LAS CASAS, AND THE RELATIONS OF THE SPANIARDS TO THE INDIANS.
BY GEORGE EDWARD ELLIS,
_Vice-President of the Massachusetts Historical Society._
WHEN the great apostle of the new faith, on his voyage from Asia to
Europe, was shipwrecked on a Mediterranean island, “the barbarous
people” showed him and his company “no little kindness.” On first
acquaintance with their chief visitor they hastily judged him to be
a murderer, whom, though he had escaped the sea, yet vengeance would
not suffer to live. But afterward “they changed their minds, and said
that he was a god.”[1012] The same extreme revulsion of feeling and
judgment was wrought in the minds of the natives of this New World when
the ocean-tossed voyagers from the old continent first landed on these
shores, bringing the parted representatives of humanity on this globe
into mutual acquaintance and intercourse. Only in this latter case the
change of feeling and judgment was inverted. The simple natives of the
fair western island regarded their mysterious visitors as superhuman
beings; further knowledge of them proved them to be “murderers,”
rapacious, cruel, and inhuman,—fit subjects for a dire vengeance.
In these softer times of ours the subject of the present chapter might
well be passed silently, denied a revival, and left in the pitiful
oblivion which covers so many of the distressing horrors of “man’s
inhumanity to man.” But, happily for the writer and for the reader,
the title of the chapter is a double one, and embraces two themes. The
painful narrative to be rehearsed is to be relieved by a tribute of
admiring and reverential homage to a saintly man of signal virtues and
heroic services, one of the grandest and most august characters in the
world’s history. Many of the obscure and a few of the dismal elements
and incidents of long-passed times, in the rehearsal of them on fresh
pages, are to a degree relieved by new light thrown upon them, by the
detection and exposure of errors, and by readjustments of truth. Gladly
would a writer on the subject before us avail himself of any such means
to reduce or to qualify its repulsiveness. But advancing time, with
the assertion of the higher instincts of humanity which have sharpened
regrets and reproaches for all the enormities of the past, has not
furnished any abatements for the faithful dealing with this subject
other than that just presented.
It is a fact worthy of a pause for thought, that in no single instance
since the discovery of our islands and continent by Europeans—to
say nothing about the times before it—has any new race of men come
to the knowledge of travellers, explorers, and visitors from the
realms of so-called civilization, when the conditions were so fair
and favorable in the first introduction and acquaintance between the
parties as in that between Columbus and the natives of the sea-girt
isle of Hispaniola. Not even in the sweetest idealizings of romance
is there a more fascinating picture than that which he draws of those
unsophisticated children of Nature, their gentleness, docility, and
friendliness. They were not hideous or repulsive, as barbarians;
they did not revolt the sight, like many of the African tribes, like
Bushmen, Feejeans, or Hottentots; they presented no caricaturings of
humanity, as giants or dwarfs, as Amazons or Esquimaux; their naked
bodies were not mutilated, gashed, or painted; they uttered no yells
or shrieks, with mad and threatening gestures. They were attractive in
person, well formed, winning and gentle, and trustful; they were lithe
and soft of skin, and their hospitality was spontaneous, generous, and
genial. Tribes of more warlike and less gracious nature proved to exist
on some of the islands, about the isthmus and the continental regions
of the early invasion; but the first introduction and intercourse of
the representatives of the parted continents set before the Europeans
a race of their fellow-creatures with whom they might have lived and
dealt in peace and love.
And what shall we say of the new-comers, the Spaniards,—the subjects of
the proudest of monarchies, the representatives of the age of chivalry;
gentlemen, nobles, disciples of the one Holy Catholic Church, and
soldiers of the Cross of Christ? What sort of men were they, what was
their errand, and what impress did they leave upon the scenes so fair
before their coming, and upon those children of Nature whom they found
so innocent and loving, and by whom they were at first gazed upon with
awe and reverence as gods?
In only one score of the threescore years embraced in our present
subject the Spaniards had sown desolation, havoc, and misery in and
around their track. They had depopulated some of the best-peopled
of the islands, and renewed them with victims deported from others.
They had inflicted upon hundreds of thousands of the natives all the
forms and agonies of fiendish cruelty, driving them to self-starvation
and suicide as a way of mercy and release from an utterly wretched
existence. They had come to be viewed by their victims as fiends of
hate, malignity, and all dark and cruel desperation and mercilessness
in passion. The hell which they denounced upon their victims was shorn
of its worst terror by the assurance that these tormentors were not to
be there.
Only what is needful for the truth of history is to be told here, while
shocking details are to be passed by. And as the rehearsal is made to
set forth in relief the nobleness, grandeur of soul, and heroism of a
man whose nearly a century of years was spent in holy rebuke, protest,
exposure, and attempted redress of this work of iniquity, a reader may
avert his gaze from the narration of the iniquity and fix it upon the
character and career of the “Apostle to the Indians.”
There was something phenomenal and monstrous, something so aimless,
reckless, wanton, unprovoked, utterly ruinous even for themselves,
in that course of riot and atrocity pursued by the Spaniards, which
leads us—while palliation and excuse are out of the question—to seek
some physical or moral explanation of it. This has generally been
found in referring to the training of Spanish nature in inhumanity,
cruelty, contempt of human life, and obduracy of feeling, through
many centuries of ruthless warfare. It was in the very year of the
discovery of America that the Spaniards, in the conquest of Granada,
had finished their eight centuries of continuous war for wresting their
proud country from the invading Moors. This war had made every Spaniard
a fighter, and every infidel an enemy exempted from all tolerance
and mercy. Treachery, defiance of pledges and treaties, brutalities,
and all wild and reckless stratagems, had educated the champions of
the Cross and faith in what were to them but the accomplishments of
the soldier and the fidelity of the believer. Even in the immunities
covenanted to the subject-Moors, of tolerance in their old home and
creed, the ingenuities of their implacable foes found the means of new
devices for oppression and outrage. The Holy Office of the Inquisition,
with all its cavernous secrets and fiendish processes, dates also from
the same period, and gave its fearful consecration to all the most
direful passions.
