Colonists carried ready-made monster fantasies to the New World before contact

Evidence

During the American colonial era, stories of monsters were not uncommon. This is not surprising, given that early colonists were from the very places that invented or sustained the fantasies of monsterdom: “They were all at home in an intellectual terrain that was literally swarming with monsters.” Lands far away or recently discovered by Europeans were thought to be especially ripe for encounters with non-human creatures. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 587

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s core thesis: image precedes contact. Also connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and the fabricated-imagery literature.
• SEED: Strong evidence block for the reader’s essay on how European settlers projected pre-existing monster categories onto uncontacted lands.