrived with some money from the Mengele family farm-machinery manufacturing company, and gradually started to feel as though the Nazi hunters weren’t interested in him. At one point in the mid-1950s, he walked into the West German embassy in Buenos Aires and said: “By the way, my name is not really Helmut Gregor [the fake name in the fake passport on which he’d arrived in 1949], it’s Josef Mengele, and I would like a passport in my real name.” Nobody in the West German embassy said: “You’re the right age to have served in the Second World War, you arrived in Argentina under a fake name, and now you’re giving this name? I’ll check to see if it’s on the wanted list.” It was a remarkable bit of incompetence and apathy that allowed him to live there in style and comfort. I also think that the West German embassy had been penetrated by Argentine Nazi sympathisers. It’s almost impossible now to establish who put his application through. But it is astonishing that this Nazi fugitive felt so comfortable that in 1958 he was listed in the Buenos Aires phonebook under his real name. All you needed to know was which city to look in and you would have found him. In 1960, near Buenos Aires, the Israelis kidnapped Adolf Eichmann, the bureaucrat who ran the trains to the concentration camp. That’s when Mengele decided to move away from Argentina. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/09/GettyImages-79666502web-69a7006.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white photo of Adolf Eichmann standing trial, with two men in uniform standing behind him." title="Adolf Eichmann stands trial in Jerusalem, 1961, following his capture in Argentina. Mengele fled the country to avoid a similar fate. (Photo by Popperfoto via Getty Images)" /> How and why did you first become involved in this story? In 1981, I had just joined a small law practice in New York City when a friend told me that the US Department of Justice (DoJ), where he worked, had been approached by Auschwitz survivors – twins who’d been experimented on as children by Josef Mengele. They asked whether the DoJ might bring an action against the German government to try to find Mengele. It couldn’t, but my friend asked if I might help these twins. So I met Marc Berkowitz and his sister Francesca. Marc wanted money from the German government to pay for his medical bills – the thousands of dollars that he’d spent over many years trying to heal the pain caused by what Mengele had done to them in the camp. In fact, we found that of the 1,500 sets of twins on whom Mengele had experimented, about 140 were still alive in 1981. I tried to sue the Mengele family, but we were thrown out of the Federal Court because I couldn’t produce evidence that they had been supporting him as a fugitive. Yet it sparked a passion in me, and I kept pursuing what I thought was the case against Mengele, and trying to determine where he was. Where did you think he was at that time? I was convinced that Mengele was living the high life in Paraguay, under the then-dictator Alfredo Stroessner. We knew that he had acquired Paraguayan citizenship in 1959, when he first fled from Argentina, under the name José Mengele – not a very good alias, but good enough to throw those hunting him off the scent. We suspected that he was hiding out in the Chaco region of Paraguay, or perhaps in the heavily German area around Hohenau in the south-east. A whole range of sightings, books and movies about Mengele – Marathon Man, The Boys from Brazil – had propagated the myth that he was hiding in the jungle, surrounded by killer dogs and armed guards, riding around in a Mercedes limousine and being funded by his family. That image is one of the reasons he got away – because, instead, he was actually living a very low life in the poorest barrios outside São Paulo, Brazil. He wasn’t the superhuman Nazi fugitive living the Hollywood version – he was the Nazi doing anything to survive, and that kept him free. Amid all this hype and mythologisation, how did you go about finding the truth? It was known that Mengele had been in Argentina, but nobody knew the details. The Argentine government, which was run for nearly 15 years by a military junta across two periods from 1966 to 1973 and 1976 to 1983, had been asked repeatedly for its Mengele file by the US DoJ, by the Israelis, the British, the West German government – and always ignored that request. Good research sometimes involves lucky timing. I first visited Buenos Aires in November 1984, not long after the Falklands War. The military junta had been overthrown, and a new civilian government was in power. I went to the Presidential Palace and made a request in writing for the Mengele file, and talked to a human-rights advisor to the newly elected president. I also sat in a downtown hotel for about three weeks doing interviews. Then, at about 11pm one night, there was a knock on the hotel-room door. Two members of the Argentine federal police were outside, who told me to come with them. They took me to a blue Ford Falcon – which, as I quickly learned, was not a good sign, because under the military junta blue Falcons had been used for taking away political prisoners. They took me to their headquarters and to a very grumpy colonel. I didn’t know what was happening until I realised he had been ordered by the civilian government to open their Mengele file. On a desk in a side room was a folder detailing 10 years of Mengele’s life on the run: his entry into the country, his false passport, his application to the West German embassy, his businesses, his marriage. It was only later that I realised how lucky I had been. Six weeks after I had gained access to that file, a British journalist applied to see the same material and was rejected. The government had realised that it didn’t have to say yes to every request and closed the door. So I’d love to say that I deliberately took advantage of that , but I was mainly just fortunate. And that opportunity then led me to Paraguay and beyond – except for the last, most vital part of the story, when Mengele was in Brazil, because the documents only went up to 1959. You mentioned that you carried out interviews. Who did you speak to? In Buenos Aires I interviewed Wilfred Von Oven, an assistant to Joseph Goebbels. I was convinced that he knew Mengele’s location, and spent a lot of time trying to get information from him, but got nowhere. Instead he would show me pictures from Miss Nazi contests – and yes, things like that existed at the time down in this little Fourth Reich. There was a kind of industry in South America in tales about Nazis. So if you were a journalist or lawyer looking for Mengele, people came out of the woodwork to say: “Oh, I used to go bowling with him,” or “He taught my child how to speak German.” So you had to weave through a minefield. These people weren’t asking for money, they just wanted a bit of fame. So two-thirds of the information I pursued in Argentina and Paraguay would have made a great novel, but wasn’t useful for finding out what had happened to Mengele. When did you realise that he was dead? Not until 1985. The previous year, I had signed a book deal to co-write a biography of Mengele with a British journalist, John Ware. We were halfway through that manuscript – and still believed Mengele was alive – when at about 4.30am one morning, I got a call from a German reporter telling me that bones had been found in Embu, near São Paulo, that were thought to belong to Josef Mengele. