Defoe and the Black Legend: The Spanish Stereotype in A New Voyage Round the World

This piece investigates Defoe's use and manipulation of the Black Legend in this 1724 travel fiction. To some degree, the Black Legend created the stereo-type of the cruel, greedy, and barbarous Spaniard; to a much larger degree, the Black Legend endorsed and perpetuated this stereotype in order to delegitimize Spain's colonial power in the New World. Defoe was certainly aware of this stereotype and consciously drew upon it in A New Voyage. In particular, Defoe echoes the anti-conquistador sentiments of Bartolome de Las Casas, a sixteenth-century Dominican friar who was the self-proclaimed "Defender of the Indians." This essay, then, illustrates the parallels between Las Casas' and Defoe's uses of the Black Legend, and argues that Defoe's travel fiction is thinly-veiled propaganda for the creation of an English colony in Chile.