In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Grandin reveals how the United States …
The English also confirmed their own goodness by reading Las Casas on Spanish badness. Las Casas’s Brevísima Relación had been translated into English many times throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As relentless as a modern slasher film, with its descriptions of Spanish hounds ripping a “little sweet babie” to shreds, the book helped give rise to what scholars later called the Black Legend. Against Spanish avariciousness and excess, England saw itself as moderate. Against Catholic decadence and superstition, Protestants were modern and rational. Cruel Spain. Just England. Yet the English also read Las Casas to rouse themselves to violence against the Irish. The Puritan translation of A Brief History urged Cromwell to avenge the “twenty millions of the souls of the slaughter’d Indians” destroyed by “Popish Cruelties.” The logic went that since the Catholic Irish were allied with Catholic Spain, they were as responsible for the destruction of the Indies as were Cortés and Pizarro.