american-holocaust

SEX, RACE AND HOLY WAR 197disciplined) theory following the end of his third voyage in 1500, when hebegan compiling what he called his Libra de las Profecias-his Book ofProphecy: a scrapbook of hundreds of quotations from Scripture, fromearly Christian writers, and from classical authors, all purporting to demonstratethat the end of time was but a century and a half away, that theJews and infidels and heathens throughout the entire world soon would beeither destroyed or converted to Christ, and that before long the HolyLand would be recaptured. By the beginning of the sixteenth century Columbushad become certain that his voyages and discoveries had confirmedall this. Moreover, not only would each of these miraculous events soonbe initiated, so the prophecies said, by the Messiah-Emperor from Spain,but the final conquests and the liberation of Jerusalem would be fundedby vast quantities of gold that Columbus expected to discover either inthose densely populated islands he had found lying off the coast of whathe continued to think was Asia, or on the mainland of the continent itself.Indeed, for a time he thought he had discovered-with the Lord's guidance,of course-King Solomon's mines, and it was this gold that wouldlaunch the crusade that would bring on the end of the world. "Never wasthe popular image of the gold of the Indies more mystically spiritualizedthan on this occasion," writes John Leddy Phelan, adding: "The discoveryand the conquest of America, among many other things, was the last crusade.If Columbus had had his way, this would have been literally so." 6But Columbus had read more than Ailly's Imago Mundi before embarkingon his famous voyages. He also had read Plutarch and Marco Poloand several other works-including Pliny's Natural History, the earliestcatalogue of the monstrous races that were said to live in distant realms,and John Mandeville's Travels, a largely plagiarized volume of supposedreports on the Holy Land and on the monstrous races of the East, a bookthat also happened to be the most popular prose work of the Middle Ages. 7Columbus believed in and expected to encounter in his travels representativesof the monstrous races, just as he expected to find-and never stoppedsearching for-the fabled terrestrial paradise. Again, Columbus was farfrom alone in these assumptions. As he wrote in his letter to the king andqueen while returning from his first voyage: "In these islands I have so farfound no human monstrosities, as many expected," but elsewhere he wrotethat within a few weeks of his first sighting of land he had been told bysome Indians that on other islands "there were men with one eye, andothers with dogs' heads who ate men and that in killing one they beheadedhim and drank his blood and cut off his genitals." 8In fact, there was no real evidence of cannibalism (to say nothing ofdog-headed people) anywhere in the Indies, despite widespread popularbelief to the contrary that continues to exist today, belief largely based onthe fact that Columbus said the alleged man-eaters were called Caribs.Through Spanish and English linguistic corruption that name evolved into