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.
Themes
Unimaginable Atrocity in the New World
The most important theme that runs through Las Casas’s work is also its reason for existing: The genocide Spanish colonists committed against the indigenous peoples of South America. Each chapter details acts of incredible brutality by the Spanish against the largely defenseless peoples of the New World, with no provocation from this indigenous group. These acts of atrocity include massacring villages, burning people alive, feeding people to dogs, throwing people off mountains, disfiguring and dismembering children, raping women, and countless other violent acts. Las Casas maintains an unflinching gaze toward these atrocities, documenting them in a historically useful level of detail. Las Casas approaches these acts from a position of moral disbelief, repeatedly admitting that it is impossible to detail the true horror of these events. That said, the death tolls reported by Las Casas should not be interpreted as wholly accurate. In other works Las Casas is careful to mention that the number of causalities is meant to give the reader a sense of these atrocities, not an exact count of the dead.
Las Casas’s reasons for actively petitioning for the abolition of these acts are twofold. First, as we get a sense of in the text, Las Casas is a true humanitarian who objects to the massacre of innocent indigenous people simply because it is cruel. He often uses language such as “inhumane” and “barbaric” to describe these acts, and he sees the perpetrators of these massacres and other acts of atrocity as in forfeit of their humanity due to these deeds. Las Casas’s second objection to these acts is religious. Originally involved in the encomienda system as a settler, Las Casas eventually began a career of activism set directly against such cruelties.
Las Casas’s attention to the horrors of the Spanish conquest marks his work as an early account of genocide and a highly useful text in postcolonial scholarship on the history of the Americas. The cessation of these atrocities was Las Casas’s lifetime goal and the objective that inspired several of his written works.
The Colonial Gaze
Though Las Casas opposes colonial atrocity, he is still firmly located within a larger aesthetic tradition of colonial writing. When Las Casas describes the landscape of the Americas, he observes it as idyllic, paradisiacal, and naturally bountiful. Whether this is a rhetorical strategy tuned to the perspective of his royal audience or not, Las Casas clearly reads the landscape in terms of its resource wealth. This intersects with larger colonial views of the New World (i.e., one that is newly born, blossoming, and ready to be harvested). This is, of course, not the historical reality. The Americas were already inhabited by its indigenous people at the time of European conquest. While fertile, this landscape was by no means empty or untamed; indigenous peoples had already successfully exploited it agriculturally, and they had developed complex urban and political systems based on this agricultural foundation.
Las Casas, in some ways, works against the colonial perception of the New World’s natural purity by depicting the indigenous peoples as socially, linguistically, and politically developed. Even more rare for the time, he often remarks on the dense population of many regions, actively contrasting a colonial gaze that traditionally interprets the landscape as resource rich but societally barren. However, as Las Casas does this, he also pays special attention to the regions’ resource wealth, detailing the precious metals and foodstuffs produced in each. The organization of his work, with chapters moving through regions both chronologically and geographically, mirrors the expansion of the colonial machine. In some senses it offers a useful resource map to king even as it objects to how this landscape is currently being exploited.
All in all, Las Casas employs the colonial gaze as a rhetorical technique. When Las Casas outlines that regional kings have refused to reveal the whereabouts of precious resources as a protest to their treatment by the Spanish, for example, he is informing the emperor that these atrocities must be stopped to preserve the economic system that Spain is exploiting. While a vociferous objector to the atrocities committed in the Americas, Las Casas is still a Spanish settler there. He never questions his personal loyalty to the Spanish Crown or Spain’s rights to the American landscape. He simply wants the colonial project to be handled better.
The Noble Savage and the Savage Nobles
A common theme in both colonial and postcolonial literature is the noble savage trope, which conceives indigenous peoples as outsiders of the civilized tradition. These people are therefore uncorrupted by civilized traditions, existing in a naive and sinless space outside of modern discourse. While foregrounding the innocence and purity of these peoples, this ideology also attributes preconceived notions of morality onto indigenous peoples and traditions, reductively depicting their culture.
Las Casas highlights a few aspects of indigenous culture, such as basic ceremony, social organization, and language. He remarks that they “live in well-ordered and structured societies” (103). But A Short Account is not an effort in legitimate anthropology or ethnic study. Instead, Las Casas uses characterizations of native generosity, naivete, and innocence to underscore the Spanish colonizers’ atrocious activities. Therefore, while engaging the noble savage trope, Las Casas also engages its inversion, the savage noble. Las Casas explicitly contrasts the goodwill of native peoples with the barbarity and bloodthirstiness of the Spanish, asking the reader to judge who the real savage is in this dialectic.
Perversion of Christianity and Impending Divine Punishment
Las Casas primarily objects to the atrocities in the Americas from a Christian standpoint, viewing these acts as offensive to God. Christianity is also an important structural component of his arguments, and he cites the Bible as an important source of legal authority. When Las Casas objects to the “horrific excesses” of the Spanish colonial project, he employs language that not only highlights the colonizers’ brutality but also the sinfulness of their extravagance. Writing on the destruction of indigenous life, he objects to murder as well as the tragedy that these individuals, having never been baptized or accepted into the Christian faith, will go to hell. Both examples show how integral Las Casas’s Christian worldview is to his arguments.
Throughout his text Las Casas remains staunchly determined that the atrocities of the Spanish have called down future punishment from God. There are multiple claims throughout the text, such as the statement that de Alvarado was punished by God through his death in battle, or the assertion that the first Spanish colonists’ disappearance in Florida was divine retribution. The destruction of the city of Antigua by natural disaster (61) and the burning of an entire settlement in Granada at the moment of the torture of its king (117) are also examples.
Las Casas is clear this punishment will extend beyond individual conquistadors and Spanish settlements. He believes, or at least argues, that this is a punishment coming to the whole Spanish kingdom. There is some credulity to this line of attack: The Spanish have divine rights to the Americas because the Pope granted sovereignty of it to the Castilian Crown. Furthermore, Charles V of Spain is Holy Roman Emperor, a dynasty appointed by the Pope. His leadership, therefore, is not politically but religiously justified. This aspect of Charles V’s identity and caveat to his power allows Las Casas to make the implicit threat that runs through his text. The “punishment from God” that may be coming for the Spanish may not in fact be an earthquake, pestilence, or flood, but the revocation of a legal authority granted by the Pope, God’s messenger on Earth. Las Casas became a bishop in 1543, years before this text was put to print. While nowhere near the emperor’s power, this did give Las Casas some sway in this political game.