With that training in inhumanity and cruelty which the Spanish
adventurers brought to these shores, we must take into view that
towering, overmastering rapacity and greed which were to glut
themselves upon the spoils of mines, precious stones, and pearls.
The rich soil, with the lightest tillage, would have yielded its
splendid crops for man and beast. Flocks would have multiplied and
found their own sustenance for the whole year without any storage in
garner, barn, or granary. A rewarding commerce would have enriched
merchants on either side of well-traversed ocean pathways. But not
the slightest thought or recognition was given during the first
half-century of the invasion to any such enterprise as is suggested
by the terms colonization, the occupancy of soil for husbandry and
domestication. Spanish pride, indolence, thriftlessness regarded
every form of manual labor as a demeaning humiliation. There was no
peasantry among the new-comers. The humblest of them in birth, rank,
and means was a gentleman; his hands could not hold a spade or a rake,
or guide the plough. The horse and the hound were the only beasts on
his inventory of values. Sudden and vast enrichment by the treasures
of gold wrung from the natives, first in their fragmentary ornaments,
and then by compulsory toil from the mines which would yield it in
heaps, were the lure and passion of the invaders. The natives, before
they could reach any conception of the Divine Being of the Catholic
creed, soon came to the understanding of the real object of their
worship: as a cacique plainly set forth to a group of his trembling
subjects, when, holding up a piece of gold, he said, “This is the
Spaniards’ god.” A sordid passion, with its overmastery of all the
sentiments of humanity, would inflame the nerves and intensify all
the brutal propensities which are but masked in men of a low range of
development even under the restraints of social and civil life. We must
allow for the utter recklessness and frenzy of their full indulgence
under the fervors of hot climes, in the loosening of all domestic
and neighborly obligations, in the homelessness of exile and the mad
freedom of adventure. Under the fretting discomforts and restraints
of the ocean-passage hither, the imagination of these rapacious
treasure-seekers fed itself on visions of wild license of arbitrary
power over simple victims, and of heaps of treasure to be soon carried
back to Spain to make a long revel in self-indulgence for the rest of
life.
“Cruelties” was the comprehensive term under which Las Casas gathered
all the enormities and barbarities, of which he was a witness for
half a century, as perpetrated on the successive scenes invaded by
his countrymen on the islands and the main of the New World. He had
seen thousands of the natives crowded together, naked and helpless,
for slaughter, like sheep in a park or meadow. He had seen them wasted
at the extremities by torturing fires, till, after hours of agony,
they turned their dying gaze, rather in amazed dread than in rage,
upon their tormentors. Mutilations of hands, feet, ears, and noses
surrounded him with ghastly spectacles of all the processes of death
without disease. One may well leave all details to the imagination; and
may do this all the more willingly that even the imagination will fail
to fill and fashion the reality of the horror.
* * * * *
Previous to the successful ventures on the western ocean, the
Portuguese had been resolutely pursuing the work of discovery by
pushing their daring enterprise farther and farther down the coast of
Africa, till they at last turned the Cape.[1013] The deportation of the
natives and their sale as slaves at once became first an incidental
reward, and then the leading aim of craving adventurers. It was but
natural that the Spaniards should turn their success in other regions
to the same account. Heathen lands and heathen people belonged by
Papal donation to the soldiers of the Cross; they were the heritage of
the Church. The plea of conversion answered equally for conquest and
subjugation of the natives on their own soil, and for transporting them
to the scenes and sharers of a pure and saving faith.
A brief summary of the acts and incidents in the first enslavement of
the natives may here be set down. Columbus took with him to Spain, on
his first return, nine natives. While on his second voyage he sent to
Spain, in January, 1494, by a return vessel, a considerable number,
described as Caribs, “from the Cannibal Islands,” for “slaves.” They
were to be taught Castilian, to serve as interpreters for the work of
“conversion” when restored to their native shores. Columbus pleads that
it will benefit them by the saving of their souls, while the capture
and enslaving of them will give the Spaniards consequence as evidence
of power. Was this even a plausible excuse, and were the victims really
cannibals? The sovereigns seemed to approve the act, but intimated
that the “cannibals” might be converted at home, without the trouble
of transportation. But Columbus enlarged and generalized sweepingly
upon his scheme, afterward adding to it a secular advantage, suggesting
that as many as possible of these cannibals should be caught for the
sake of their souls, and then sold in Spain in payment for cargoes
of live stock, provisions, and goods, which were much needed in the
islands. The monarchs for a while suspended their decision of this
matter. But the abominable traffic was steadily catching new agents
and victims, and the slave-trade became a leading motive for advancing
the rage for further discoveries. The Portuguese were driving the work
eastward, while the Spaniards were keenly following it westward. In
February, 1495, Columbus sent back four ships, whose chief lading was
slaves. From that time began the horrors attending the crowding of
human cargoes with scant food and water, with filth and disease, and
the daily throwing over into the sea those who were privileged to die.
Yet more victims were taken by Columbus when he was again in Spain in
June, 1496, to circumvent his enemies. Being here again in 1498, he had
no positive prohibition against continuing the traffic. A distinction
was soon recognized, and allowed even by the humane and pious Isabella.
Captives taken in war against the Spaniards might be brought to Spain
and kept in slavery; but natives who had been seized for the purpose of
enslaving them, she indignantly ordered should be restored to freedom.
This wrong, as well as that of the _repartimiento_ system, in the
distribution of natives to Spanish masters as laborers, was slightly
held in check by this lovable lady during her life. She died while
Columbus was in Spain, Nov. 26, 1504. Columbus died at Valladolid, May
20, 1506. The ill that he had done lived after him, to qualify the
splendor of his nobleness, grandeur, and constancy.
And here we may bring upon the scene that one, the only Spaniard who
stands out luminously, in the heroism and glory of true sanctity, amid
these gory scenes, himself a true soldier of Christ.
