66 Smallpox, usually the big killer, probably did not appear on the island until
after 1516.
67 Benjamin Keen, “Black Legend,” in The Christopher Columbus
Encyclopedia (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991). Las Casas cited by Sale,
The Conquest of Paradise, 160-61. See also Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The
Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972), 45.
68 Regarding Isabella, see J. Leitch Wright Jr., The Only Land They Knew
(New York: Free Press, 1981), 128; Forbes, Black Africans and Native
Americans, 28; Morison, The Great Explorers, 78. Warren Lowes, Indian
Giver (Penticton, British Columbia: Theytus, 1986), 32, says Labrador means
“place to get cheap labor.” Regarding the Natchez, see James W. Loewen and
Charles Sallis, Mississippi: Conflict and Change (New York: Pantheon,
1980), 40.
69 Letter by Michele de Cuneo quoted in Paiewonsky, The Conquest of Eden,
50.
70 Letter by Columbus quoted in Williams, Documents of West Indian
History, 1:36-37.
71 Ronald Sanders, Lost Tribes and Promised Lands: The Origins of
American Racism (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), 131, also quoting and
paraphrasing Peter Martyr, De Orbe Novo (1516).
72 Las Casas, History of the Indies, quoted in Williams, Documents of West
Indian History, 1:67. See also Sanders, Lost Tribes and Promised Lands,
131, also quoting and paraphrasing Las Casas.
73 Norlander-Martinez, “Christopher Columbus: The Man, the Myth, and the
Slave Trade,” 17; Sale, The Conquest of Paradise, 156; Sanders, Lost Tribes
and Promised Lands, 169; Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire (New York:
Pantheon, 1988), 72; Floyd, The Columbus Dynasty in the Caribbean, 75,
- Diego Columbus was almost killed in this revolt, according to J. A.
Rogers, Your History (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1983 [1940]), 71.
Nicholas de Ovando may have imported Africans as slaves even before 1505.
74 This turn of phrase is Bill Bigelow’s.
75 Official statement, June 8, 1989, quoted in Five Hundred (magazine of the
Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee Commission), 10/1989, 9.