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Captain Nemo observed the herd of cetaceans cavorting on the waters a mile from the Nautilus. “They’re southern right whales,” he said. “There goes the fortune of a whole whaling fleet.” “Well, sir,” the Canadian asked, “couldn’t I hunt them, just so I don’t forget my old harpooning trade?” “Hunt them? What for?” Captain Nemo replied. “Simply to destroy them? We have no use for whale oil on this ship.” “But, sir,” the Canadian went on, “in the Red Sea you authorized us to chase a dugong!” “There it was an issue of obtaining fresh meat for my crew. Here it would be killing for the sake of killing. I’m well aware that’s a privilege reserved for mankind, but I don’t allow such murderous pastimes. When your peers, Mr. Land, destroy decent, harmless creatures like the southern right whale or the bowhead whale, they commit a reprehensible offense. Thus they’ve already depopulated all of Baffin Bay, and they’ll wipe out a whole class of useful animals. So leave these poor cetaceans alone. They have quite enough natural enemies, such as sperm whales, swordfish, and sawfish, without you meddling with them.”

[…]

Meanwhile Captain Nemo studied the herd of cetaceans, then addressed me: “I was right to claim that baleen whales have enough natural enemies without counting man. These specimens will soon have to deal with mighty opponents. Eight miles to leeward, Professor Aronnax, can you see those blackish specks moving about?” “Yes, Captain,” I replied. “Those are sperm whales, dreadful animals that I’ve sometimes encountered in herds of 200 or 300! As for them, they’re cruel, destructive beasts, and they deserve to be exterminated.”

— Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Extraordinary Voyages, #6) by Jules Verne

But soon these last representatives of animal life vanished, and three vertical leagues down, the Nautilus passed below the limits of underwater existence just as an air balloon rises above the breathable zones in the sky. We reached a depth of 16,000 meters—four vertical leagues—and by then the Nautilus’s plating was tolerating a pressure of 1,600 atmospheres, in other words, 1,600 kilograms per each square centimeter on its surface!

— Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Extraordinary Voyages, #6) by Jules Verne

“I can see, Captain, that nature is your obedient servant, any time or any place. You’re safe on this lake, and nobody else can visit its waters. But what’s the purpose of this refuge? The Nautilus doesn’t need a harbor.” “No, professor, but it needs electricity to run, batteries to generate its electricity, sodium to feed its batteries, coal to make its sodium, and coalfields from which to dig its coal. Now then, right at this spot the sea covers entire forests that sank underwater in prehistoric times; today, turned to stone, transformed into carbon fuel, they offer me inexhaustible coal mines.”

— Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Extraordinary Voyages, #6) by Jules Verne

One day Solon was conversing with some elderly wise men in the Egyptian capital of Sais, a town already 8,000 years of age, as documented by the annals engraved on the sacred walls of its temples. One of these elders related the history of another town 1,000 years older still. This original city of Athens, ninety centuries old, had been invaded and partly destroyed by the Atlanteans. These Atlanteans, he said, resided on an immense continent greater than Africa and Asia combined, taking in an area that lay between latitude 12° and 40° north. Their dominion extended even to Egypt. They tried to enforce their rule as far as Greece, but they had to retreat before the indomitable resistance of the Hellenic people. Centuries passed. A cataclysm occurred—floods, earthquakes. A single night and day were enough to obliterate this Atlantis, whose highest peaks (Madeira, the Azores, the Canaries, the Cape Verde Islands) still emerge above the waves.

— Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Extraordinary Voyages, #6) by Jules Verne

By 8:30 we were back on board the Nautilus. There I fell to thinking about the incidents that marked our excursion over the Mannar oysterbank. Two impressions inevitably stood out. One concerned Captain Nemo’s matchless bravery, the other his devotion to a human being, a representative of that race from which he had fled beneath the seas. In spite of everything, this strange man hadn’t yet succeeded in completely stifling his heart. When I shared these impressions with him, he answered me in a tone touched with emotion: “That Indian, professor, lives in the land of the oppressed, and I am to this day, and will be until my last breath, a native of that same land!”

— Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Extraordinary Voyages, #6) by Jules Verne

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

As ‘vassals’ of the Crown,* Indigenous people were theoretically protected from arbitrary enslavement, just as any Spanish citizen would be, but there were three important exceptions to the royal prohibition on slavery in the early years of colonisation. Indigenous people could be enslaved if they were ‘cannibals’; had been captured in a ‘just war’; or, as mentioned earlier, if they were subject to rescate (‘ransom’ from a worse fate, like human sacrifice, or being enslaved to a non-Christian). Significantly, also, only those from Spanish territories were protected by their ‘vassal’ status, meaning that anyone from beyond their borders (or whom the slaver claimed was from elsewhere) could be enslaved. These loopholes in the law meant that the debate over the subjection of Indigenous peoples was mainly focused not on whether slavery was wrong, but in what circumstances people had been, or could be, legally enslaved.

— On Savage Shores by Caroline Dodds Pennock

Meanwhile, the popular image of early modern Europe remains an extraordinarily white, ruffed and cod-pieced Tudor and Golden Age fantasy, where Indigenous Americans, Africans and Asians existed only as ‘curiosities’ from distant lands. Scholars pointing out the ubiquity of people of colour in the European past are routinely denounced as politically correct historical revisionists, shaping the past to fit an idealised multicultural present. Even pseudo-historical fantasy universes replicate and reproduce this cultural homogeneity, which has become not just an issue of ignorance but also of politics. ‘Historical whiteness’ has become a battleground.

— On Savage Shores by Caroline Dodds Pennock

The erasure and exclusion of Indigenous peoples is a fundamental part of national narratives across the world. The ‘Doctrine of Discovery’, a legal fiction that granted Europeans and their descendants the right to ‘discovered’ territories, has its roots in the fifteenth-century papal bulls that divided the world between Spain and Portugal, making Indigenous peoples ‘politically non-existent’. This doctrine has a powerful legacy in United States law, and patriotic myths are often framed around the ‘absence’ of Native Americans: discovery, the wilderness, the untamed frontier, the ‘opening’ of the West – these are compelling fantasies that deliberately erase Indigenous presence and set the scene for the settlement of empty lands by industrious ‘pioneers’. The violent displacement of Native peoples from their lands is obscured, and even their presence is blurred so that they become merely a distorted caricature in the origin story of the nation.

— On Savage Shores by Caroline Dodds Pennock

If you see a train this evening, Far away against the sky, Lie down in your wooden blanket, Sleep, and let the train go by.

Trains have called us, every midnight, From a thousand miles away, Trains that pass through empty cities, Trains that have no place to stay.

No one drives the locomotive, No one tends the staring light, Trains have never needed riders, Trains belong to the bitter night.

Railway stations stand deserted, Rights of way lie clear and cold: What we left them, trains inherit, Trains go on, and we grow cold.

Let them cry like cheated lovers, Let their cries find only wind. Trains are meant for night and ruin. We are meant for song, and sin.

— Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, George Guidall (Narrator)