History homework

Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies

By Bartoleme de Las Casas

The Indies were discovered in the year one thousand four hundred and ninety-two. In

the following year a great many Spaniards went there with the intention of settling the

land. Thus, forty-nine years have passed since the first settlers penetrated the land,

the first so claimed being the large and most happy isle called Hispaniola, which is six

hundred leagues in circumference. Around it in all directions are many other islands,

some very big, others very small, and all of them were, as we saw with our own eyes,

densely populated with native peoples called Indians. This large island was perhaps

the most densely populated place in the world. There must be close to two hundred

leagues of land on this island, and the seacoast has been explored for more than ten

thousand leagues, and each day more of it is being explored. And all the land so far

discovered is a beehive of people; it is as though God had crowded into these lands

the great majority of mankind.

And of all the infinite universe of humanity, these people are the most guileless, the

most devoid of wickedness and duplicity, the most obedient and faithful to their native

masters and to the Spanish Christians whom they serve. They are by nature the most

humble, patient, and peaceable, holding no grudges, free from embroilments, neither

excitable nor quarrelsome. These people are the most devoid of rancors, hatreds, or

desire for vengeance of any people in the world. And because they are so weak and

complaisant, they are less able to endure heavy labor and soon die of no matter what

malady. The sons of nobles among us, brought up in the enjoyments of life's

refinements, are no more delicate than are these Indians, even those among them who

are of the lowest rank of laborers. They are also poor people, for they not only possess

little but have no desire to possess worldly goods. For this reason they are not

arrogant, embittered, or greedy. Their repasts are such that the food of the holy fathers

in the desert can scarcely be more parsimonious, scanty, and poor. As to their dress,

they are generally naked, with only their pudenda covered somewhat. And when they

cover their shoulders it is with a square cloth no more than two varas in size. They

have no beds, but sleep on a kind of matting or else in a kind of suspended net called

bamacas. They are very clean in their persons, with alert, intelligent minds, docile and

open to doctrine, very apt to receive our holy Catholic faith, to be endowed with

virtuous customs, and to behave in a godly fashion. And once they begin to hear the

tidings of the Faith, they are so insistent on knowing more and on taking the

sacraments of the Church and on observing the divine cult that, truly, the missionaries

who are here need to be endowed by God with great patience in order to cope with

such eagerness. Some of the secular Spaniards who have been here for many years say

that the goodness of the Indians is undeniable and that if this gifted people could be

brought to know the one true God they would be the most fortunate people in the

world.

Yet into this sheepfold, into this land of meek outcasts there came some Spaniards

who immediately behaved like ravening wild beasts, wolves, tigers, or lions that had

been starved for many days. And Spaniards have behaved in no other way during the

past forty years, down to the present time, for they are still acting like ravening beasts,

killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples, doing all

this with the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of

before, and to such a degree that this Island of Hispaniola once so populous (having a

population that I estimated to be more than three million), has now a population of

barely two hundred persons.

The island of Cuba is nearly as long as the distance between Valladolid and Rome; it

is now almost completely depopulated. San Juan [Puerto Rico] and Jamaica are two of

the largest, most productive and attractive islands; both are now deserted and

devastated. On the northern side of Cuba and Hispaniola he the neighboring Lucayos

comprising more than sixty islands including those called Gigantes, beside numerous

other islands, some small some large. The least felicitous of them were more fertile

and beautiful than the gardens of the King of Seville. They have the healthiest lands in

the world, where lived more than five hundred thousand souls; they are now deserted,

inhabited by not a single living creature. All the people were slain or died after being

taken into captivity and brought to the Island of Hispaniola to be sold as slaves. When

the Spaniards saw that some of these had escaped, they sent a ship to find them, and it

voyaged for three years among the islands searching for those who had escaped being

slaughtered , for a good Christian had helped them escape, taking pity on them and

had won them over to Christ; of these there were eleven persons and these I saw.

More than thirty other islands in the vicinity of San Juan are for the most part and for

the same reason depopulated, and the land laid waste. On these islands I estimate there

are 2,100 leagues of land that have been ruined and depopulated, empty of people.

As for the vast mainland, which is ten times larger than all Spain, even including

Aragon and Portugal, containing more land than the distance between Seville and

Jerusalem, or more than two thousand leagues, we are sure that our Spaniards, with

their cruel and abominable acts, have devastated the land and exterminated the

rational people who fully inhabited it. We can estimate very surely and truthfully that

in the forty years that have passed, with the infernal actions of the Christians, there

have been unjustly slain more than twelve million men, women, and children. In truth,

I believe without trying to deceive myself that the number of the slain is more like

fifteen million.

The common ways mainly employed by the Spaniards who call themselves Christian

and who have gone there to extirpate those pitiful nations and wipe them off the earth

is by unjustly waging cruel and bloody wars. Then, when they have slain all those

who fought for their lives or to escape the tortures they would have to endure, that is

to say, when they have slain all the native rulers and young men (since the Spaniards

usually spare only the women and children, who are subjected to the hardest and

bitterest servitude ever suffered by man or beast), they enslave any survivors. With

these infernal methods of tyranny they debase and weaken countless numbers of those

pitiful Indian nations.

Their reason for killing and destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the

Christians have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold, and to swell themselves

with riches in a very brief time and thus rise to a high estate disproportionate to their

merits. It should be kept in mind that their insatiable greed and ambition, the greatest

ever seen in the world, is the cause of their villainies. And also, those lands are so rich

and felicitous, the native peoples so meek and patient, so easy to subject, that our

Spaniards have no more consideration for them than beasts. And I say this from my

own knowledge of the acts I witnessed. But I should not say "than beasts" for, thanks

be to God, they have treated beasts with some respect; I should say instead like

excrement on the public squares. And thus they have deprived the Indians of their

lives and souls, for the millions I mentioned have died without the Faith and without

the benefit of the sacraments. This is a wellknown and proven fact which even the

tyrant Governors, themselves killers, know and admit. And never have the Indians in

all the Indies committed any act against the Spanish Christians, until those Christians

have first and many times committed countless cruel aggressions against them or

against neighboring nations. For in the beginning the Indians regarded the Spaniards

as angels from Heaven. Only after the Spaniards had used violence against them,

killing, robbing, torturing, did the Indians ever rise up against them....

On the Island Hispaniola was where the Spaniards first landed, as I have said. Here

those Christians perpetrated their first ravages and oppressions against the native

peoples. 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....

After the wars and the killings had ended, when usually there survived only some

boys, some women, and children, these survivors were distributed among the

Christians to be slaves. The repartimiento or distribution was made according to the

rank and importance of the Christian to whom the Indians were allocated, one of them

being given thirty, another forty, still another, one or two hundred, and besides the

rank of the Christian there was also to be considered in what favor he stood with the

tyrant they called Governor. The pretext was that these allocated Indians were to be

instructed in the articles of the Christian Faith. As if those Christians who were as a

rule foolish and cruel and greedy and vicious could be caretakers of souls! And the

care they took was to send the men to the mines to dig for gold, which is intolerable

labor, and to send the women into the fields of the big ranches to hoe and till the land,

work suitable for strong men. Nor to either the men or the women did they give any

food except herbs and legumes, things of little substance. The milk in the breasts of

the women with infants dried up and thus in a short while the infants perished. And

since men and women were separated, there could be no marital relations. And the

men died in the mines and the women died on the ranches from the same causes,

exhaustion and hunger. And thus was depopulated that island which had been densely

populated.