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/09/2MWMCHRweb-a24afcc.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A grey-haired male doctor in a white labcoat holding a human skull and pointing to the middle of it, showing it to a group of students in white labcoats." title="Forensic doctor Daniel Muñoz, who led the team that identified Mengele’s body in 1985, with his remains at Sao Paulo University’s school of medicine. They are now used as teaching aids. (Photo by AP Photo/Andre Penner, via Alamy)" /> I initially thought it was junk – it must have been something like the 12th time that they had apparently found his remains – so my initial reaction wasn’t that this was fantastic news. But a day later, I set off for Embu – and while I was there my view started to change. It was down to another bit of serendipity. News articles had been published revealing that I had the largest private archive on Mengele. And while I was in Embu discussing with the forensic pathologists the authenticity of the bones – which turned out to be real – Mengele’s only son, Rolf, showed up at the German publisher of celebrity magazine Bunte, offering them what he claimed were thousands of pages of his father’s personal diaries from his years on the run, along with correspondence sent to Rolf. Bunte was tempted but cautious – this was just two years after the publication of the fake ‘Hitler Diaries’ that had been serialised in the German magazine Stern and in The Sunday Times, and which had fooled British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. So the publisher decided to have the documents assessed by the German version of the FBI. They also brought in a panel of experts and asked me – because of my huge archive – to be the only non-historian in the group. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/09/Rolf-Mengele-and-Gerald-Posner-1985web-f437f55.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A photo of Gerald Posner (left) and Rolf Mengele (right) seated together at a dark table, both wearing suits. Gerald is holding a white A4 sheet of paper, and Rolf has his hands loosely clasped together on top of the table." title="Documents held by Mengele’s son Rolf – seated (right) with Gerald Posner in Germany, 1986 – were key to unlocking the mystery of his final years. (Photo by Gerald Posner)" /> So in Munich, every day for two weeks, we grilled Rolf Mengele about how he’d obtained the documents, when he’d last seen his father, all the details. It turned out that those documents were real – and I was able to use them in my book. How did Mengele’s survivors react to the news that he was dead? Many survivors refused to believe it, and I understand that. One said to me, and I’m paraphrasing: “We saw him at his most evil; a God-like figure who controlled life and death. So if there’s a one in a million chance that the remains in Brazil are not his, I’ll believe it’s not him. He’s capable of anything.” I was among the people disappointed that the story ended with him getting away. It’s often said that putting him on trial wouldn’t have led to justice, and that’s true – but as Eichmann’s trial showed, it would have added so much detail to the historical record. What was particularly infuriating about Mengele was that he was unrepentant. Until his dying day, he never was sorry for what he had done at Auschwitz. Two years before he died, Rolf visited him in South America to confront him about Auschwitz, and he responded, essentially: “You’ll never under- stand what we were trying to accomplish.” What did Auschwitz survivors want to see happen to Mengele? People often assume the survivors I spoke to wanted vengeance – to see Mengele pay for his crimes. But what they really wanted was to know what he did to them at the camp: what was injected into them, what experiments he undertook. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/09/GettyImages-909628120web-875e84f.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Two women looking at photographs on a wall that are part of an exhibition." title="Two of Mengele’s victims, twins Lia Huber and Judith Barnea, at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem, 2018. As Mengele never left behind medical records, what he sought to achieve from his brutal experiments remains a mystery. (Photo by GALI TIBBON/AFP via Getty Images)" /> They knew that he had injected their eyes; that he had done spinal taps without pain relief; that, in some cases, he had even performed amputations. But they didn’t know what it was for. Was it for sterilisation? To unlock the mystery of twin births so that German mothers could have more children after the war? Was it to turn dark eyes blue? Mengele didn’t leave behind his medical records, so the reasons for those experiments were locked up in his own head. The only way survivors might find out what had been done, and how to treat themselves as result, was to find out what he had injected into them and why. That was the mystery he held for them – something I had never expected until I started to talk to them. Decades on, how do you now see this story and your role within it? For me, the fact that Mengele died of natural causes, swimming off a beach near São Paulo in 1979, is an indictment of the people who should have been looking for him and failed to find him. After the Israelis caught Eichmann in 1960, they closed the book on Nazis, but the West Germans could have broken this case with a simple mail intercept. Mengele sent letters back to his family, and they were kept by a senior executive in the Mengele firm, who the West Germans knew was a childhood friend. And if they had put a travel notice on Rolf, they would have realised he was travelling under a false document when he went to South America in 1977, and could have easily caught up with Josef. This was not a difficult case to break – but nobody in the West German prosecutors’ offices had the passion or the wherewithal to chase down this ageing Nazi decades after the war and put him on trial for his crimes. The fact that he got away with it isn’t because he was so clever, but because those looking for him just didn’t have enough desire to undertake the investigation. Another reason I’d have relished the idea of him on trial is because, in the face of all the Holocaust deniers we’ve seen emerge in the decades since, Mengele would have spoken in a clear voice about what he did without any apologies. He would have tried to defend his work as a zealous doctor doing experiments in Nazi ideology and racial theory. That, I think, would have been hugely important. On the podcast | Gerald Posner on tracking Josef Mengele Gerald Posner is an investigative journalist and writer. He co-authored (with John Ware) Mengele: The Complete Story (McGraw-Hill, 1986) This article was first published in the October 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
