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Bartolomé De Las Casas

From: The Norton Anthology of American literature, vol. 1 of 2. Ed. Nina Baym, 5th ed. New York
and London; Norton 1998.

Bartolomé de las Casas (1474 – 1566)

Early modern Europe's most eloquent apologist for Native American rights, Bartolomé de las Casas
first heard of the new "discoveries" as a student in Seville in 1493, when Columbus triumphantly
entered that Spanish city. All his life, Casas recalled how Columbus brought with him "seven
Indians who had survived the voyage," and "beautiful green parrots, ... masks made of precious
stones and fishbone, ... sizable samples of very fine gold, and many other things never before seen
in Spain." Although Casas later called the seizure of those seven Taino Indians on the island of
Guanahani "the first injustice committed in the Indies," in the Spain of 1493, neither Casas nor
anyone else had time to reflect on the moral implications of the pageant taking place before their
eyes.
Going to the island of Hispaniola himself in 1502 as a member of a new royal governor's
party, Casas soon was participating eagerly in the exploitation of the natives. In his History of the
Indies, he was to write of his moral blindness in this period, noting that he "went about his concerns
like the others, sending his share of Indians to work fields and gold mines, taking advantage of them
as much as he could." Later, after becoming a priest, he grew convinced that such behavior was
contrary to Christian teachings and he soon was urging all masters to renounce the slave system (or
encomienda), as he himself had done. In 1515 Casas took the case to Spain, where the government
appointed him "protector of the Indians" and gave him permission to found a peaceful, exemplary
colony on the Venezuelan coast. That venture failed, however, and as Casas withdrew into monastic
seclusion on Hispaniola between 1522 and 1529, brutal new conquests in Guatemala, Nicaragua,
and Peru buried the promise of his Venezuelan project ever deeper. Only in the 1530s, when Casas
returned to political activity, did his arguments have widespread effect. In 1537 Pope Paul III
forbade all further enslavements; in 1542, Emperor Charles V followed suit in the New Laws of the
Indies, which gave Native Americans full protection of the courts, forbidding their enslavement on
any grounds. "We order and command that henceforth," ran one clause, "for no cause whatsoever,
whether of war, rebellion, ransom, or in any other manner, can any Indian be made a slave."
Such victories were bittersweet. As bishop of Chiapas, Mexico, from 1544 to 1547, Casas
sought to enforce the new laws, but riots there and broad resistance throughout the Spanish colonies
made it clear that his goals would not easily be achieved. Disillusioned by Charles V's revocation,
in the face of pressure from the settlers, of key features of the 1542 code, Casas returned in 1547 to
Spain, where he spent the last twenty years of his life writing about his long crusade in the West
Indies.
Of his writings, the most important in his own era was The Very Brief Relation of the
Devastation of the Indies, first published in 1552 but based on oral arguments used by Casas a
decade earlier to persuade a special royal commission to frame the new code of 1542. It details with
such chilling effect the destruction visited on Native Americans by conquistador and colonizer in
pursuit of wealth that in his own time Casas was widely accused of treason and even endured
charges of heresy, partly because the quick translation of his Relation into several other languages
provided Spain's enemies with ample evidence of his country's sins in America—a point Protestant
nations such as The Netherlands and England especially wished to make. Ironically, the later
Protestant "Black Legend" of Spain's devastation of the West Indies derives from the polemical
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exposé of the Catholic priest Bartolomι de las Casas, an exposé he intended as a call to Spain's
future reform rather than as a denunciation of its past.

From The Very Brief Relation of the Devastation of the Indies

From “Hispaniola”

This was the first land in the New World to be destroyed and depopulated by the Christians, and
here they began their subjection of the women and children, taking them away from the Indians to
use them and ill use them, eating the food they provided with their sweat and toil. The Spaniards did
not content themselves with what the Indians gave them of their own free will, according to their
ability, which was always too little to satisfy enormous appetites, for a Christian eats and consumes
in one day an amount of food that would suffice to feed three houses inhabited by ten Indians for
one month. And they committed other acts of force and violence and oppression which made the
Indians realize that these men had not come from Heaven. And some of the Indians concealed their
foods while others concealed their wives and children and still others fled to the mountains to avoid
the terrible transactions of the Christians.
And the Christians attacked them with buffets and beatings, until finally they laid hands on the
nobles of the villages. Then they behaved with such temerity and shamelessness that the most
powerful ruler of the islands had to see his own wife raped by a Christian officer.
From that time onward the Indians began to seek ways to throw the Christians out of their lands.
They took up arms, but their weapons were very weak and of little service in offense and still less in
defense. (Because of this, the wars of the Indians against each other are little more than games
played by children.) And the Christians, with their horses and swords and pikes began to carry out
massacres and strange cruelties against them. They attacked the towns and spared neither the
children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and
dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house. They
laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword, could split a man in two or could cut off his head
or spill out his entrails with a single stroke of the pike. They took infants from their mothers'
breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them headfirst against the crags or snatched them
by the arms and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter and saying as the babies fell into
the water, "Boil there, you offspring of the devil!" Other infants they put to the sword along with
their mothers and anyone else who happened to be nearby. They made some low wide gallows on
which the hanged victim's feet almost touched the ground, stringing up their victims in lots of
thirteen, in memory of Our Redeemer and His twelve Apostles, then set burning wood at their feet
and thus burned them alive. To others they attached straw or wrapped their whole bodies in straw
and set them afire. With still others, all those they wanted to capture alive, they cut off their hands
and hung them round the victim's neck, saying, "Go now, carry the message," meaning, Take the
news to the Indians who have fled to the mountains. They usually dealt with the chieftains and
nobles in the following way: they made a grid of rods which they placed on forked sticks, then
lashed the victims to the grid and lighted a smoldering fire underneath, so that little by little, as
those captives screamed in despair and torment, their souls would leave them....
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I once saw this, when there were four or five nobles lashed on grids and burning; I seem even to
recall that there were two or three pairs of grids where others were burning, and because they
uttered such loud screams that they disturbed the captain's sleep, he ordered them to be strangled.
And the constable, who was worse than an executioner, did not want to obey that order (and I know
the name of that constable and know his relatives in Seville), but instead put a stick over the
victims' tongues, so they could not make a sound, and he stirred up the fire, but not too much, so
that they roasted slowly, as he liked. I saw all these things I have described, and countless others.
And because all the people who could do so fled to the mountains to escape these inhuman,
ruthless, and ferocious acts, the Spanish captains, enemies of the human race, pursued them with the
fierce dogs' they kept which attacked the Indians, tearing them to pieces and devouring them. And
because on few and far between occasions, the Indians justifiably killed some Christians, the
Spaniards made a rule among themselves that for every Christian slain by the Indians, they would
slay a hundred Indians.

