American History reproduces Columbus Landing in the Bahamas, the first of
eight huge “historical” paintings in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol (above). The
1847 painting by John Vanderlyn illustrates the heroic treatment of Columbus
in most textbooks. An alternative representation of Columbus’s enterprise
might be Theodore de Bry’s woodcut, created around 1588 (opposite). De Bry
based this engraving on accounts of Indians who impaled themselves, drank
poison, jumped off cliffs, hanged themselves, and killed their children. The
artist squeezed all of these fatal deeds into one picture! De Bry’s images
became important historical documents in their own right. Accompanied by
Las Casas’s writings, they circulated throughout sixteenth-century Europe and
gave rise to the “Black Legend” of Spanish cruelty, which other European
countries used to denounce Spain’s colonialism, mostly out of envy. No
textbook includes any visual representation of the activities of Columbus and
his men that is other than glorious.
A particularly repellent aspect of the slave trade was sexual. As soon as the
1493 expedition got to the Caribbean, before it even reached Haiti, Columbus
was rewarding his lieutenants with native women to rape.^69 On Haiti, sex