How a proto-Indiana Jones rediscovered the Inca stronghold of Machu Picchu
The Inca stronghold of Machu Picchu lay abandoned for over 350 years, until whip-cracking archaeologist Hiram Bingham III stumbled across it
Bingham had been scrambling ever upwards – often on hands and knees – for hours now. His legs ached, his clothes were damp with sweat, and his lungs struggled to take in the increasingly thin mountain air. And for what? A vague promise from a local man called Melchor Arteaga of Inca ruins at the top of a nearby precipice. For all Bingham knew, Arteaga could have been sending him on a wild – and exhausting – goose chase. But then Bingham’s weary legs felt a surge of energy. For he and his guides suddenly came across what he later described as “an unexpected sight, a great flight of beautifully constructed stone terraces, perhaps a hundred of them, each hundreds of feet long and ten feet high”. Then, “suddenly I found myself confronted with the walls of ruined houses built of the finest quality of Inca stonework”. He had discovered the long-lost Inca city of Machu Picchu, and – though he couldn’t have known it at the time – it was to prove one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century. Hiram Bingham III is sometimes hailed as a kind of proto-Indiana Jones – a buccaneering archaeologist-turned-adventurer who felt more at home in the middle of a jungle than buried in a textbook. He developed a passion for Latin American history as a boy and, armed with a PhD in the subject, made the journey to Yale University to pursue a career as a lecturer. He might have stayed at Yale, had he not met and married Alfreda Mitchell, an heiress to the Tiffany jewellery fortune. Bingham now had the financial security to fulfil his dream – embark on his first expedition to South America. That first adventure, in 1906, saw him trace the celebrated political leader Simón Bolívar’s routes through Venezuela and Colombia in 1819. But it was a people who dominated South America 300 years before Bolívar who really fired Bingham’s imagination, and ultimately led him to that first, historic sighting of Machu Picchu. They were the Inca. Who was Hiram Bingham? If Hiram Bingham III’s parents – both missionaries – had gotten their way, then instead of stomping around Peru in search of Inca cities, their son would have carved out a living spreading the word of God. But Bingham was more interested in South American history than the scriptures. And so he embarked on a series of expeditions to Peru in search of long-lost Inca cities. Following his landmark discovery of Machu Picchu in 1911, Bingham went into politics, serving as a member of the US Senate for the state of Connecticut and, later, helping President Truman’s administration identify communists working in government. He died in 1956. Why was Machu Picchu abandoned? Over the course of a few hundred years from the 12th century AD, the Inca forged one of the greatest empires the world had yet seen. They were warriors, conquerors, architects and road-builders extraordinaire, presiding over a vast swathe of territory that ran 2,500 miles down South America’s western seaboard. Unfortunately for them, however, they also developed an obsession with gold. For in 1532, a ruthless Spanish conquistador named Francisco Pizarro stepped onto Inca territory, accompanied by around 180 followers. Pizarro shared the Inca’s infatuation and, hearing tales of their vast and exquisite stores of yellow metal, made a beeline for their emperor, Atahualpa. In the long, and sometimes undistinguished history of European colonialism, what happened next has gone down in infamy. Read more | The last days of the Inca In November 1532, Pizarro invited Atahualpa to a meeting in the town of Cajamarca. But the conquistador had a nasty surprise for his host. Having lured Atahualpa and his followers into a plaza, Pizarro’s men attacked, unleashing volleys of gunfire into the unarmed Inca masses. Many were killed and Atahualpa was taken hostage. The Inca empire More than a century before a ‘British’ empire was a mere twinkle in Queen Elizabeth I’s eye, a mighty Inca warriorking named Pachacuti was presiding over one of the greatest polities in the world. At its height in the mid-15th century, the Inca empire encompassed much of South America’s western seaboard, a 2,500-mile-long, 500-milewide swathe of land that, from its glittering capital of Cusco, ruled 12 million people from more than 100 ethnic groups. In terms of reach and power, it put even the mighty Aztecs of Mexico in the shade. The Inca first appeared (in modern southeastern Peru) in the 12th century. They began seriously expanding their territory at the end of the 14th century, but it was during the reign of their eighth emperor, Viracocha Inca, that they truly started to become a superpower. Not only was Viracocha a successful warrior, he was also a shrewd empire-builder, leaving military garrisons to keep the peace in conquered lands. Yet Viracocha’s achievements paled in comparison to the aforementioned Pachacuti, who extended the empire both north and south. Pachacuti was a ruthless ruler who ordered the forced resettlement of conquered peoples to prevent uprisings. He was also a canny one. His masterstroke was to introduce a policy whereby rulers were prevented from inheriting their predecessors’ possessions. This ensured that they were hungry to accumulate new lands and wealth for themselves. Not only were the Inca brilliant warriors, they were also consummate engineers, and constructed a network of roads that spanned their enormous empire. Furnished with way stations every mile and a half, these could cope with anything the highest mountains or deepest ravines could throw at them. Those roads connected an incredibly diverse array of subject peoples, most of whom were self-sufficient farmers who produced everything from corn to squash and – critically to the building of Cusco and Machu Picchu – provided labour. It was this toil and sweat on which the Inca emperors’ fantastic wealth was built. And that wealth was to have catastrophic consequences for the Inca when Francisco Pizarro first made contact with the hapless Emperor Atahualpa in 1532. To earn his freedom, the emperor reportedly offered Pizarro a ransom that would make the conquistador fantastically rich – a room full of gold, and two full of silver. Almost immediately, gold started pouring in from across the Inca empire. But the Spanish reneged on