A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
By Bartolomé de las Casas (1484 – 1566)
Originally written 1552; published 1875.
Penguin Classics Ed, 2004.
Bartolomé de las Casas came to America in 1502 aboard one of Christopher Columbus’ voyages, initially settling in Hispaniola (what is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). He was ordained as a priest in 1510, joined the Dominican Order in 1523, and was appointed the Bishop of Chiapas (located in southern Mexico) in 1543. Proceedings for his beatification commenced in 2000 and remain ongoing. Las Casas is revered (and depending upon one’s perspective, reviled) for his statements regarding human rights abuses by the Spanish settlers. He is also well known of one of the primary sources of information regarding Columbus’ voyages, as he preserved and edited Columbus’ diary.
The “Short Account” was written for Prince Philip of Spain (later to be King Philip II). Las Casas had sent a much larger account to Philip earlier, but Las Casas apparently thought that the earlier book was too large or perhaps had gotten lost, and so he sent Prince Philip a summary version of his original book. As can be seen in Las Casas’ introduction and throughout the book, his purpose in writing the book and seeking to end the abuses he witnessed was two-fold: (1) that the abuses were so widespread that they would cause a tarnishing of the Spanish Crown, who was acting under papal authority in their occupation of the New World; and (2) Las Casas sought to protect the Spanish empire from the wrath of God, envisioning a replaying of Sodom and Gomorrah if the abuses did not stop.
The Short Account is 130 pages, and there is a separate 40 page introduction by Anthony Padgen, a professor at UCLA, which provides useful biographical and background information. It is an easy read, but a very disturbing one. Las Casas relies upon his own travels and observations all over the New World, and he also quotes from documents from the Bishop of Santa Marta (now Columbia) and other priests to detail a systematic abuse of the natives of the Americas. Las Casas goes from region to region in short chapters, from Hispaniola to Mexico, Nicaragua to Florida, Peru to Trinidad and so forth, detailing the literal destruction of the native populations.
Sadly, the pattern was often the same: the Spanish would move into a new territory and demand gold, which the natives were usually glad to give, as they usually believed the Spanish to be sent by the gods. When the natives began to show concern or question their occupiers, the local king/nobility would be taken hostage until more gold was produced. If the natives refused or simply had no more gold to give, the Spanish would then begin a methodical destruction of the population, by selling the healthy into slavery and slaughtering the rest. Depending upon the circumstances, the Spanish would sometimes kill numerous natives in their initial occupation, thereby ruling by fear from the beginning.
The methods used by the Spanish to torture and kill were numerous: groups of natives being burned alive was a common practice, with the natives being hung by their necks with their feet just above the coals to prolong their suffering. Throwing the weak and elderly to packs of wild dogs kept by the Spanish was also a regular occurrence, as then the Spanish would not have to expend funds to keep the dogs fed. They would use the strappado, whereby the person would have their arms tied behind their back and then be hung from their wrists, sometimes being dropped from a height which would either dislocate or shatter their shoulders. The natives were also used as miners and pearl fishers, who were then worked to exhaustion and either died from suffocation or from drowning. When a group of natives were being taken to a slave ship, they would be chained at the neck and march single file; should one of them falter, they would be beheaded where they stood so that time would not be wasted unchaining them from the group.
When one reads these accounts by Las Casas, one is reminded of the wholesale slaughter of the Jews in WWII, the ethnic cleaning in Bosnia, and the ongoing atrocities of Darfur. One criticism of Las Casas is that his numbers are exaggerated, and it appears that they are, as the lands themselves could not have supported the millions who died as he describes them. However, it was not the sheer numbers of dead that made an impression on me, but the detail in Las Casas’ descriptions (and this is only the Short Account – there is much more detail in the original Account) that rings true.
What Las Casas found especially appalling in all this was that (1) the natives were generally docile and peace loving (a fact noted by Columbus and other explorers of the era) when the occupations began, and thus their generosity was exploited; (2) that the naives were often improperly enslaved, because they should have been treated as Spanish subjects (not Spanish citizens, but legal members of the occupied territories, with some modicum of rights); and (3) the outright failure of the settlers to follow the will of Isabella that the natives be converted to Christianity, as countless numbers were sent to the grave without the benefit of Christian teachings or the sacraments.
I am certainly not a scholar of early American history, nor do I claim to have a grasp on all the arguments on both sides of this debate; however, in reading the Short Account, I came away with the impression that Las Casas was primarily concerned for the lives of the natives and the reputation of the Spanish crown and was not writing this document with some ulterior motive. Indeed, Las Casas specifically asked that this document not be available to the public for 40 years after it was written to protect the Crown; in fact, it was not published until 1875, over 300 years after his death
The Short Account is a straightforward and concise book, and I would recommend it to anyone seeking to gain a greater understanding of the native perspective in regards to the discovery and occupation of the New World. Unfortunately, the Short Account does confirm man’s capacity throughout the ages – and into the modern era – to commit atrocities against those unable to defend themselves.