* * * * *
Bartholomew Las Casas was born at Seville in 1474. Llorente—a faithful
biographer, and able editor and expositor of his writings, of whom
farther on we are to say much more—asserts that the family was French
in its origin, the true name being Casuas; which appears, indeed, as an
alias on the titlepage of some of his writings published by the apostle
in his lifetime.[1014]
Antoine Las Casas, the father of Bartholomew, was a soldier in the
marine service of Spain. We find no reference to him as being either in
sympathy or otherwise with the absorbing aim which ennobled the career
of his son. He accompanied Columbus on his first western voyage in
1492, and returned with him to Spain in 1493.
During the absence of the father on this voyage the son, at the age of
eighteen, was completing his studies at Salamanca. In May, 1498,[1015]
at the age of about twenty-four, he went to the Indies with his father,
in employment under Columbus, and returned to Cadiz, Nov. 25, 1500.
In an address to the Emperor in 1542, Bartholomew reminded him that
Columbus had given liberty to each of several of his fellow-voyagers
to take to Spain a single native of the islands for personal service,
and that a youth among those so transported had been intrusted to
him. Perhaps under these favoring circumstances this was the occasion
of first engaging the sympathies of Las Casas for the race to whose
redemption he was to consecrate his life. Isabella, however, was highly
indignant at this outrage upon the natives, and under pain of death
to the culprits ordered the victims to be restored to their country.
It would seem that they were all carried back in 1500 under the
Commander Bobadilla, and among them the young Indian who had been in
the service of Bartholomew. One loves to imagine that in some of the
wide wanderings of the latter, amid the scenes of the New World, he may
again have met with this first specimen of a heathen race who had been
under intimate relations with himself, and who had undoubtedly been
baptized.
We shall find farther on that the grievous charge was brought against
Las Casas, when he had drawn upon himself bitter animosities, that he
was the first to propose the transportation of negro slaves to the
islands, in 1517. It is enough to say here, in anticipation, that
Governor Ovando, in 1500, received permission to carry thither negro
slaves “who had been born under Christian Powers.” The first so carried
were born in Seville of parents brought from Africa, and obtained
through the Portuguese traffickers.
On May 9, 1502, Las Casas embarked for the second time with Columbus,
reaching San Domingo on June 29. In 1510 he was ordained priest by the
first Bishop of Hispaniola, and was the first ecclesiastic ordained in
the so-called Indies to say there his virgin Mass. This was regarded
as a great occasion, and was attended by crowds; though a story is
told, hardly credible, that there was then not a drop of wine to be
obtained in the colony. The first Dominican monks, under their Bishop,
Cordova, reached the islands in 1510. As we shall find, the Dominicans
were from the first, and always, firm friends, approvers, and helpers
of Las Casas in his hard conflict for asserting the rights of humanity
for the outraged natives. The fact presents us with one of the strange
anomalies in history,—that the founders and prime agents of the
Inquisition in Europe should be the champions of the heathen in the New
World.
The monks in sympathy with the ardent zeal of Las Casas began to preach
vehemently against the atrocious wrongs which were inflicted upon the
wretched natives, and he was sent as curate to a village in Cuba. The
Franciscans, who had preceded the Dominicans, had since 1502 effected
nothing in opposition to these wrongs. Utterly futile were the orders
which came continually from the monarchs against overworking and
oppressing the natives, as their delicate constitutions, unused to
bodily toil, easily sank under its exactions. The injunctions against
enslaving them were positive. Exception was made only in the case
of the Caribs, as reputed cannibals, and the then increasing number
of imported negro slaves, who were supposed to be better capable of
hard endurance. Las Casas was a witness and a most keen and sensitive
observer of the inflictions—lashings and other torturing atrocities—by
which his fellow-countrymen, as if goaded by a demoniac spirit, treated
these simple and quailing children of Nature, as if they were organized
without sensitiveness of nerve, fibre, or understanding, requiring of
them tasks utterly beyond their strength, bending them to the earth
with crushing burdens, harnessing them to loads which they could not
drag, and with fiendish sport and malice hacking off their hands
and feet, and mutilating their bodies in ways which will not bear a
description. It was when he accompanied the expedition under Velasquez
for the occupation of Cuba, that he first drew the most jealous
and antagonistic opposition and animosity upon himself, as standing
between the natives and his own countrymen, who in their sordidness,
rapacity, and cruelty seemed to have extinguished in themselves every
instinct of humanity and every sentiment of religion. Here too was
first brought into marked observation his wonderful power over the
natives winning their confidence and attachment, as they were ever
after docile under his advice, and learned to look to him as their
true friend. We pause to contemplate this wonderful and most engaging
character, as, after filling his eye and thought with the shocking
scenes in which his countrymen—in name the disciples of Jesus and
loyal members of his Church—perpetrated such enormities against beings
in their own likeness, he began his incessant tracking of the ocean
pathways in his voyages to lay his remonstrances and appeals before
successive monarchs. Beginning this service in his earliest manhood, he
was to labor in it with unabated zeal till his death, with unimpaired
faculties, at the age of ninety-two. He calls himself “the Clerigo.”
He was soon to win and worthily to bear the title of “Universal
Protector of the Indians.” Truly was he a remarkable and conspicuous
personage,—unique, as rather the anomaly than the product of his age
and land, his race and fellowship. His character impresses us alike
by its loveliness and its ruggedness, its tenderness and its vigor,
its melting sympathy and its robust energies. His mental and moral
endowments were of the strongest and the richest, and his spiritual
insight and fervor well-nigh etherealized him. His gifts and abilities
gave him a rich versatility in capacity and resource. He was immensely
in advance of his age, so as to be actually in antagonism with it. He
was free alike from its prejudices, its limitations, and many of its
superstitions, as well as from its barbarities. He was single-hearted,
courageous, fervent, and persistent, bold and daring as a venturesome
voyager over new seas and mysterious depths of virgin wildernesses,
missionary, scholar, theologian, acute logician, historian, curious
observer of Nature, the peer of Saint Paul in wisdom and zeal. Charles
V. coming to the throne at the age of sixteen, when Las Casas was
about forty, was at once won to him by profound respect and strong
attachment, as had been the case with Charles’s grandfather Ferdinand,
whom Las Casas survived fifty years, while he outlived Columbus sixty
years.