their promise to release Atahualpa, and instead had him executed. It was an act that triggered all-out war; a triumph of military technology over weight of numbers. The Spanish could only call upon a couple of hundred men – far fewer than the thousands that the Inca had at their disposal. But what the Spanish did possess was armour, firearms, cannons and horses. Against an enemy that possessed clubs and spears – and which had already been weakened by civil war and smallpox – these were to prove decisive. Within a few short years, the Spanish had utterly ravaged the once-great Inca empire, levelling towns and temples wherever they found them. And it was what happened as Pizarro and his men slowly but surely squeezed the life out of Inca resistance over the following decades that brought Hiram Bingham III back to Peru on another expedition in 1911. When did Hiram Bingham find Machu Picchu? What drew Bingham to South America was the long-lost Inca citadel of Vilcabamba. It was from here, deep in Peru’s mountains, that the emperor Manco Inca had led an audacious guerrilla campaign against the Spanish. And it was here that the very last embers of Inca resistance were extinguished in 1572. Bingham was determined to find this tragic city. The thrilling possibility that he had done just that must have raced around his head as he explored Machu Picchu for the first time in July 1911. But this wasn’t Vilcabamba; it was somewhere far more spectacular still. Bingham would return to Machu Picchu on numerous occasions over the following years. He took hundreds of photographs, excavated scores of graves, and transported thousands of objects – among them pottery, tools and bronze knives – back to the United States (in doing so, he sparked a longrunning spat between Yale and the Peruvian government, which accused the university of profiting from Peru’s cultural heritage). But it was what Bingham left behind him that led UNESCO, when appointing Machu Picchu a World Heritage Site in 1983, to declare it “an absolute masterpiece of architecture and a unique testimony to the Inca civilisation”. Archaeologists believe that somewhere between 300 and 1,000 people lived up here in the city’s heyday. As subsequent excavations would reveal, the city was divided between an agricultural and an urban sector, the latter made up of major temples, housing and workshops, and an open central plaza where the population would have congregated to worship. And, as Bingham soon realised, these were no ordinary buildings – they were masterpieces of engineering, edifices of almost mind-boggling beauty and complexity. They may have had nothing more than stone and bronze tools at their disposal, but Inca craftsmen were masters of their art, constructing the walls and buildings that sit atop Machu Picchu with almost surgical precision. Of these, none is more impressive than the Temple of the Sun, a huge, semicircular place of worship aligned to catch the Sun’s rays on the winter solstice. It was constructed around what the Inca would have regarded as a sacred rock, which may have acted as an altar. Worship of the Sun God was clearly important to the residents of Machu Picchu, and this is borne out by the presence of a famous ritual stone known as the ‘Inti Watana’. Archaeologists believe that the Inca performed a ritual here at winter solstice, in which they ceremonially tied the Sun to the post so that it couldn’t fall permanently below the horizon. If the Temple of the Sun and the Inti Watana were the spiritual hubs of Machu Picchu, then a series of exquisite buildings containing a royal palace – known as the ‘king’s group’ – appear to be the secular centre. This was clearly the residence of someone very important, for not only is it the most elaborate of Machu Picchu’s buildings, it was also sited next to the city’s most impressive fountain, serving up water delivered by a 760-metre-long stonelined canal. If that was an amazing hydraulic achievement, then the city’s famous terrace system was perhaps even more impressive. Twelve acres of fertile farming land provided maize, potatoes and even avocados for the population’s palates. And, by soaking up the 2,000 millimetres of rainfall that fell from the sky each year, the terraces would have served another critical purpose: stopping the city from sliding off the side of the mountain. Why was Machu Picchu built? To appreciate the true genius of Machu Picchu, you have to consider not just what it contains, but where it is: 2,430 metres above sea level; 450 metres above the river Urubamba, which races past the feet of the cliffs below. This truly is a city in the clouds, and the fact that its inhabitants had to transport 20-tonne stones up the side of this mountain with perhaps nothing more sophisticated at their disposal than wooden sleds turns it from a spectacular engineering achievement into an astounding one. But the question is, who was the driving force behind this awesome achievement, and why did he or she have it built? It was a question that Bingham took to the grave. Now, 60 years after the great adventurer breathed his last, we appear to have an answer. Read more | Did the Age of Exploration bring more harm than good? The breakthrough came when University of California, Berkeley, anthropologist John Rowe discovered an Inca document that contained references to a royal retreat called ‘Picchu’. That document also made mention of a legal claim to ownership of ‘Picchu’, laid down by descendants of Emperor Pachacuti. The inference is clear: if the emperor’s successors were claiming Machu Picchu as their own, then it must have once been his. The theory that Pachacuti ordered the building of Machu Picchu (in around 1450) has proved persuasive. As a fearsome warrior-leader who presided over the Inca empire at its very height, he certainly had the power to assemble the most talented people and the unlimited labour that would have been required to attempt such a massive undertaking. What has also proved persuasive is the suggestion that Machu Picchu was a royal retreat where the emperor and his closest advisers would have repaired each winter when the climatic conditions in his capital city, Cusco (at an even more dizzying altitude of 3,400 metres), became too harsh. This elite party may have entered the city via a secret, grass rope-bridge over the river at its base before taking up residence at Machu Picchu’s impressive royal palace. Six highlights of Machu Picchu Intihuatana This magnificant carved rock – often called the ‘hitching post of the Sun’ – was almost certainly some kind of astronomical clock or calendar, designed to track the Sun’s passage across the sky. The Temple of the Sun The Temple of the Sun was a huge, semicircular place of worship aligned to catch the Sun’s rays on the winter solstice. It boasts some of the finest stonework in all of Machu Picchu. The Temple of the Three Windows Sited in the eastern corner of Machu Picchu’s main