Free The Mapmaker's Wife by Robert Whitaker

Spaniards cutting off the hands, noses and ears of local people, both men and women, simply for the fun of it, and that this happened time and again in various places throughout the region. On several occasions I also saw them set dogs on the people, many being torn to pieces in this fashion, and they also burned down houses and even whole settlements, too numerous to count. It is also the case that they tore babes and sucklings from the mother’s breast and played games with them, seeing who could throw them the farthest.
    While much of what Las Casas wrote was true, historians have noted that he also employed exaggerated rhetoric—such as the tale of baby tossing—to make his point. Las Casas hoped that his polemical book would stir reform in the colonies, but it served primarily to bring a flood of international hatred down upon his country. A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies was immediately translated into every major European language. The ghoulish engravings of a Protestant Flemish artist, Theodore de Bry, which accompanied the translations, deepened the image of Spanish cruelty. He drew scenes of pregnant Indian women being thrown into pits and impaled, of Indian babies being roasted alive, and of dogs tearing apart the severed limbs of those so slaughtered.
    After the publication of Las Casas’s book, Spain redoubled its efforts to build a wall that would separate it and its colonies from Europe. In 1551, the Spanish Inquisition published its first Index of Forbidden Books, which was designed to keep reformist writings—like those of Las Casas—out of print. Anyone who dared to challenge biblical teachings or the Spanish monarchy risked being branded a heretic and burned at the stake. Seven years later, Spain banned all foreign books in Spanish translations. Violators of these laws could be put to death. In 1559, Spaniards studying in other European countries were ordered to come home, and those whoreturned from the colonies hoping to tell of their experiences were forbidden to publish a word.

    Theodore de Bry’s depiction of the Spanish hunting Indians with dogs.
    By permission of the British Library .
    As a result of this censorship, the rest of Europe learned little about Peru or the rest of South America. Rumors, gossip, and the scattered writings of a handful of foreign traders were the primary sources of information, and these reports often encouraged the imagination to run wild.
    One of the earliest travelogues was written by an Italian slave trader, Francesco Carletti. He returned from Peru in 1594 with tales of an amazing wilderness, reporting, for instance, that frogs and toads of “frightening size” were found in such quantity in Cartagena that people there were uncertain whether“they rain[ed] down from the sky” or whether they were “born when the water falls and touches that arid land.” Vampire bats liked to feast on a person’s fingers and ears; chiggers bored into the feet and nibbled on the flesh until they grew fat; and in the forests, Carletti wrote, there were “mandril cats” so smart that, to cross a river, they linked“themselves together by their tails” and swung from trees on one side of the river to the other.

    Levinus Hulsius’s depiction of Sir Walter Raleigh’s headless men in Guiana (1599).
    By permission of the British Library .
    At this same time, the English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh returned with a report on the Guianas, where he had gone to search for El Dorado. This region, he said, was home to a fierce tribe of headless men, known as the Ewaiponoma, who had“eyes in their shoulders and their mouths in the middle of their breasts, and a long train of hair growing between their shoulders.” Sir Walter also had met a man named Juan Martinez who claimed to have lived in El Dorado for seven months. This fabled empire, Raleigh wrote, was located around a salt lake 200 leagues (600 miles) in length and was graced by a city of stone, named Manoa,