Essay Questions for Thinking through Sources 12

1. Comparing first encounters: How would you compare the first impressions that these three encounters generated for the Europeans involved? What surprised them? What offended their sensibilities? How did they describe or portray cultural differences? How open to these differences did they seem to be?
2. Establishing political ties: What political relationship with the host society did each of the Europeans have? What were they seeking from those societies? To what extent did these factors shape their posture toward those they were meeting for the first time?
3. Reading between the lines: Although these sources all derive from Europeans, what might we infer, reading between the lines, about how the West African, Indian, and Native American figures may have understood these encounters?
4. Foreshadowing future encounters: In what ways did these encounters bear the seeds of future developments, although unknown to everyone at the time?