plaza, this stone hall – containing three windows along one wall – offers extraordinary views. The Temple of the Condor This bird had great significance for the Inca people, as it was believed to represent the ‘upper world’. This rock was carved to look like a condor in flight, and acted as a ceremonial centre. Inti Punku The Inti Punku (or ‘Sun Gate’), dedicated to the cult of Inti, was a main entrance point into the citadel from the Inca capital, Cusco, and would have been heavily guarded during its 15th-century heyday. Inca Bridge A six-metre gap in the trail to Machu Picchu spanned by four or five planks of wood above a 600-metre drop make up its ‘secret’ back entrance. The planks could be removed to deter unwanted visitors. Why was Machu Picchu abandoned? Machu Picchu outlived its probable creator – who died in 1471 – but not by much. Pizarro's men never discovered the site but, a decade after they deceived the unsuspecting Atuahalpa in 1532, its residents were gone. Perhaps they felt isolated up there in their lofty home, perhaps they didn't have enough supplies to sustain themselves. Either way, they left it to be swallowed up by the Peruvian forest, where it lay largely forgotten, until Bingham stumbled across it more than 350 years later. Today, Machu Picchu is anything but forgotten – hundreds of thousands of tourists visit it every year. Like Pachacuti and Hiram Bingham III before them, these visitors have to make an arduous journey up the mountain. But, within seconds of casting their eyes on this wonder of the world, they surely know that their effort was worth it. Read next | The Golden Age: The Spanish Empire of Charles V On the podcast | The Incas: Bill Sillar answers listener questions about the mighty South American empire This content first appeared in the January 2017 edition of BBC History Revealed
Alternate history: what if Argentina had won the Falklands War?
Dr Martin Farr and Nige Tassell consider how the political landscape may have changed had Britain – and the prime minister Margaret Thatcher – been defeated in the 1982 conflict
In January 1982, the Conservative Party of prime minister Margaret Thatcher was trailing in third place in the opinion polls, behind the Liberal-SDP Alliance, which stood at 40 per cent, and Labour at 30 per cent. By June of that year, the polls had been turned on their head: Labour were still second, but the Tories now had the approval of 51 per cent of the country. The Falklands War had been fought between these polls, and the events in the South Atlantic, where Britain’s naval taskforce had evicted the invading Argentinians in a bloody conflict, transformed Thatcher’s political fortunes. As the taskforce sailed home in triumph, her future in Downing Street was assured. The following year, she recorded the biggest landslide victory in a general election since 1945. On the podcast | Helen Parr discusses the conflict that erupted between Britain and Argentina 40 years ago But what if the Argentinian military had sent the Royal Navy packing? The popular belief is, after all, that the electoral success of 1983 was all due to the war and that, without the air of triumphalism, the Conservative Party would have been on shaky ground heading towards a general election. That belief isn’t completely watertight. “Even without a Falklands victory, the re-election of the Conservatives in either 1983 or 1984 was still more likely than not,” explains Dr Martin Farr, senior lecturer in contemporary British history at Newcastle University. “But, in the event of an Argentinian victory, Thatcher would have resigned immediately and a new leader would still probably have gone on to win, as Harold Macmillan did in 1959 after replacing Anthony Eden, who had been brought down by his own foreign crisis – Suez.” Had Thatcher resigned, her unpopular economic policies may well have been jettisoned by the party. “It would have all depended on when a subsequent leader replaced her. Early on in her premiership, there were few sufficiently senior figures who were so like-minded, but over time, as she transformed the party, there were more. The 1983 general election gave the impregnable base – and a majority that took three elections to erode – but the subsequent election, held in 1987, ensured the effective irreversibility of the revolution.” Had, though, the Conservatives lost the election in either 1983 or 1984, the weakness of the Labour Party and the rise of the Liberal-SDP Alliance would almost certainly have meant no one party taking sole control of government. “It was a uniquely divided electoral opposition,” says Dr Farr. More from our alternate history series What if... the Cuban Missile Crisis had escalated? What if... Napoleon had defeated Russia? What if... George III had not 'lost' the colonies? What if... the Spanish Armada had landed in England? What if... Alexander the Great hadn't died so young? What if... Magna Carta hadn’t been written? What if... Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon’s first son had lived? What if... Japan hadn't attacked Pearl Harbor? “Labour’s Michael Foot would still have been the alternative prime minister, as the Alliance was hampered by uncertainty in voters’ minds as to whether David Steel, the Liberal leader, or Roy Jenkins, the SDP leader, would be PM. Labour could still rely on its heartlands: in 1983, 28 per cent of votes provided Labour with 209 MPs, while 25 per cent for the Alliance delivered 23. A hung parliament would have been most likely, with some sort of Labour-Alliance agreement – but one probably short of a coalition.” Self-inflicted wound With Thatcher not in Number 10 – and regardless of which party held the reins of power – the brutality of the 1984-85 miners’ strike almost certainly wouldn’t have been witnessed. “There had been miners’ strikes before, but never one engineered by a government for expressly political purposes. It is unlikely that another prime minister would have sought it and, therefore, that such a protracted dispute, where victory was all, would have happened. But the erosion of the sector, with the weakening of the union, would still have occurred, merely over a longer period.” Had Thatcher fallen from power, it would have been a self-inflicted wound. “The greatest irony of the Falklands War is that what became known as a testament to British resolution and strength was occasioned by the absence of either. It was an avoidable conflict,” Dr Farr stresses. Read more | How the Falklands War fired up Britain “The Argentinian invasion was almost invited by the actions of the British government, including the planned decommissioning of HMS Endurance, which had maintained a naval presence in the area. Indeed, had the war taken place even a year later, the chances of British success would have been much lower, following the Nott Defence Review of 1981 that had promised substantial cuts to defence spending.” Read more | The Falklands War 40 years on: why