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"What just deserts, I thought, for I did not like Columbus. How I loved this picture—to see the usually triumphant Columbus, brought so low, seated by the bottom of the boat watching things go by."

Annie makes this statement in Chapter Five, "Columbus in Chains." She has become bored in his history class because she already knew the lesson, so she flipped ahead in the book and found a picture of Columbus in Chains. Annie never before had known that Columbus fell out of favor with the Queen and returned to Spain in chains. Although she is supposed to revere Columbus, the image of him in chains makes her happy because it seems a just reward to the man who brought colonization to her island. Annie thoughts about Columbus are connected to her opinions about slavery. Annie thinks that Africans would not have colonized Europeans the way that Europeans colonized Africans. She finds the fact that Columbus returned to Europe locked at the bottom of a boat, much in the way that slaves have been brought to the New World, to be completely fair and even humorous. Annie proceeds to deface the Columbus in Chains picture in her history book by writing "the great man can no longer get up and go" under it. Annie's writing serves as a revision to her colonial education, which fails to properly instruct her in the true, brutal history of Antigua.

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