The Clerigo found his remonstrances and appeals to his own nominally
Christian fellow-countrymen wholly ineffectual in restraining or even
mitigating the oppressions and cruelties inflicted upon the wretched
natives. There was something phenomenal, as has been said, in the
license yielded to the ingenuity of Spanish barbarity. It combined
all the devices of inquisitorial torturing with the indulgence of
the bestial ferocities of the bullfight. At times it seemed as if
the heartless oppressors were seeking only for a brutal mirth in
inventing games in which their victims should writhe and yell as for
their amusement. Then, as opportunity suggested or served, a scheme
of the most cunning treachery and malice would turn an occasion of
revelry or feasting, to which the natives had been invited or been
beguiled by their tormentors, into a riot of fury and massacre. The
utter aimlessness and recklessness of most of these horrid enormities
impress the reader in these days as simply the indulgence of a wanton
spirit in giving free license in human passions to those mocking
employments of grinning devils in the old church paintings as they
inflict retributions on the damned spirits in hell. The forked weapons,
the raging flames, and the hideous demoniac delights exhibited in
paintings, with which the eyes of the Spaniards were so familiar, found
their all-too-faithful counterparts in the tropical zones and valleys
of our virgin islands. The only pretences offered, not for justifying
but for inflicting such wanton barbarities on the natives, were such
as these,—that they refused to make known or to guide their oppressors
to rich mines, or to work beyond their powers of endurance, or to bear
intolerable burdens, or to furnish food which they had not to give.
Touching and harrowing it is to read of many instances in which the
simple diplomacy of the natives prompted them to neglect the little
labor of husbandry required to supply their own wants, in order that
the invaders might with themselves be brought to starvation. Whenever
the Clerigo accompanied a body of Spaniards on the way to an Indian
village, he always made an effort to keep the two people apart by night
and by day, and he employed himself busily in baptizing infants and
little children. He could never be too quick in this service, as these
subjects of his zeal were the victims of the indiscriminate slaughter.
The only consolation which this tender-hearted yet heroic missionary
could find, as his share in the enterprise of his people, was in
keeping the reckoning on his tablets of the number of those born under
the common heathen doom whom he had snatched, by a holy drop, from the
jaws of hell.
Baffled in all his nearly solitary endeavors to check the direful havoc
and wreck of poor humanity on the scenes which were made so gory and
hateful, Las Casas returned again to Spain in 1515, buoyed by resolve
and hope that his dark revelations and bold remonstrances would draw
forth something more effective from the sovereign. He was privileged by
free and sympathizing interviews with Ferdinand at Placentia. But any
hope of success here was soon crushed by the monarch’s death. Las Casas
was intending to go at once to Flanders to plead with the new King,
Charles I., afterward Emperor, but was delayed by sympathetic friends
found in Cardinal Ximenes and Adrian, the Regents.
It may seem strange and unaccountable that Las Casas should have
encountered near the Court of a benignant sovereign a most malignant
opposition to all his endeavors from first to last in securing the
simply humane objects of his mission. But in fact he was withstood as
resolutely at home as abroad, and often by a more wily and calculating
policy. He found enemies and effective thwarters of his influence and
advice in the order of the Jeronymites. Of the grounds and methods
of their harmful activity, as well as of some of the more ostensible
and plausible of the motives and alleged reasons which made him
personal enemies both in Spain and in the Indies, we must speak with
some detail farther on. It may be well here to follow him summarily
in his frequent alternation between his missionary fields and his
homeward voyages, to ply his invigorated zeal with new and intenser
earnestness from his fuller experiences of the woes and outrages which
he sought to redress. With some, though insufficient, assurances
of regal authority in support of his cause, he re-embarked for the
Indies, Nov. 11, 1516, and reached Hispaniola in December, fortified
with the personal title of the “Universal Protector of the Indians.”
He sailed again for Spain, May 7, 1517. His plainness of speech had
in the interval increased the animosity and the efforts to thwart
him of the local authorities on the islands, and had even induced
coldness and lack of aid among his Dominican friends. He had many
public and private hearings in Spain, stirring up against himself
various plottings and new enemies. In each of these homeward visits Las
Casas of course brought with him revelations and specific details of
new accumulations of iniquity against the natives; and with a better
understanding of himself, and also of all the intrigues and interests
warring against him, his honest soul assured him that he must at last
win some triumph in his most righteous cause. So he heaped the charges
and multiplied the disclosures which gave such vehemence and eloquence
to his pleadings. Having during each of his home visits met some form
of misrepresentation or falsehood, he would re-embark, furnished as
he hoped with some new agency and authority against the evil-doers.
But his enemies were as ingenious and as active as himself. Perhaps
the same vessel or fleet which carried him to the islands, with orders
intended to advance his influence, would bear fellow-passengers with
documents or means to thwart all his reinforced mission. He left Spain
again in 1520, only to cast himself on a new sea of troubles soon
inducing him to return. His sixth voyage carried him this time to the
mainland in Mexico, in 1537. He was in Spain once more in 1539. While
waiting here for the return of the Emperor, he composed six of his many
essays upon his one unchanging theme, all glowing with his righteous
indignation, and proffering wise and plain advice to the monarch. Yet
again he crossed the now familiar ocean to America, in 1544, it being
his seventh western voyage, and returned for the seventh and last time
to Spain in 1547. Here were fourteen sea-voyages, with their perils,
privations, and lack of the common appliances and comforts shared in
these days by the rudest mariners. These voyages were interspersed by
countless trips and ventures amid the western islands and the main,
involving twofold, and a larger variety of harassments and risks, with
quakings, hurricanes, and reefs, exposures in open skiffs, and the
privilege of making one’s own charts. But one year short of fifty in
the count out of his lengthened life were spent by this man of noble
ardor, of dauntless soul, and of loving heart in a cause which never
brought to him the joy of an accomplished aim.
