A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

“As Divine Providence has ordained that the world shall, for the benefit and proper government of the human race, be divided into kingdoms and peoples and that these shall be ruled by kings, who are (as Homer has it) fathers and shepherds to their people and are, accordingly, the noblest and most virtuous of beings, there is no doubt, nor could there in all reason be any such doubt, but that these kings entertain nothing save that which is morally unimpeachable. It follows that if the commonwealth suffers from some defect, or shortcoming, or evil, the reason can only be that the ruler is unaware of it; once the matter is brought to his notice, he will work with the utmost diligence to set matters right and will not rest content until the evil has been eradicated.” 

A Short Account was written for Charles V of Spain, appealing to the pathos of the Holy Roman Emperor to put a stop to colonial atrocities. In this passage Las Casas both honors his emperor and excuses him from the vitriolic accusations he later throws at any and all Spaniards involved in the colonial project. Las Casas explicitly assumes—while of course knowing otherwise—that Charles V is simply oblivious to these atrocities, therefore necessitating the text that Las Casas humbly presents. Casting the king as a pious and caring shepherd of his people, Las Casas encourages him to behave as such while also reminding him of his obligation to uphold the teachings of the Christian tradition that empowers him. While seemingly humble, this honorific appeal to Charles V is also a reminder of his duty as a ruler.

“One fact in all this is widely known and beyond dispute, for even the tyrannical murderers themselves acknowledge the truth of it: the indigenous peoples never did the Europeans any harm whatever; on the contrary, they believed them to have descended from the heavens, at least until they or their fellow-citizens had tasted, at the hands of these oppressors, a diet of robbery, murder, violence, and all other manner of trials and tribulations.” 

Many historical sources suggest that Aztec Emperor Montezuma II believed Cortés’s landing on the Americas in 1519 to be the return of the deity Quetzalcoatl, due to the coincidence of this arrival with prophecies of Quetzalcoatl’s return. This is still a point debated in scholarship. However, this passage is one of only a few in the book where Las Casas suggests the indigenous actually did believe the colonizers were gods and did not just treat them with intense hospitality and graciousness as if they were deities.

“The king of Cibao was called Guarionex and he had as vassals several extremely powerful local leaders; one of them, for example, had sixteen thousand men under arms and these he placed at the service of Guarionex. I met some of these men myself. The king himself was dutiful and virtuous, a man of placid temperament much devoted to the King and Queen of Spain.”

Chapter 2 is one of the more vivid of in the text, likely because of Las Casas’s extensive personal history in Hispaniola. He gives ample geographical and political descriptions of the island, listing the names of each of the region’s kings—a rare occurrence in later chapters. When he does so for Guarionex, Las Casas also provides information on the political hierarchy surrounding the king and depicts him not as a savage but as dutiful and fair. While potentially only a facet aimed at making the later killing of Guarionex more striking to the reader, Las Casas’s determination to honor this king as a just ruler of a complex civilization is an important moment in early colonial writing.

“The carriage was terrible and, eventually, they tracked down the fugitive, took him prisoner, put him in chains and shackles and bundled him on a ship bound for Castile, only for him to perish, along with many Spaniards, when the ship was lost at sea. A fortune in gold sank beneath the waves that day, among the cargo being the Great Nugget, as big as a loaf of bread and weighting three thousand six hundred castilians. In this way, God passed judgement on the great iniquities committed by the Spanish.” 

The prisoner in question here is the king Guarionex, who was captured by the Spanish after fleeing the massacre of his people. He, along with the other regional kings, was sent to Spain on a ship that was lost at sea. Here Las Casas highlights not the injustice of the action but its consequences: monetary loss for the Spain. This passage is one of a handful of times Las Casas argues that God is punishing the Spanish kingdom for its conquistadors’ acts.

“Indeed, they invented so many new methods of murder that it would be quite impossible to set them all down on paper and, however hard one tried to chronicle them, one could probably never list a thousandth part of what actually took place. All I can say is that I know it to be an incontrovertible fact and do here so swear before Almighty God, that the local peoples never gave the Spanish any cause whatever for the injury and injustice that was done to them in these campaigns. On the contrary, they behaved as honorably as might the inmates of a well-run monastery, and for this they were robbed and massacred, and even those who escaped death on this occasion found themselves condemned to a lifetime of captivity and slavery.” 

Early in the text Las Casas employs several argumentative motifs. He foregrounds the barbarity and inventiveness of Spanish slaughter and the paucity of his text to do it justice. He also compares the native peoples’ innocence to “inmates of a monastery”—i.e., practitioners of the Christian faith—thereby distancing any colonists’ claim of missionary practice as a justification for their actions.

