36 De Soto’s only geopolitical significance was smallpox, which he left among
the Indians, and which left their populations much reduced even by the time La
Salle floated down the Mississippi 140 years later. Among the books I
reviewed only Life and Liberty mentions this plague, giving it just five words.
37 After I published this imagined classroom exchange in The Truth About
Columbus (New York: New Press, 1992), I read an account of the African
American novelist Ishmael Reed’s bringing up similar material, learned from
the historian J. A. Rogers, in his fourth-grade history class. His teacher
dismissed his ideas in “a lengthy outburst,” Reed reports. See “The Forbidden
Books of Youth,” New York Times Book Review, June 6, 1993, 26-28.
38 Diagne, “Du Centenaire de la Decouverte du Nouveau Monde par Bakari
II, en 1312, et Christopher Colomb, en 1492,” 2-3; Van Sertima, They Came
Before Columbus, 6. Forbes, Black Africans and Native Americans, 13-14,
cites Las Casas as evidence that Columbus knew of American trade from West
Africa.
39 Van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus , 21, 26. Regarding African
diseases in the Americas, see Sorenson and Raish, entry H344, and Richard
Hoeppli, “Parasitic Diseases in Africa and the Western Hemisphere,” in Acta
Tropica, Supplementum 10 (Basel: Verlag für Recht und Gesellschaft, n.d.),
54-59. Forbes, Black Africans and Native Americans, cautions that black and
Negro might be misleading terms, for Europeans often applied them to any dark
person of low status. Forbes believes that Balboa saw blacks, but thinks these
blacks might have come somehow from Haiti. Since African slaves were
brought to Haiti only in 1505, they would have had to escape from Haiti to
Panama with Indians in order to have preceded Balboa, who arrived in
Panama in 1510. Regarding black oral tradition in Mexico, see Gonzalo
Aguirre Beltran, La población negra de México (Mexico City: Fondo de
Cultura Económica, 1989); and John G. Jackson, Man, God, and Civilization
(New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1972), 283.
40 Riley et al., Man Across the Sea, especially Alice B. Kehoe, “Small Boats
upon the North Atlantic,” 275-92. Even Marc Stengel leaves out Brendan from
his lively and sympathetic summary, “The Diffusionists Have Landed,”
Atlantic Monthly, 1/2000, 35-48.
41 The three small fragments of knowledge about Columbus’s background are
described in Lorenzo Camusso, The Voyages of Columbus (New York: Dorset,