146 MICHELINE ADAMS

 The Aboriginals set much store by the fact that they see the world as flat
while Ovando sees it as round. Able to look out to where the world ends in a
sharp, flat clear line, they are "not tempted to transgress its boundaries"(78).
They are satisfied with life as it is because it bears them "only goodness"
(78). The word "bear" conveys their acceptance that they are not in control.
 Someone or some force provides them with goodness. There is no sense
of providence in Ovando's round world, however; he provides for himself.
Because the globe's far reaches are never all visible at any one point in time, it
can be imagined into existence, so that what is initially perceived as "small
and bare and chalk-white"-unremarkable- Ovando is able to redesign,
creating its geography according to his own vision (77). If the world exists
according to his vision, then he must be its master. Here we see Europe's
claim on everything that it has apprehended by means of its intellect. Also,
it is apparently Ovando's sense of a round world that has impelled his bloody
quest: "If the earth were round he could go away, far away beyond the horizon
which would prove not to be a ledge over which he would fall into a sea of
blackness" (76). This evokes the story that many in Columbus's time believed
the convoy of ships would tumble over the earth's edge. But it also suggests
that the cataclysmic changes Europeans brought to the New World have
occurred because of the possibilities that the round earth promised and
because of the power that this promise encouraged Europeans to nurture
and to exercise.
 Nevertheless, despite Ovando's horrific treatment of the natives, the
typical representation of Aboriginals as victims is challenged in this story.
Firstly, the tale is their own, and voice is agency. In addition, as in Kincaid's
novel Lucy, the European gaze has been deflected in this story.5 Instead, the
Amerindians observe him (Ferguson, Where 140). Travel narratives and other
documents written by Western colonisers typically include criticism of the
appearance and customs of the Other (Ferguson, Where 140). However,
Kincaid subverts that convention and, instead, we are privy to the wary
reaction of the Other to the European. As observers and chroniclers, the
Amerindians are far from blind or impotent.
 Also the Aboriginals are empowered because of their large-spiritedness.
Through the course of the story their world has been invaded and destroyed
by arrogant marauders. Nonetheless, at the end of the tale the tortured are
unwilling to judge the torturer:

 A true and just sentence would be imbued with love for Ovando. The
 sentence must bear within it sympathy and identification, for only if the
 judge resides in Ovando and Ovando resides in the judge can an everlasting

5 When Lucy discovers that her lover Paul, an artist like his namesake Gauguin, is
exoticising her because of her ethnicity and her nationality, she turns the tables on
him by scrutinising and objectifying him in turn.