I'm sure like most people here I grew up being taught and educated on the evils of imperialism, of all colours and nations, and I have just finished reading Michael Wood's 'Conquistadors', which goes into some detail about the heart breaking travesties and cruelties inflicted upon the native people by the Spanish conquerors. After that I've just moved onto Paul Lay's "Providence Lost", about Cromwell's Protectorate. I didn't expect to encounter any overlap but early in chapter two he mentions,

"In Madrid, Buckingham had been told by a Spanish bureaucrat, 'Don Fennyn', of an Indian legend, which predicted, 'that there shall come a nation unto them, with flaxen hair, white complexion, grey eyes, that shall govern them'."

Which first piqued my curiosity because thanks to this subreddit I had learned that the idea that the whites were seen as gods was itself a myth. While it's not outright calling the Spaniards gods in that quote it is supposedly a Spaniard telling an Englishman about a native (I'm guessing applied with a broad brush by the teller to apply to all 'Indians') myth that a strange foreign people will come, described as white in appearance, and then rule them. Similar to the idea of Quetzalcoatl returning, I think. This comes from the Clarendon State Papers (Vol1. P.14) but I can't read them to get a fuller idea of the context, and reliability of this 'Don Fennyn', about whom I've been able to find nothing else online.

Paul Lay then goes on to say,
"They were the heirs of 'Don Francisco Draco' - Francis Drake - who along with Raleigh had nurtured the Hispanophobic 'Black Legend' of Spanish cruelty and exploitation in the New World."

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It was difficult for me to come to terms with the fact that most of what we know of pre-Columbian civilisations comes written decades or centuries after the conquest, because the conquerors destroyed so much, so greedily, so is peppered with insights from the authors time that make it appear that the native civilisations expected to be conquered, but can it possibly be true that the reports of cruelty and genocide are an exaggerated myth? It sounds like a modern Spanish attempt to erase crimes and whitewash history.

What is the view of historians here?