did it happen? As Dr Farr observes, the timing of the war had a profound effect on subsequent foreign policy. The British victory “renewed the enthusiasm for hard power in foreign policy. Admiral Sir Henry Leach famously stiffened the prime minister’s resolve: if we ‘do not achieve complete success, in another few months we shall be living in a different country whose word counts for little’.” A failure to reclaim the Falklands would have diminished Britain’s standing on the international stage, meaning its place at the forefront of future conflicts in, say, Iraq and Afghanistan wouldn’t have necessarily been guaranteed. The result of the war had profound consequences in South America, too. The Argentinian retention of Islas Malvinas would have strengthened the junta, allowing it to continue its repression of the population. Instead, the British victory hastened its demise, as Dr Farr concludes. “Defeat certainly brought an end to military rule quicker than would otherwise have been the case. After all, what’s the point of a military government if it loses wars?” In context: the Falklands War In April 1982, the Argentinian military invaded the British-held Falkland Islands, repeating the mission the following day on South Georgia and the Sandwich Islands. The Royal Navy swiftly dispatched a heavy taskforce to the South Atlantic and, after 74 days of bloody conflict that took more than 900 lives, Argentina surrendered. The Argentinian military junta would fall in 1983, the same year that British prime minister Margaret Thatcher went on to record one of the largest electoral victories of recent times. Britain’s sovereignty over the Falkland Islands – known as Islas Malvinas in Buenos Aires – is still contested by some people today, more than 40 years later. Read next | The Falklands War 40 years on: why did it happen? Martin Farr is senior lecturer in contemporary British history at Newcastle University. His upcoming book is Margaret Thatcher’s World This article was first published in the January 2023 issue of BBC History Revealed
“Indigenous Americans who travelled across the Atlantic were horrified by inequalities in European society”
Caroline Dodds Pennock talks to Ellie Cawthorne about her new book tracing the remarkable stories of Indigenous Americans who voyaged to Europe after 1492
Let’s start with the title of your book, On Savage Shores. What can you tell us about the meaning? People often use the term “savage” as a racial slur to diminish and belittle Indigenous peoples. I wanted to deliberately invert that stereotype. In my book, I follow Indigenous Americans who travelled to Europe after 1492 – from their perspective, Europe was a much more savage place than the Americas. We tend to think of the “Columbian exchange” as a one-way cultural encounter – a story of Europeans going to the Americas. Why is it that we don’t hear much about Indigenous Americans coming to Europe? That’s a good question. It’s not that historians have never written about this; I’m standing on the shoulders of other scholars in my work. But for some reason the presence of Indigenous peoples in Europe doesn’t seem to have made an impression on popular understanding of the past. I think that might be because, in our imagination, 15th and 16th-century Europe is a white, ruffed and codpieced “Golden Age”. The stories we’re told are about kings, lords and royal dramas. But how many people know that there was a Brazilian king at the court of Henry VIII, or that there were tens of thousands of enslaved Indigenous people in Spain? Read more | America: Brave new world or accident? How many Indigenous Americans came to Europe, and when? Exact numbers are difficult to pin down, because the official statistics we have are almost certainly far too low. We know that there were tens of thousands, at least, but the number may be very much larger. The vast majority came as enslaved people into Spain and Portugal, but there are also Indigenous people recorded in England, the Netherlands, the other Low Countries and Germany. And they appear from as early as Christopher Columbus’s first voyage, when he brought back Taíno people from the Caribbean. So, from the first moment of encounter, Indigenous travellers are part of the story. On the podcast | Indigenous American travellers in Europe What sources do we have for this? The problem is that a lot of the sources are from the perspective of Europeans – written either by people who kidnapped Indigenous Americans, or by diplomats or courtiers who happened to see them once they reached Europe. However, there are some sources that occasionally allow us to hear the voices of Indigenous people themselves. After 1542, when it became illegal to enslave Indigenous people in Spain’s American colonies, amazing testimonies were produced by Indigenous peoples applying for their freedom. Today these are held in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville. They are formulaic legal records, but they provide fascinating pictures of the lives of people from all across Central and South America. They explain what happened to them, including information about their life stories or how they were kidnapped. Read more | What can the Aztecs tell us about themselves? The secrets of their 'indigenous annals' Then there’s the Cantares Mexicanos, a collection of 16th-century Nahuatl songs and poems by Indigenous people singing about their histories – which is how they would have recorded these stories in a popular oral tradition. They include stories of travel, too. What did Indigenous Americans make of European societies that they encountered? We’re obviously talking about a hugely diverse range of peoples, from the Inuit in the north of what is now Canada down to the Tupi people in Brazil. But some common threads emerge. One is that they were horrified by inequalities in European society, and didn’t understand how people with vast wealth could live right beside others in abject poverty. They were also surprised by leaders who were ineffective, or were children – the idea of boy kings was completely nonsensical to them. My suspicion is that many Indigenous Americans saw European gender roles as peculiar. In many Native American cultures, women were incredibly effective and influential but, apart from Elizabeth I, they would have seen few influential women at European courts. Beating children was another thing they were surprised by. They had different ideas about childhood, and didn’t understand using violence against people you were supposed to care for. Though part of the wider story of slavery, the enslavement of Indigenous American peoples is an aspect with which many in Europe might not be so familiar. What can you tell us about it? There’s been an upsurge in scholarship on the enslavement of Indigenous peoples in the past few decades. In particular, Andrés Reséndez wrote a wonderful book, The Other Slavery, in which he estimates that around a million