51 pages • 1 hour read
Bartolome de Las CasasA Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1552A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 9-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “The Province and Kingdom of Guatemala”
In Guatemala a Spanish commander (Pedro de Alvarado) summoned and captured the king. When the king did not produce gold, as Guatemala does not naturally have it, he was burned at the stake. At this, the lords of the region went into hiding and instructed their people to surrender to the Spanish but not reveal their leaders’ hiding places.
When Cortés began raiding cities, some Guatemalans raised defenses, constructing pits with spikes in the streets to kill Spanish horses. The Spanish discovered the pits and cast all natives captured, including “pregnant women, mothers of newborn babes, children and old men,” into them (60). Other natives were impaled, stabbed, or thrown to dogs. Las Cases writes, “This inhumane butchery continued unabated for a full seven years, from 1524 until 1530 or 1531” (60).
De Alvarado and his brothers moved on the city of Cuzcatlán. Discovering that the country had very little gold, they took as many inhabitants as they could as slaves and left; “[t]hese poor wretches went unprotestingly, like lambs to the slaughter […] doing everything their new master asked of them and treating him almost as a god” (60). When the islanders mounted an attack on the departing Spanish, they were massacred. Years later the Spanish returned to Guatemala and built a city (possible Antigua) “that has only recently been visited by the full force of Divine Justice and been utterly destroyed by three violent disasters” (61).
De Alvarado and his brothers were responsible for the death of 4 or 5 million natives from 1524 to 1540, according to Las Casas. De Alvarado used starved natives of regions he had already conquered in siege of new ones, allowing these native soldiers to eat those they captured. His camp became “a human abattoir” (63). Many natives also died building ships for the Spanish. Las Casas closes the chapter praying God is satisfied with the terrible death in battle he eventually delivered on de Alvarado (64).
Chapter 10 Summary: “New Spain, Pánuco and Jalisco”
Beltrán Nuño de Guzmán arrived in New Spain and Pánuco in 1525. He took slaves as laborers and to sell on Cuba and Hispaniola, bartering one mare against 80 locals. Guzman later became a governor of Mexico City and New Spain, presiding over the Audiencia (royal courts in the New World deeply involved in the government of the colonies). In Michoacán, Guzmán’s Spanish kidnapped and tortured the city lord for gold and silver. A Franciscan released him, but he died of his injuries.
Las Casas recounts how an Inspector of Indian Affairs, or visitador, tortured natives into relinquishing their idol statues. When he realized they were not made of gold, he ransomed them back to the people for “all the gold and silver they could lay their hands on” (67).
Guzmán moved on to Jalisco, “acknowledging no limits to his frenzied quest for his great God, gold” (68). Enslaving women as well as men, he forced many to abandon their children on the side of the road to carry the massive loads they were chained to. One Spaniard, in a foiled attempt to rape a young woman, stabbed her to death. Guzmán was directly responsible for the looting and destruction of 800 towns and villages throughout Jalisco. The Spanish seemed not to understand the ungodliness of their actions, and in fact praised God for allowing them these conquests.
Chapter 11 Summary: “The Kingdom of Yucatán”
In 1526 “yet another thorough scoundrel” (71), Francisco de Montejo, was elevated to power, becoming governor of the kingdom of Yucatán. As there was no gold in the region, Montejo and his men sold many hundreds of inhabitants into slavery. Before this, “Yucatán was very densely populated, for it enjoys a healthy climate and produces foodstuffs in plenty” (71). The kingdom was “particularly well endowed with fruit of all kinds, and produces more honey and wax than has been discovered to date in any other part of the New World” (71).
Atrocities committed here included the live butchery of children to feed to dogs and the rape of women to make them pregnant so they fetched a higher price as slaves. In 1534, with these “hellhounds” (75) exiting the province, five Franciscans entered and were allowed to preach as long as no Spaniards accompanied them. They quickly converted the local population, which Las Casas describes as highly amenable to this new faith. In becoming Christian, they also became subjects of the emperor, documentation of which Las Casas still has in his possession.
After this successful conversion, a band of 30 Spaniards arrived with idols sacked from other areas, which they forced the locals to distribute throughout the province in exchange for slaves. Feeling betrayed, the locals turned against the friars, and the friars only barely escaped. However, after their escape the locals realized they were not in league with the Spanish and welcomed backed the friars, who stayed for five months until they were forced to abandon their mission due to constant turmoil in the region.
Chapters 9-11 Analysis
These chapters detail three short years of Spanish arrival on the islands of the Americas. Las Casas arranges the chapters to depict chronologically sequential events in the conquest of American islands—with de Alvarado’s activities in Guatemala beginning in 1524; Guzmán’s conquest of New Spain, Pánuco, and Jalisco in 1525; and Montejo’s conquest of Yucatan in 1526. These are the last chapters that detail these conquests chronologically, with the rest of the text turned toward islands that had been inhabited by the Spanish for decades and still suffered at the time of Las Casas’s writing in 1542. While Las Casas provides detailed chronological and geographical information, he is noticeably vague in the actual listing of the names of Spanish commanders. In each of these chapters, instead of naming the Commanders directly, he uses epithets such as “commander,” “butcher,” or “scoundrel” to depict them.
Las Casas’s choice to use this literary effect is difficult to decidedly explain, with little scholarship currently discussing it. As he learned about the acts of the Spanish on these islands, he certainly also knew the names of their commanders. His vagueness on their actual identities may be a choice to avoid ruffling the feathers of those with specific loyalties at the Spanish court. Their identities, alternatively, may be irrelevant to Las Casas. Focused on the criminal acts of the Spanish, he often takes witness of how their modes of destruction are similar across geographically disparate areas—and he seems to see all the Spanish conquistadors as a single pack of hellhounds, with little interest or necessity in identifying specific leadership. Indeed, even Cortés, often synonymous with the figure of the Spanish conquistador to modern readers, is depicted as one of many nameless Spanish commanders.
The actions of these commanders in these cities are presented as both standard and deviously innovative. While enslavement, murder, and the abduction and ransom of leadership is all common practice, the use of captured natives as soldiers in siege and its support of cannibalism, as well as the ransoming of idols, are new occurrences in Las Casas’s account. While the massacre committed under the leadership of these butchers is clearly abhorrent to Las Casas as a humanitarian, these chapters also show how his specifically religious perspective fuses with his political stance. For example, the narrative of a visitador ransoming captured idols to the natives for gold is another clear allusion to the biblical story of the golden calf.
Las Casas depicts the Spanish in forfeit of their Christianity, as ravening idolaters who express gold as their deity and greed as their form of worship. The story of the Franciscan friars also draws a clear distinction between the ethos of the conquistadors and that of Christian missionaries. As Las Casas avoids personal identification of the key players in this drama—not just Spanish commanders but also the missionaries and natives themselves—contemporary narrative analysis would describe these figures as stock characters. Instead of seeing individual historical persons with unique agencies, we read a drama of homogenously evil conquistadors, moral and helpless missionaries, and innocent natives.