“It is of note that all these island territories began to go to the dogs once news arrived of the death of our most gracious Queen Isabella, who departed this life in 1504. Up to then, only a small number of provinces had been destroyed through unjust military action, not the whole area, and news of even this partial destruction had by and large been kept from the Queen.” 

Las Casas shows himself to be a relatively reliable contemporary source on the history of the Spanish colonization. Columbus was the first European explorer to land on Hispaniola, doing so on December 5, 1492, and giving the island its name. It was Queen Isabella who prevented Columbus from selling natives of the Americas as slaves in 1495. Her 1501 instructions that the peoples of the Americas should be treated as subjects of the Spanish Crown, with similar rights afforded to them, was an important precedent for Las Casas’s argument against the Spanish colonizers’ immoral acts and their offense to the principles of the Spanish Crown. This ordinance is referenced in the above passage.

“The local people have been presented with an ultimatum: either they adopt the Christian religion and swear allegiance to the crown of Castile, or they will find themselves faced with military action in which no quarter will be given and they will be cut down or taken prisoner. It is as though the son of God who gave his life for every living soul when he instructed his followers with the words ‘go ye therefore and teach all nations’ intended heathens, living in peace and tranquility in their own lands, to be confronted with the demand that they convert on the spot, without their ever hearing the Word or having Christian doctrine explained to them.”

Though official policy emphasized missionary action and the spreading of Christianity among native populations, this manifested in a policy of using forced conversion as an excuse to massacre and enslave natives and thereby gain access to any precious metals in their property. This is codified in Spanish law, known as the Requerimentio of 1513. Las Casas believed colonial action for the purpose of proselytizing was justified, and he argues for the return to this activity as a primary goal throughout his text.

“This wicked wretch of a governor [Pedro Dávila] was accordingly under instructions to ensure that the terms of this government legislation were made known to the native population, as though by doing this one could justify the absurdity, unreasonableness and injustice of the terms themselves; what he did in practice, whenever he or the bandits in his employ learned that there was gold in a particular town or village, was to get his gang of robbers to make their way there at the dead of night, when the inhabitants were all in bed and sound asleep and, once they got within, say, half a league of the town itself, to read out the terms of this edict.” 

Continuing the passage above, Las Casas provides actual reference to the terms of the Requerimentio of 1513. The Requerimentio was a declaration that outlined the Spanish monarchy’s divine right to the territories of the New World. This requirement necessitated reading aloud to natives and labeled those who resisted in defiance of God’s will, justifying their forceful subjugation. In this passage Las Casas describes the colonists’ actual application of this decree.

“They would chain their prisoners together so that none could slip the load of three arrobas which he or she was forced to carry. […] And when a native bearer flagged and became utterly debilitated and wearied by the enormous burden he was expected to carry and the shortage of food and lack of rest, they cut his head from his shoulders so they would not have to break the chains that held the line of prisoners together, and his head would fall to one side of the baggage train and his trunk to the other.” 

Las Casas repeatedly mentions that natives were chained with neck shackles to carry heavy loads between colonial sites, each time noting the practice of beheading the exhausted to avoid unshackling or breaking of the chains. This is the first time the practice is referenced in the text. While we cannot confirm if the practice was as widespread as Las Casas attests, it becomes one of his primary examples of Spanish atrocity, symbolizing the absolute disdain the Spanish had for native life and their treatment of these peoples as slaves and beasts of burden.

“As we have said, all the towns of the region stood amid fertile lands of their own. Each of the settlers took up residence in the town allotted to him (or encommended to him as the legal phrase has it), put the inhabitants to work for him, stole their already scarce foodstuffs for himself and took over the lands owned and worked by the natives and on which they traditionally grew their own produce.”

Las Casas refers to the historical encomienda system, which is detailed in Part II of the Introduction to the Penguin Classics Edition. Las Casas was part of the system and had some natives of Hispaniola under his “encommendation” before rejecting it shortly after becoming a friar and working toward slavery’s abolition. In the passage above Las Casas draws sarcastic attention to the disparity of the letter of the law and the reality of its application in the New World.

“In this fashion, more than five hundred thousand poor souls, each of them as free as you or me, have been taken from their homelands.” 

Las Casas often refers to the illegality, both in divine and Spanish law, of the massacres against the natives and their enslavement. He refers to their actual right to freedom, as he does in this passage, more rarely. As subjects of the Spanish Crown, under the declaration of Queen Isabella, the natives had the same rights as Spanish subjects, on paper. These rights were rarely upheld.

