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There's a premise at the heart of the book on Savage Shores, which we're going to talk about today.

It was written by the historian Caroline Dodds Pennick.

And what she does in the book is take the story of European explorers who discovered the

new world and she flips it.

What if it was indigenous Americans who discovered the old world?

It's not a gimmick.

It's a way of getting people to imagine the perspective of native people who found themselves in a strange place with strange customs, you know, discovering the place.

Of course, many were enslaved and oppressed and their land was taken from them. But Dodds Penick says they weren't

these passive agents. They had their own deep history and identities and stature. There's this

incredible event in the middle of the 1540s when the Spanish are beginning to establish a foothold in Central and South America,

and a Maya chief called Don Juan Apop Batz appears at the court of Prince Philip in Spain,

in 1545.

This has come about because the Spanish have murdered his predecessor.

He sees the terrible destruction that's happening in the communities around him.

And he decides that the only way to save his community as he sees it

is to voluntarily convert to Catholicism.

He becomes the first converted Ketchi Maya in that region, San Juan Chamalco in Guatemala, as it is today.

And in conversation with the friars who are in that region,

he and a group of other chiefs decide that they should send an embassy to Spain

to negotiate with the crown.

And so they get together and they gather these incredible gifts for the king.

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