53 Ibid., 23.
54 The Log of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America in the Year
1492, as copied out in brief by Las Casas (Hamden, CT: Linnet, 1989),
unpaginated.
55 Sale, The Conquest of Paradise, 122.
56 Philip Klass, “Wells, Welles, and the Martians,” New York Times Book
Review, October 30, 1988. Ironically, in Wells’s story, the aliens are finally
done in by microbes, while, in reality, disease wiped out the Natives.
“Amazon tribe faces ‘annihilation’,” BBC, 5/17/2005,
news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/2/hi/americas/4554221 .stm , 11/2006.
57 Quoted in Michael Paiewonsky, The Conquest of Eden, 1493-1515
(Chicago: Academy, 1991), 109. I have slightly modified the translation based
on a translation in Juan Friede and Benjamin Keen, Bartolomé de Las Casas
in History (De Kalb: Northern Illinois Press, 1971), 312.
58 Sale, The Conquest of Paradise, 153- 54.
59 Cuneo, quoted in Sale, The Conquest of Paradise, 138. See also Howard
Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper and Row,
1980), 4.
60 1496 letter, quoted in Eric Williams, Documents of West Indian History,
(Port-of-Spain, Trinidad: PNM, 1963), 1:57.
61 Ferdinand Columbus, The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1959), 149-50.
62 Maria Norlander-Martinez, “Christopher Columbus: The Man, the Myth,
and the Slave Trade,” Adventures of the Incredible Librarian, 4/1990, 17;
Troy Floyd, The Columbus Dynasty in the Caribbean (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1973), 29.
63 One book, The Americans, does much better. It includes the quotation about
subjugating the island with fifty men, quotes Las Casas, and tells the story of
the 1493 voyage and the subjugation of the Natives that followed.
64 James Axtell, “Europeans, Indians, and the Age of Discovery in American
History Textbooks,” American Historical Review 92 (1987): 621-32; Sale,
The Conquest of Paradise, 156.
65 De Cordoba letter in Williams, Documents of West Indian History, 1:94.