Las Casas shared, with a few other men of the most fervent and
self-sacrificing religious zeal, an experience of the deepest inward
conviction, following upon, not originally prompting to, the full
consecration of his life to his devoutest aim. Though he had been
ordained to the priesthood in 1510, he was afterward made to realize
that he had not then been the subject of that profound experience known
in the formulas of piety as true conversion. He dates this personal
experience, carrying him to a deeper devotional consciousness than he
had previously realized, to the influence over him of a faithful lay
friend, Pedro de la Renteria, with whom he became intimate in 1514. To
the devout conversation, advice, and example of this intimate companion
he ascribed his better-informed apprehension of the radical influences
which wrought out the whole system of wrong inflicted upon the natives.
Las Casas himself, like all the other Spaniards, had a company of
Indian servants, who were in effect slaves; and he put them to work,
the benefit of which accrued to himself. A form of servitude which
exceeded all the conditions of plantation slavery had been instituted
by Columbus under the system of so-called _repartimientos_. It was
founded on the assumption that the Spanish monarch had an absolute
proprietary right over the natives, and could make disposals and
allotments of their services to his Christian subjects, the numbers
being proportioned to the rank, standing, and means of individuals,
the meanest Spaniard being entitled to share in the distribution of
these servitors. This allowance made over to men of the lowest grade of
intelligence, character, and humanity, the absolute and irresponsible
power over the life and death of the natives intrusted to the disposal
of masters. Under it were perpetrated cruelties against which there
were no availing remonstrances, and for which there was no redress.
The domestic cattle of civilized men are to be envied above the human
beings who were held under the system of _repartimientos_,—tasked,
scourged, tormented, and hunted with bloodhounds, if they sank under
toils and inflictions beyond their delicate constitutions, or sought
refuge in flight.
The slavery which afterward existed in the British Colonies and in
these United States had scarce a feature in common with that which
originated with the Spanish invaders. Las Casas thinks that Ferdinand
lived and died without having had anything like a full apprehension
of the enormities of the system. This, however, was not because
efforts were lacking to inform him of these enormities, or to engage
his sovereign intervention to modify and restrain, if not positively
to prohibit, them. As we shall see, the system was so rooted in the
greed and rapacity of the first adventurers here, who were goaded by
passion for power and wealth, that foreign authority was thwarted in
every attempt to overrule it. The most favored advisers of Ferdinand
endeavored at first to keep him in ignorance of the system, and then,
as he obtained partial information about it, to lead him to believe
that it was vitally indispensable to conversion, to colonization, and
to remunerative trade. The Dominican missionaries had, as early as
1501, informed the monarch of the savage cruelties which the system
imposed. All that they effected was to induce Ferdinand to refer the
matter to a council of jurists and theologians. Some of these were even
alleged to have personal interests in the system of _repartimientos_;
but at any rate they were under the influence and sway of its most
selfish supporters. As the result of their conference, they persuaded
the monarch that the system was absolutely necessary,—as, first,
the Spaniards themselves were incapable of bodily labor under a
debilitating climate; and second, that the close and dependent relation
under which the natives were thus brought to their masters could alone
insure the possibility of their conversion to the true faith. Ferdinand
was so far won over to the allowance of the wrong as to issue an
ordinance in its favor; while he sought to limit, restrain, and qualify
it by injunctions which, of course, were futile in their dictation, for
operating at a distance, in islands where sordid personal interests
were all on the side of a defiance of them.
The Clerigo affirms that his own conscience was more startlingly
aroused to a full sense of the wrongs and iniquities of the system
of the _repartimientos_ by his religious friend Renteria. He had
previously, of course, so far as he was himself made the master or
guardian in this relation of any number of the natives, brought his
humanity and his ardor for justice into full exercise. But he was
quickened by his friend to the duty of private and also of bold public
protest against the system, and most plainly to offenders in proportion
to the number of the victims which they enthralled and to the cruelty
inflicted upon them. It was not his wont to allow any timidity or
personal regards or temporizing calculations to compel his silence or
to moderate his rebukes. His infirmity rather led him to excess in
impatience and passion in his remonstrances. His bold and denunciatory
preaching—though it appears that in this, and, as we shall note, on
other occasions of speech and writing, he restrained himself from using
the name of conspicuous offenders—caused an intense consternation and
excitement. His clerical character barely saved him from personal
violence. He found his hearers obdurate, and utterly beyond the sway
of his protests and appeals. Again, therefore, he turned his face
toward Spain, sustained by the fond assurance that he could so engage
the King’s intervention by his disclosures and rehearsals, that the
royal authority should at this time be effectually exerted against a
giant iniquity. This was his homeward errand in 1515. That even his
presence and speech had had some restraining influence in Cuba, is
signified by the fact that after his withdrawal and during his absence
all the wrongs and miseries of which the natives, wholly impotent to
resist, were the victims, ran into wilder license. The Spaniards kept
bloodhounds in training and in hunger, to scour the woods and thickets
and wilderness depths for the despairing fugitives. Whole families of
the natives took refuge in voluntary and preferred self-destruction.
Two Dominicans of like mind with Las Casas accompanied him on his
errand. Pedro de Cordova, prelate of the Dominicans, was his stanch
friend. The Clerigo reached Seville in the autumn of 1515, and at once
addressed himself to Ferdinand. He found the monarch old and ailing.
The most able and malignant opponent with whose support, enlisted
upon the side of the wrong and of the wrongdoers, Las Casas had to
contend, was the Bishop of Burgos, Fonseca, whose influence had sway
in the Council for the Indies.[1016] After the King’s death, Jan. 23,
1516, Las Casas enjoyed the countenance, and had hope of the effectual
aid, of the two Regents, previously mentioned, during the minority
of Charles, the heir to the throne. The earnestness and persistency
of the Clerigo so far availed as to obtain for him instructions to
be carried to those in authority in the islands for qualifying the
_repartimiento_ system, and with penalties for the oppressions under
it. Some Jeronymites were selected to accompany him on his return,
as if to reinforce the objects of his mission, and to insure the
efficacy of the title conferred upon him as the “Protector of the
Indians.” The Jeronymites, however, had been corrupted by the cunning
and intrigues of the wily and exasperated enemies of Las Casas, who
effected in secrecy what they could not or dared not attempt publicly
against the courageous Clerigo and his purposes backed by authority.