From “The Coast of Pearls, Paria, and the Island of Trinidad”

[The Spaniards] have brought to the island of Hispaniola and the island of San Juan more than two
million souls taken captive, and have sent them to do hard labor in mines, labors that caused many
of them to die. And it is a great sorrow and heartbreak to see this coastal land which was so
flourishing, now a depopulated desert. This is the truth that can be verified, for no more do they
bring ships loaded with Indians that have been thus attacked and captured as I have related. No
more do they cast overboard onto the sea the third part of the numerous Indians they stow on their
vessels, these dead being added to those they have killed in their own native lands, the captives
crowded into the holds of their ships, without food or water, or with very little, so as not to deprive
the Spanish tyrants who call themselves ship owners and who carry enough food for themselves on
their voyages of attack. And for the pitiful Indians who died of hunger and of thirst, there is no
remedy but to cast them into the sea. And verily, as a Spaniard told me, their ships in these regions
could voyage without compass or chart, merely by following fro the distance between the Lucayos
Islands and Hispaniola, which is sixty or seventy leagues, the trace of those Indians corpses floating
in the sea, corpses that had been cast overboard by earlier ships. Afterward, when they disembark
on the Island of Hispaniola, it is heartbreaking to see those naked Indians, heartbreaking for anyone
with a vestige of piety, the famished state they are in, fainting and falling down, weak from hunger,
men, women, old people, and children. Then, like sheep, they are sorted out into flocks of ten or
twenty persons, separating fathers from sons, wives from husbands, and the Spaniards draw lots, the
ship owners carrying off their share, the best flock, to compensate them for the moneys they have
invested in their fleet of two or three ships, the ruffian tyrants getting their share of captives who
will be house slaves, and when in this “repartimiento” a tyrant gets an old person or an invalid, he
says, “Why do you give me this one? To bury him? And this sick one, do you give him to me to
make him well?” See by such remarks in what esteem the Spaniards hold the Indians and judge if
they are accomplishing the divine concepts of love for our fellow man, as laid down by the
prophets. The tyranny exercised by the Spaniards against the Indians in the work of pearl fishing is
one of the most cruel that can be imagined. There is no life as infernal and desperate in this century
that can be compared with it, although the mining of gold is a dangerous and burdensome way of
life. The pearl fishers dive into the sea at a depth of five fathoms, and do this from sunrise to sunset,
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and remain for many minutes without breathing, tearing the oysters out of their rocky beds where
the pearls are formed. They come to the surface with a netted bag of these oysters where a Spanish
torturer is waiting in a canoe or skiff, and if the pearl diver shows signs of wanting to rest, he is
showered with blows, his hair is pulled, and he is thrown back into the water, obliged to continue
the hard work of tearing out the oysters and bringing them again to the surface. The food given the
pearl divers is codfish, not very nourishing, and the bread made of maize, the bread of the Indies. At
night the pearl divers are chained so they cannot escape. Often a pearl diver does not return to the
surface, for these waters are infested with man eating sharks of two kinds, both vicious marine
animals that can kill, eat, and swallow a whole man. In this harvesting of pearls let us again
consider the Spaniards preserve the divine concepts of love for their fellow men, when they place
the bodies of the Indians in such mortal danger, and their souls, too, for these pearl divers perish
without the holy sacraments. And it is solely because of the Spaniards' greed for gold that they force
the Indians to lead such a life, often a brief life, for it is impossible to continue long for long diving
into the water and holding the breath for minutes at a time, repeating this for hour after hour, day
after day; the continual cold penetrates them, constricts the chest, and they die spitting blood, or
weakened by diarrhea. The hair of these pearl divers, naturally black, is as if burnished by the
saltpeter in the water, and hangs down their backs making them look like sea dogs or monsters of
another species. And in this extraordinary labor, or, better put, in this infernal labor, the Lucayan
Indians are finally consumed, as are captive Indians from other provinces. And all of them were
publicly sold for one hundred and fifty castellanos, these Indians who had lived happily on their
islands until the Spaniards came, although such a thing was against the law. But the unjust judges
did nothing to stop it. For all the Indians of the islands are known to be great swimmers.