Indigenous people were enslaved before 1600 alone – a figure that may have risen as high as 4 to 5 million by 1900. This idea of it as an “other slavery” is an allusion to the fact that this hasn’t been widely recognised by history. But it also refers to the fact that it was another kind of slavery. Very often, Indigenous people were involved in forms of forced labour that weren’t technically labelled slavery but were still effectively bondage. Read more | How slavery thrived in Renaissance Europe In the first part of the 16th century, Indigenous American people were being literally traded across the Atlantic – maybe tens of thousands of them. Some estimates have been as high as hundreds of thousands, but I haven’t been able to verify a number quite that big. Europeans were kidnapping Indigenous peoples and using them for forced labour, both within the Americas and overseas. But the extent of this became much murkier after 1542, when it became illegal to enslave Indigenous people. We know they were still being treated as slaves, just identified differently. In Spanish territories, for example, there was a system called the encomienda: as an Indigenous person, you were technically “entrusted” to a Spaniard who was supposed to look after and evangelise you; in exchange, you would work for the Spaniard. In most cases, though, that may as well have been slavery. Sources often talk about Indigenous people being “brought” or “taken” to Europe, and it’s important to look out for those words. Even in the cases of elite individuals who became diplomatic representatives for their people, often the issue of consent is murky and ambiguous. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/01/W95AGFsml-3e69910.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Hernan Cortés (seated at the table) is shown with his Indigenous translator, Malintzin (by the letter E), after his defeat of the Aztecs, c1521. He later brought Martín, the son he had with Malintzin, to Europe (Photo by PRISMA ARCHIVO / Alamy Stock Photo)" title="Hernan Cortés (seated at the table) is shown with his Indigenous translator, Malintzin (by the letter E), after his defeat of the Aztecs, c1521. He later brought Martín, the son he had with Malintzin, to Europe (Photo by PRISMA ARCHIVO / Alamy Stock Photo)" /> You look at stories of Indigenous Americans who came to Europe with diplomatic aims. What kind of petitions were they bringing? A number of high-status Indigenous people came to England, either to assist the English in their explorations or in some cases to meet with the monarch. An interesting case is the so-called “Brazilian king” who met Henry VIII on a diplomatic mission in 1531. In order to guarantee his safe return, the English left a hostage with that king’s people. However, the king died of disease in Europe before he could return home. The English were worried about the fate of the hostage, but the people in Brazil understood, and allowed the hostage to go free. Other travellers included Manteo and Wanchese, high-status men from Croatan and Roanoke, on the north-eastern coast of what’s now the United States. Although they became entangled with English agendas, they seemed to be part of a mission to investigate Britain on behalf of their own people. The same is true of some of the Taíno people who crossed the Atlantic in the 1490s. It was originally assumed that they were simply brought by Columbus but, when you dig into the sources, it appears that some of them were related to rulers of Caribbean islands, so there may have been a diplomatic agenda. There are well-recorded cases of high-status Indigenous people in the Spanish and Portuguese territories, often descendants of prominent nobility, coming over to Europe to appeal for their rights through the Spanish legal system. For example, the sons of [the Aztec emperor] Moctezuma are recorded appealing for money, pensions, jobs and confirmation of the rights to their lands. Read more | Two worlds collide: Spanish conquistadors and Aztecs The Tlaxcalans, who allied with the Spanish to defeat the Mexica (who we think of as the Aztecs), were very successful within the Spanish legal system. The first time that Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortés returned to Spain from Mexico in 1528, he brought a big entourage with him. Historically, we’ve tended to focus on the entertainers, jugglers and tumblers in that group, but it also included several ambassadors – noblemen who were there to promote their interests. During that expedition, the Tlaxcalans gained the right for their city to be recognised as an independent state under the Spanish crown, meaning that they would never be subject to any command or local authority. They got a coat of arms and exemptions from taxation. Though the Tlaxcalans were especially successful, expeditions in which noble families came to Spain to promote their interests or complain about Spanish actions were fairly typical. The conquest of the Americas was not a straightforward story of Europeans versus Indigenous peoples. Very often, Indigenous nobilities were forced to either cooperate with or exploit European ways of doing things. Read more | Why we should remember when Cortés’s conquistadors were forced to flee the Aztec capital You also recount several cases of Indigenous people starting families with Europeans, willingly or unwillingly. Could you give some examples? We know that in the Americas, Indigenous women frequently had relationships with European men. Those were often informal, and Europeans weren’t always keen to bring Indigenous wives with them when they returned home. One of the most famous examples is Matoaka, known to many as Pocahontas, who came to Europe as the wife of an Englishman and was used to promote English colonisation in the Americas as a civilising force. But such examples are more ubiquitous in mainland Europe. Occasionally, the records show Spaniards bringing home Indigenous wives or partners, but we know that a lot of the time it was unrecorded. The trouble is that the Spanish licences to travel across the Atlantic used a word that meant “dependent”; they didn’t have to define exactly who that was, so it could mean a servant or a partner. The precarity of many of these people is very evident. For instance, one Indigenous Peruvian woman, Isabel, was brought to Castile by a Spanish man, Pedro de Oropesa, whom she recognised as her legitimate partner, but he decided to marry a European woman instead. When he died, the new wife tried to assert that the Indigenous woman was enslaved all along, so they had to fight it out in the courts and Isabel was only declared free many years later in 1570. Mestizo children [of mixed ancestry] were also often brought to Europe by their fathers. The most famous example is probably Martín, the son of Cortés. The pope legitimised this son, and Martín actually gained a much higher status than his father. Unlike the elder Cortés, who was not