Already alienated during the voyage, they reached San Domingo in
December, 1516. Perhaps candor may induce the suggestion that while the
Jeronymites, from motives of prudence, temporized and qualified their
activity in their errand, Las Casas was heady and unforbearing in his
uncompromising demand for instant redress of wrong. At any rate he was
wholly foiled in the exercise of his delegated authority; and so, with
a fire in his blood which allowed no peace to his spirit, he was again
in Spain in July, 1517. Here he found Cardinal Ximenes, his friendly
patron, near to death. He was, however, encouraged with the hope
and promise of patronage from high quarters. For a season his cause
presented a favorable aspect. He had become sadly assured that upon the
Spaniards in the islands, whose hearts and consciences were smothered
by their greed and inhumanity, no influence, not even that of ghostly
terrorism, which was tried in the refusal of the sacraments, would be
of the least avail. His only resource was to engage what force there
might be in the piety and humanity of the Church at home, in the sense
of justice among high civil dignitaries, and in such sympathetic aid as
he might draw from his countrymen who had no interest in the mining or
the commerce sustained by the impositions upon the natives. The young
King had wise councillors, and they made with him some good plans for
means of relieving the natives from severities in their tasks of labor,
from cruel inflictions in working the mines, and from exorbitant taxes
exacting of them produce and commodities enormously exceeding their
possible resources, however willing they might be in yielding. It was
at this time and under its emergency, that Las Casas unfortunately
gave something more than his assent, even his countenance and advice,
to a proposition the effect of which was to root in pure and free
soil an enormity whose harvesting and increase were a sum of woes. He
certainly did advise that each Spaniard, resident in Hispaniola, should
be allowed to import a dozen negro slaves. He did this, as he afterward
affirmed and confessed, under the lure of a deep mist and delusion. So
painful was the remorse which he then experienced for his folly and
error, that he avows that he would part with all he had in the world
to redress it. He says that when he gave this advice he had not at all
been aware of the outrages perpetrated by the Portuguese dealers in
entrapping these wretched Africans. Besides this, he had been promised
by the colonists that if they might be allowed to have negroes, whose
constitutions were stronger for endurance, they would give up the
feeble natives. We may therefore acquit Las Casas in his confessed sin
of ignorance and willing compromise in an alternative of wrongs. But
he is wholly guiltless of a charge which has been brought against him,
founded upon this admitted error, of having been the first to propose
and to secure the introduction of African slavery into the New World.
As has already been said, the wrong had been perpetrated many years
before Las Casas had any agency in it by deed or word. While the young
King was still in Flanders negro slaves had been sent by his permission
to Hispaniola. The number was limited to a thousand for each of the
four principal islands. As there was a monopoly set up in the sale
of these doleful victims, the price of them was speedily and greatly
enhanced.[1017]
Las Casas devised and initiated a scheme for the emigration of laboring
men from Spain. Thwarted in this purpose, he formed a plan for a colony
where restrictions were to be enforced to guard against the worst
abuses. Fifty Spaniards, intended to be carefully selected with regard
to character and habits, and distinguished by a semi-clerical garb and
mode of life, were his next device for introducing some more tolerable
conditions of work and thrift in the islands. Ridicule was brought to
bear, with all sorts of intrigues and tricks, to baffle this scheme.
But the Clerigo persevered in meeting all the obstructions thrown in
his way, and sailed for San Domingo in July, 1520. He established his
little Utopian colony at Cumana; but misadventures befel it, and it
came to a melancholy end. It seemed for a season as if the tried and
patient Clerigo was at last driven to complete disheartenment. Wearied
and exhausted, he took refuge in a Dominican convent in San Domingo,
receiving the tonsure in 1522. Here he was in retirement for eight
years, occupying himself in studying and writing, of which we have many
results. During this interval the work of depopulation and devastation
was ruinously advancing under Cortés, Alvarado, and Pizarro, in Mexico,
Guatemala, and Peru. There is some uncertainty about an alleged
presence of Las Casas at the Court in Spain in 1530. But he was in
Mexico in 1531, in Nicaragua in 1534, and in Spain again in 1539, in
behalf of a promising work undertaken in Tuzulutlan, from which all lay
Spaniards were to be excluded. Having accomplished, as he hoped, the
object of his visit, he would have returned at once to the American
main; but was detained by the Council of the Indies as the person best
able and most trustworthy to give them certain information which they
desired. It was at this period that he wrote his remarkable work, _The
Destruction of the Indies_. This bold and daring product of his pen
and of the righteous indignation which had heretofore found expression
from his eloquent and fervid speech, will soon be examined in detail.
It may be said now that this work, afterward so widely circulated
and translated into all the languages of Europe,—perhaps with some
reductions from the original,—was not at first allowed to be published,
but was submitted to the Emperor and his ministers. As the shocking
revelations made in this book state in round numbers the victims of the
Spaniards in different places, it is at once observable that there are
over-statements and exaggerations. This, however, applies only to the
numbers, not at all to the acts of barbarity and iniquity.[1018] The
book was published twelve years after it was written, and was dedicated
to Philip, the heir to the throne.
It may be as well here to complete the summary of the career of Las
Casas. While detained by the Council he was engaged in the advice and
oversight of a new code of laws for the government of the colonies and
the colonists. Up to this time he had crossed the ocean to the islands
or the main twelve times, and had journeyed to Germany four times to
confer with the Emperor. He was offered the bishopric of Cusco, in
Toledo, but was not thus to be withdrawn from his foreign mission.
