What did indigenous Americans make of Europe?

The most influential Native American visitor to Europe in colonial times was a fiction. The protagonist of L’Ingénu, Voltaire’s novel of 1767, and of a dramatisation by the sage’s acolyte Jean-François Marmontel, was the very model of a noble Huron. He fought the British with distinction, fell in love with an imprisoned French lady and assaulted the Bastille to liberate her. The strikingly prescient central event makes his story excel even the Great Cat Massacre as a prefiguration of the French Revolution. Indeed, the discovery of the natural wisdom of the savage facilitated the philosophes’ esteem for the common man. By empowering the massesthey imperilled themselves – but that is another story.

Voltaire’s hero reciprocated French admiration, marvelling – in a topos of the time – at the way Nature seemed to have adapted the Parisian environment to provide the perfect habitation for humans. The reactions of real-life visitors from across the Atlantic in the same period are more elusive – not because they weren’t eloquent but because newcomers to Europe seldom saw any reason to modify the views they’d formed from a distance.

From Spain’s American dominions, tens of thousands of folios of early colonial documents survive from indigenous hands in native people’s own languages. Most are unread and few have been catalogued. But the scholars who have begun to publish them in recent years have revealed a surprising world, where incoming and incumbent elites collaborated in appreciation, to mutual advantage. Features of the white man’s civilisation appealed to natives: his religion, his alphabet, the unbounded reach of his commerce, his arts and technologies, his intoxicants, his music and his usefulness as objective arbiter, holy man or marriage partner.