SOURCE: Jones, Howard Mumford. “The Anti-Image.” In O Strange New World: American Culture: The Formative Years, pp. 35-61. New York: The Viking Press, 1952.

In the following excerpt, Jones argues that in the first three centuries after discovery of the New World the Spanish and English generally regarded American Indians as monsters and devils, and he examines the ways they used descriptions of how natives engaged in cannibalism, torture, and deceit to justify European warfare.

If the discoverers, in Peter Martyr's words, “ruined and exhausted themselves by their own folly and civil strife, failing absolutely to rise to the greatness expected of men who accomplish such wonderful things”—a judgment at once understandable and premature—the natives of the New World proved to be something less than pastoral inhabitants of an Earthly Paradise. The contrast between the two sides of the shield was sometimes merely puzzling and sometimes horrifying...