In order, however, to secure authority to enforce the new laws, he
accepted the foreign bishopric of Chiapa, was consecrated at Seville
in 1544, embarked on July 4, with forty-four monks, and arrived at
Hispaniola. He bore the aversion and hate which his presence everywhere
provoked, was faithful to the monastic habits, and though so abstemious
as to deny himself meat, he kept the vigor of his body. He resolutely
forbade absolution to be given to Spaniards holding slaves contrary to
the provisions of the new laws. Resigning his bishopric, he returned to
Spain for the last time in 1547,—engaging in his bold controversy with
Sepulveda, to be soon rehearsed. He resided chiefly in the Dominican
College at Valladolid. In 1564, in his ninetieth year, he wrote a work
on Peru. On a visit to Madrid in the service of the Indians, after a
short illness, he died in July, 1566, at the age of ninety-two, and was
buried in the convent of “Our Lady of Atocha.”
* * * * *
The most resolute and effective opponents which Las Casas found at
the Spanish Court were Oviedo and Sepulveda, representatives of two
different classes of those who from different motives and by different
methods stood between him and the King. Oviedo had held high offices
under Government both in Spain and in various places in the New World.
He wrote a history of the Indies, which Las Casas said was as full of
lies almost as of pages. He also had large interests in the mines and
in the enslaving of the natives. Sepulveda[1019] was distinguished as
a scholar and an author. Las Casas charges that his pen and influence
were engaged in the interest of parties who had committed some of the
greatest ravages, and who had personal advantages at stake. Sepulveda
in his opposition to the Clerigo makes two points or “Conclusions,”—1.
That the Spaniards had a right to subjugate and require the submission
of the Indians, because of their superior wisdom and prudence; and
that, therefore, the Indians were bound to submit and acquiesce. 2.
That in case of their refusal to do so they might justly be constrained
by force of arms. It was the proceeding on these assumptions that,
as Las Casas pleaded, had led to the entire depopulation of vast
territories. With high professions of loyalty Sepulveda urged that his
motive in writing was simply to justify the absolute title of the King
of Spain to the Indies. In offering his book to the Royal Council he
importunately solicited its publication; and as this was repeatedly
refused, he engaged the urgency of his friends to bring it about. Las
Casas, well knowing what mischief it would work, strongly opposed the
publication. The Council, regarding the matter as purely theological,
referred Sepulveda’s treatise for a thorough examination to the
universities of Salamanca and Alcala. They pronounced it unsound in
doctrine and unfit to be printed. Sepulveda then secretly sent it to
Rome, and through his friend, the Bishop of Segovia, procured it to be
printed. The Emperor prohibited its circulation in Spain, and caused
the copies of it to be seized.
Las Casas resolved to refute this dangerous treatise, and Sepulveda was
personally cited to a dispute, which was continued through five days.
As a result, the King’s confessor, Dominic de Soto, an eminent divine,
was asked to give a summary of the case. This he did in substance as
follows:—
“The prime point is whether the Emperor may justly make war on the
Indians before the Faith has been preached to them, and whether after
being subdued by arms they will be in any condition to receive the
light of the Gospel, more tractable, more docile to good impressions,
and ready to give up their errors. The issue between the disputants
was, that Sepulveda maintained that war was not only lawful and
allowable, but necessary; while Las Casas insisted upon the direct
contrary,—that war was wholly unjust, and offered invincible obstacles
to conversion. Sepulveda presented four arguments on his side: 1. The
enormous wickedness and criminality of the Indians, their idolatry,
and their sins against nature. 2. Their ignorance and barbarity
needed the mastery of the intelligent and polite Spaniards. 3. The
work of conversion would be facilitated after subjugation. 4. That
the Indians treat each other with great cruelty, and offer human
sacrifices to false gods. Sepulveda fortifies these arguments by
examples and authorities from Scripture, and by the views of doctors
and canonists,—all proceeding upon the assumed exceeding wickedness of
the Indians. In citing _Deuteronomy_ xx. 10-16, he interprets ‘far-off
cities’ as those of a different religion. Las Casas replies that it
was not simply as idolaters that the seven nations in Canaan were to
be destroyed,—as the same fate, on that score, might have been visited
upon all the inhabitants of the earth, except Israel,—but as intruders
upon the Promised Land. The early Christian emperors, beginning with
Constantine, did not make their wars as against idolaters, but for
political reasons. He cites the Fathers as giving testimony to the
effect of a good example and against violent measures. The Indians
under the light of Nature are sincere, but are blinded in offering
sacrifices. They are not like the worst kind of barbarians, to be
hunted as beasts; they have princes, cities, laws, and arts. It is
wholly unjust, impolitic, and futile to wage war against them as
simply barbarians. The Moors of Africa had been Christians in the
time of Augustine, and had been perverted, and so might rightfully be
reclaimed.”
The Royal Council, after listening to the dispute and the summary of
its points, asked Las Casas to draw up a paper on the question whether
they might lawfully enslave the Indians, or were bound to set free all
who were reduced to bondage. He replied that the law of God does not
justify war against any people for the sake of making them Christians;
so the whole course of treatment of the Indians had been wrong from
the start. The Indians were harmless; they had never had the knowledge
or the proffer of Christianity: so they had never fallen away, like
the Moors of Africa, Constantinople, and Jerusalem. No sovereign
prince had authorized the Spaniards to make war. The Spaniards cannot
pretend that their reason for making war was because of the cruelty of
the Indians to each other. The slaughter of them was indiscriminate
and universal. They were enslaved and branded with the King’s arms.
The monarch never authorized these execrable artifices and shocking
atrocities, a long catalogue of which is specified.
The Clerigo then warms into an earnest dissertation on natural and
Christian equity. He quotes some beautiful sentences from the will
of Isabella, enjoining her own humanity on her husband and daughter.
He makes a strong point of the fact that Isabella first, and then a
council of divines and lawyers at Burgos, and Charles himself in 1523,
had declared that all the inhabitants of the New World had been born
free. Only Las Casas’ earnestness, his pure and persistent purpose,
relieve of weariness his reiteration of the same truths and appeals to
the King. He insists over and over again that the delegating of any
portion of the King’s own personal authority to any Spaniard resident
in the New World, or even to the Council of the Indies, opens the door
to every form and degree of abuse, and that he must strictly reserve
all jurisdiction and control to himself.