“Over the twelve years of which we are speaking, and during the course of what they term ‘conquest’ (which is really nothing other than a series of violent incursions into the territory by these cruel tyrants: incursions condemned not only in the eyes of God but also by law, and in practice far worse than the assaults mounted by the Turk in his attempt to destroy Christendom), the Europeans have, throughout these four hundred and fifty leagues, butchered, burned alive or otherwise done to death four million souls, young and old alike, men, women and children.” 

“Conquest” is a historically loaded term that equates Spanish colonists’ actions in the New World with those of soldiers in the Crusades. Since the holy purposes of Spanish colonization were actively ignored and avoided by Spanish settlers, Las Casas openly rejects this terminology.

“And no account, no matter how lengthy, how long it took to write, nor how conscientiously it was compiled, could possibly do justice to the full horror of the atrocities committed at one time or another in various parts of this region by these mortal enemies of the human race. Even if one were simply to select one or two outrages from among the many, it would still be nigh on impossible to describe them in all their bloody and terrible detail. That said, and even though I am well aware that I can hardly recount one atrocity in a thousand, I will endeavor to say something about a few of these incidents.” 

The passage above exemplifies a common rhetorical flourish of Las Casas’s writing. He asserts that it is impossible to describe Spanish atrocity to the extent of its reality several times in the text.

“Among other massacres was one which took place in Cholula, a great city of some thirty thousand inhabitants. When all the dignitaries of the city and the region came out to welcome the Spaniards with all due pomp and ceremony, the priests to the fore and the high priest at the head of the procession, and then proceeded to escort them into the city and lodge them in the houses of the lord and the leading citizens, the Spaniards decided that the moment had come to organize a massacre (or ‘punishment’ as they themselves express such things) to inspire fear and terror in all the people of the new territory. This was, indeed, the pattern they followed in all the lands they invaded: to stage a bloody massacre of the most public possible kind to terrorize those meek and gentle peoples.” 

This passages opens Chapter 8, which serves as an excellent primary source on Cortés’s “most spectacular and widely reported massacre.” Cholula was an important and wealthy town in Mesoamerica. Not only was it on the region’s major trade route, it was the cult center of the deity Quetzalcoatl, who was important to many Mesoamerican groups. Here Las Casas describes how Cortés, as well as the wider group of Spanish conquistadors, conceptualized and organized their massacres.

“Any reasonable person who knows anything of God, of rights and of civil law can imagine for himself what the likely reaction would be of any people living peaceably within their own frontiers, unaware that they own allegiance to anyone save their natural lords, were a stranger suddenly to issue a demand among the following lines: ‘You shall henceforth obey a foreign king, whom you have never seen nor even heard of and, if you do not, we will cut you to pieces’—especially when they discover that these strangers are indeed quite prepared to carry this threat out to the letter.” 

Las Casas can be thought of as a bipartisan mind on the subject of colonization. While he rejects slavery, atrocity, and the encomienda system, he does support the colonial project’s missionary goals and accepts the Spanish Crown’s divine right to the Americas. Despite Las Casas’s clear mixed allegiances, the passage above is so strikingly impartial and succinct that it seems wholly discreet from its time. It is a stand-out moment in the text for its clarity and impact, revealing the deep empathy for the native peoples at the heart of Las Casas’s life work and the Short Account.

“In order to avenge themselves on the local people for having devised this trick, they decreed that all natives taken alive, of any station and of all ages, should themselves be cast into the pits they had dug, and so it came to pass that all those they captured—pregnant women, mothers of newborn babies, children and old men—were thrown into these pits and impaled on the spikes. The pits, brim full of their wretched victims, afforded a sorry spectacle, especially as they included women with their children still clutched to their breasts. Those they did not deal with in this fashion, they transfixed on their lances or stabbed to death with daggers, or threw them to the wild dogs who tore them to pieces and ate them.”

Las Casas describes the aftermath of a rare decision by the people of Guatemala to defend their homeland, and their construction of concealed pits in the road to kill cavalry horses. A few cavalrymen are fooled by these pits, precipitating this punishment from the Spanish. The passage highlights the colonists’ spitefulness and brutality and asserts that their massacres were not only politically motivated but also vengeful.

“When he discovered that a number of them still had idols hidden away, the wretched Spaniards never having taken the trouble to teach them a word about another and better God, he seized them and tortured them into surrendering these idols, thinking they would be made of gold and silver. When he discovered that they were not, he was so determined not to lose out on a single opportunity to make money, which was what he was after, that he forced his victims to bring him all the gold and silver they could lay their hands on so that they might buy back their gods and worship them in the traditional manner. This is yet another example of the great deeds of these benighted Spaniards and of the ways in which they bring lustre and honor to the name of the lord.”

