38, re Cartier. Weatherford, Indian Givers, 30, re Drake. Regarding Lewis and
Clark, one textbook, American History, gives full credit to their Indian guides.
Romeo B. Garrett, Famous First Facts About the Negro (New York: Arno,
1972), 68-69, re Henson as first at Pole. Some claim Peary’s expedition never
reached the Pole; if it did, we cannot now determine which person did so first.
Interestingly, Peary and Henson both fathered sons during the expedition. In
1987 these men, now eighty years old, participated in a reunion with Peary’s
and Henson’s “legitimate” descendants. For the first time, the men’s mothers’
role in the expedition was recognized. See “Discoverers’ Sons Arrive for
Reunion,” Burlington Free Press, 5/1/1987; also Susan A. Kaplan’s
introduction to Matthew Henson, A Black Explorer at the North Pole (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1989). A good short account of Henson appears
in Wallace, Wallechinsky, and Wallace, Significa, 17-18. For a view of how
Peary took advantage of the Inuits, including a charge of “scientific
criminality,” see Michael T. Kaufman, “A Museum’s Eskimo Skeletons and Its
Own,” New York Times, 8/21/1993, 1, 24.
97 Sale, The Conquest of Paradise, 238.
98 Las Casas, oral history collected from Tainos, in Williams, Documents of
West Indian History, 1:17, 92-93.
99 Las Casas quoted in J. H. Elliot, The Old World and the New (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1970), 48; Las Casas, History of the Indies, 289;
John Wilford, The Mysterious History of Columbus (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1991), 40. Las Casas is justly criticized for suggesting that African
slaves be brought in to replace Indian slaves. However, he recanted this
proposal and concluded “that black slavery was as unjust as Indian slavery”
(History of the Indies, 257).