deemed of good enough birth, Martín was recognised as a member of the Order of Santiago, because his mother was a high status Indigenous woman [the translator Malintzin, also called La Malinche or Doña Marina] who had been important in the conquest; by then, too, his father had become a marquis. On the podcast | 15 minutes of fame: Malintzin, Aztec interpreter You also find much more ordinary stories. In 1539, a woman called Beatriz, from somewhere in Venezuela, came across the Atlantic with a man called Alonso Ponce and their young mestizo daughter, Juana. We know that Beatriz was enslaved because she had been branded on her face. Alonso Ponce was the third person to enslave her, but as far as we know she was recognised as his partner. If she’d lived just one more year after her transatlantic voyage, she’d have been able to apply for her freedom. As it was, she died and was buried in Spain. Ponce then cared for his daughter with the help of his sister, before sending Juana off to become a maid in a Seville household. This is what would have been expected with a non-mestizo daughter and Juana seems to have become part of the community. Are there any individual stories from your book that have really stuck with you? In 1577, the English explorer Martin Frobisher returned from a trip to north-eastern Canada with three Indigenous Inuit people he had captured: a man, a woman and a baby. The Europeans thought that they were a family, but it seems that actually the woman and man didn’t know each other. They arrived in Bristol in October and became a real spectacle. Artists flocked to paint them; memorable images drawn of them by John White show the infant, Nutaaq, peeking out of his mother, Arnaq’s, hood. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/01/BMImagesSuperRescmyk-def766b.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Contemporary portrait of Inuit man Kalicho. Captured by the explorer Martin Frobisher, he died soon after being brought to England (© The Trustees of the British Museum)" title="Contemporary portrait of Inuit man Kalicho. Captured by the explorer Martin Frobisher, he died soon after being brought to England (© The Trustees of the British Museum)" /> Local records talk about how the man, Kalicho, hunted ducks with a “dart” on the river Avon to demonstrate how he would harpoon seals. That’s a funny image, but it’s also an incredibly tragic story. It seems that Kalicho had been injured when he was captured. He quickly became ill, and died less than a month after he arrived. The doctor who carried out the autopsy made Arnaq watch the burial and see Kalicho’s dismembered corpse, to demonstrate that the English were not cannibals, which seems frankly horrific. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/01/PE6PFH-cmyk-066b026.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The Inuit woman Arnaq and baby Nutaaq, seen in a contemporary portrait, who were brought to England along with Kalicho. Both died shortly afterwards (© The Trustees of the British Museum)" title="The Inuit woman Arnaq and baby Nutaaq, seen in a contemporary portrait, who were brought to England along with Kalicho. Both died shortly afterwards (© The Trustees of the British Museum)" /> Arnaq was very quiet, which the doctor took to mean that she wasn’t bothered, but it seems much more likely that she was incredibly traumatised. Arnaq herself then became ill – probably with measles – which happened frequently to Indigenous people who had no natural resistance to European diseases. She died a few days after Kalicho. The baby, Nutaaq, was then taken to London. His mother had died and he must have been terrified. Strangers took him to an inn called the Three Swans, where they put him on display and charged people to view him. But, like his mother, he probably had measles, and died just eight days later. Nutaaq is buried at the tiny church of St Olave’s on the corner of Hart Street and Seething Lane in the City of London. Buried in the same graveyard is Samuel Pepys, about whose life no detail goes unreported. The English writer was laid to rest in the same place as this tiny baby about whom we know almost nothing and whose voice we can barely hear, which is such a striking juxtaposition for me. It’s a moving and tragic story – but also, sadly, typical. So many Indigenous people were taken from their homes and died in a strange land, surrounded by strangers and buried in ways that did not respect their traditions or beliefs. They were separated forever from their homelands – which for many Indigenous peoples is a rupture, a wound. Can the legacy of this story still be felt in Europe today? It’s possible to create a jolly cosmopolitan history of globalisation in this period. I could say, for example, that the legacy is that our language is absolutely full of Indigenous words like canoe and hammock. Or I could say that foods from the Americas are central to our lives today. Imagine Italian cooking without tomatoes or peppers. Imagine Asian cuisine without chillies. The first people to drink chocolate in Europe were Maya lords. The legacy of what’s often called the “Columbian exchange” is vast, and Indigenous peoples were very much part of that. So you could look to this era for the roots of our global world today. But it’s also important to reflect on the colonial violence in this story that has an enduring legacy – to recognise the depth of that legacy, and the ways in which Indigenous peoples are seeking to overcome it. These peoples are now starting to try to reclaim the bodies and the belongings of their ancestors from European institutes, to recover their heritage and to repair these wounds where they can. But there’s a lot more work to do. Caroline Dodds Pennock is the author of On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2023). Buy it now on <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Savage-Shores-Caroline-Dodds-Pennock/dp/1474616909/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2QOJ2KAQR38BD&keywords=On+Savage+Shores%3A+How+Indigenous+Americans+Discovered+Europe&qid=1673878686&qu=eyJxc2MiOiIwLjA3IiwicXNhIjoiMC4wMCIsInFzcCI6IjAuMDAifQ%3D%3D&s=books&sprefix=on+savage+shores+how+indigenous+americans+discovered+europe%2Cstripbooks%2C68&sr=1-1&tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-222864" rel="sponsored" target="_blank">Amazon, Waterstones or Bookshop.org This article was first published in the February 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
The Inca empire: everything you wanted to know
Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
Bill Sillar answers listener questions about the mighty South American empire
What did an ordinary day in the Inca empire look like? How did the Inca count using knots? And why were stones so sacred to the civilization? In conversation with Emily Briffett, Bill Sillar answers listener questions on the mighty empire which dominated swathes of land in South America.