This passage describes the actions of a visitador, a member of the Council of the Indies. The theft of indigenous idols in the hope they were made of gold alludes to the biblical narrative of the golden calf, explicitly referenced elsewhere in the text. Las Casas uses the narrative to contrast the legitimacy of the natives’ pagan religion against the colonists’ false Christianity and true avarice.

“The wretched Spaniards, having abandoned all Christian sense of right and wrong and been totally given over to a reprobate mind, are utterly impervious both to the justice of the actions of the local inhabitants and to the rights these people quite properly enjoy under natural, divine, and Roman law to defend themselves by cutting the Spanish forces to pieces and, if only they were sufficient in number and possessed of the necessary weapons, throwing them out of their land once and for all.”

This is a rare occurrence where Las Casas not only justifies but openly supports the native peoples’ military defense of their land. He also mentions their legal rights as Spanish citizens. Historically, Las Casas is read as highly sympathetic to the plight of the natives but ultimately still in support of colonial action for its missionary purposes. Passages like this, however, complicate that scholarly reading of his perspective.

“We can judge whether the sins of the Spanish are any less grave than that of Jeroboam who made Israel to sin when he struck the two golden calves for gods, or whether they are any less grave than that of Judas Iscariot, or their consequences any the less terrible; for time and again the Spaniard in the New World, overcome by his lust for gold, has betrayed the Lord, and time and again he has denied Him, the betrayals and the denials continuing down to the present day.”

Las Casas explicitly compares the Spanish’s greed to the idolatry of the Israelites when they worshipped false idols. This and quotation 18 identify the biblical precedents that inform Las Casas’s views on greed

“It is my considered opinion that the greatest obstacle that stands in the way of the pacification of the New World, and with it the conversion of the people to Christ, is the harshness and cruelty of the treatment meted out by ‘Christians’ to those who surrender. This has been so harsh and so brutal that nothing is more odious nor more terrifying to the people than the name ‘Christian’, a word for which they use in their language the term yares, which means ‘demons.’” 

Las Casas argues that aggression against the natives diminishes Spain’s ability to effectively pacify and colonize the New World. This is an important moment, as he takes a political stance that emphasizes the real-world cost of atrocity to Spain rather than an emotional appeal that focuses on morality. This quotation is also a good example of Las Casas’s refusal to identify the colonists as Christians; here he calls the actual title into question with reference to the indigenous understanding of the word. This reveals Las Casas’s conviction that the colonial enterprise’s integrity as a missionary project was of primary importance.

“I testify that I saw with my own eyes Spaniards cutting off the hands, noses and ears of local people, both men and women, simply for the fun of it, and that this happened time and again in various places throughout the region. On several occasions I also saw them set dogs on people, many being torn to pieces in this fashion, and they also burned down houses and even whole settlements, too numerous to count. It is also the case that they tore babes and sucklings from the mother’s breast and played games with them, seeing who could throw them the farthest. I was a witness to other outrages and to hair-raising barbarities, so many and so various that to list each and every one of them individually would be the work of a lifetime.” 

This is an excerpt from Franciscan Friar Brother Marcos’s letter on atrocities in Peru sent to the bishop of Mexico. The excerpt quickly restates most of the motifs of atrocity that run through Las Casas’s text, though it excludes some, such as the live burning of natives and the ransom and murder of kings. The excerpt therefore is a good restatement of many of the atrocities detailed in the text. It also distinguishes Las Casas’s writing style from other documents detailing atrocity. Here, Marcos uses the language of testification—ensuring his words are true and his own, both before God and, ostensibly, a legal court. Though an excellent example of how legal and divine law are conflated in the text, it is a tactic that Las Casas never employs.

“The longer men have operated in the New World and the more they have become accustomed to the carnage and butchery around them, the more brutal and the more wicked have been the crimes they commit against God and their fellow-men.”

Las Casas spent 50 years traveling between the New World and Spain, and he perceives himself as an important eyewitness to the atrocities of the Spanish colonial project. Here he succinctly states his perspective about the increasing brutality of atrocities in the New World and rages against the desensitization exhibited by both the colonists and the courtly population in Spain.

“It was the Spanish, not the local people, who should, in all justice, have been tortured without mercy, and yet it was they who now sought to inflict torture mercilessly on those they had offended.” 

This is another rare occurrence where Las Casas’s loyalties are blurred. Generally, Las Casas understands himself as a subject of the Spanish Crown, and he acts for the betterment of the empire. Here, however, Las Casas abets the torture of the Spanish, as he similarly abets the military action of the natives and the repulsion of Spanish colonialism in quotation 19.