Well-known conquistadors, settlers and governors such as Hernando Cortes, John Smith, Jan van Riebeeck - the first governor of the Cape Colony -and the many other European men engaged in exploration and settlement wrote of their first interactions with indigenous societies in part through the prism of an encounter with a helpful young native woman. The overly sexualized native woman surfaces in the sources of European exploration in places as diverse as North America, the South Pacific, East Indies and West Africa.2 Another account that is acknowledged in its distinctiveness, but not in its generality, pervades in particular the founding histories of settler societies bordering on the Atlantic World. Narratives of heterosexuality permeate the history and dominant historiography of European exploration and conquest in the early modern period.1 One tale involves the hyper-sexuality of indigenous women and seems to be applicable to the discovery and exploration literature of much of the early modern era.
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