Reséndez’s painstaking research suggests that between one and two million Native people were enslaved prior to 1600, during the period of Iberian Atlantic dominance, many of whom found themselves transported to Europe. The historian Nancy van Deusen, whose work has shed light on the hidden lives of enslaved indios in sixteenth-century Spain, conservatively estimates that 650,000 Indigenous people were forcibly transported to foreign lands during this period. About 300,000 Africans crossed the Atlantic in the same period, around 2 per cent of the estimated twelve million victims of the infamous Triangle Trade which took place between 1492 and c.1838. These figures fail to capture the harrowing reality of enslavement, but they do allow us to imagine the sixteenth century a little differently. The same ships that ploughed westwards, crammed with abducted Africans, very likely also plied their miserable trade east: forcibly displanting Indigenous people to Europe, where most would join the thousands of enslaved people of African descent already working and living in the Iberian Peninsula. The legacy of Indigenous enslavement is not visible to us in the same way as the global Black diaspora and its many vibrant cultures, the progeny of the millions of Africans and people of African descent who were forcibly scattered across the world. Many Europeans may be descended from distant Indigenous ancestors, especially in Spain and Portugal, but their legacy – as we will see – is more intangible, more inextricable, and too often rendered silent.

— On Savage Shores by Caroline Dodds Pennock