In a second treatise, which Las Casas addressed to Charles V., he
states at length the practical measures needful for arresting the
wrongs and disasters consequent upon the enslaving of the Indians.
Of the twenty methods specified, the most important is that the King
should not part with the least portion of his sovereign prerogative. He
meets the objection artfully raised by Sepulveda, that if the King thus
retains all authority to himself he may lose the vast domain to his
crown, and that the Spaniards will be forced to return to Europe and
give up the work of Gospel conversion.
Las Casas wrote six memorials or argumentative treatises addressed to
the sovereigns on the one same theme. The sameness of the information
and appeals in them is varied only by the increasing boldness of the
writer in exposing iniquities, and by the warmer earnestness of his
demand for the royal interposition. His sixth treatise is a most bold
and searching exposition of the limits of the royal power over newly
discovered territory, and within the kingdoms and over the natural
rights of the natives. A copy of this paper was obtained by a German
ambassador in Spain, and published at Spire, in Latin, in 1571. It is
evident that for a considerable period after the composition—and, so
to speak, the publication—of these successive protests and appeals
of the Clerigo, only a very limited circulation was gained by them.
Artful efforts were made, first to suppress them, and then to confine
the knowledge of the facts contained in them to as narrow a range as
possible. His enemies availed themselves of their utmost ingenuity and
cunning to nullify his influence. Sometimes he was ridiculed as a crazy
enthusiast,—a visionary monomaniac upon an exaggerated delusion of his
own fancy. Again, he would be gravely and threateningly denounced as an
enemy to Church and State, because he imperilled the vast interests of
Spain in her colonies.
The principal and most important work from the pen of Las Casas,
on which his many subsequent writings are based and substantially
developed, bears (in English) the following title: _A Relation of
the First Voyages and Discoveries made by the Spaniards in America.
With an Account of their Unparalleled Cruelties on the Indians, in
the Destruction of above Forty Millions of People; together with the
Propositions offered to the King of Spain to prevent the further
Ruin of the West Indies. By Don Bartholomew de las Casas, Bishop of
Chiapa, who was an Eye-witness of their Cruelties._ It was composed in
Spanish, and finished at Valencia, Dec. 8, 1542, near the beginning
of the reign of Philip II., to whom it is dedicated. This was about
fifty years after the discovery of America; and during the greater
part of the period Las Casas had lived as an observer of the scenes
and events which he describes. He makes Hispaniola his starting-point,
as the navigators usually first touched there. The reader will at
once be struck by the exaggeration, the effect of a high-wrought and
inflamed imagination, so evident in the words of the title, which
set the number of the victims of Spanish cruelty at forty millions.
Of this weakness of Las Casas in over-estimate and exaggeration of
numbers, we shall have to take special notice by and by. It is enough
to say here that his license in this direction is confined to this one
point, and is by no means to be viewed as discrediting his integrity,
fidelity, and accuracy in other parts of his testimony. He certainly
had been deeply impressed with the density of the population in some
of the islands, for he says: “It seems as if Providence had amassed
together the greatest part of mankind in this region of the earth.”
He tells us that his motives for writing and publishing his exposure
of iniquities were,—the call made upon him by pious and Christian
people thus to enlist the sympathies and efforts of the good to
redress the wrong; and his sincere attachment to his King and Master,
lest God should avenge the wrong on his kingdom. For this purpose he
has followed the Court with his pleadings, and will not cease his
remonstrances and appeals. At the time of completing his work savage
cruelties were prevailing over all the parts of America which had been
opened, slightly restrained for the time in Mexico, through the stern
intervention of the King. An addition to his work in 1546 recognized
many new ordinances and decrees made by his Majesty at Barcelona since
1542, and signed at Madrid in 1543. But nevertheless a new field for
oppression and wickedness had been opened in Peru, with exasperations
from civil war and rebellion among the natives; while the Spaniards on
most frivolous pretexts defied the orders of the King, pretending to
wait for his answers to their pleas in self-justification. The period
was one in which the rapacity of the invaders was both inflamed and
gratified by abundance of spoil, which sharpened the avarice of the
earlier claimants, and drew to them fresh adventurers.
Las Casas gives a very winning description of the natives under his
observation and in his ever-kindly and sympathetic relations with
them. He says they are simple, humble, patient, guileless, submissive,
weak, and effeminate; incapable of toil or labor, short-lived,
succumbing to slight illnesses; as frugal and abstemious as hermits;
inquisitive about the Catholic religion, and docile disciples. They
were lambs who had encountered tigers, wolves, and lions. During the
lifetime of Las Casas Cuba had been rendered desolate and a desert;
then St. John and Jamaica; and in all thirty islands had come to the
same fate. A system of deportation from one island to another had been
devised to obtain new supplies of slaves. The Clerigo deliberately
charges that in forty years the number of victims counted to fifty
millions. Enslaving was but a protracted method of killing,—all in the
greed for gold and pearls. The sight of a fragment of the precious
metal in the hands of a native was the occasion for demanding more of
him, as if he had hidden treasure, or for his guiding the Spaniards
to some real or imagined mines. Las Casas follows his details and
examples of iniquity through the islands in succession, then through
the provinces of Nicaragua, New Spain, Guatemala, Pannco, Jalisco,
Yucatan, St. Martha, Carthagena, the Pearl Coast, Trinidad, the
River Yuya-pari, Venezuela, Florida, La Plata, and Peru,—being in
all seventeen localities,—repeating the similar facts, hardly with
variations. Against the Spaniards with their horses, lances, swords,
and bloodhounds, the natives could oppose only their light spears and
poisoned arrows. The victims would seek refuge in caves and mountain
fastnesses, and if approached would kill themselves, as the easiest
escape from wanton tortures. Las Casas says: “I one day saw four or
five persons, of the highest rank, in Hispaniola, burned by a slow
fire.” Occasionally, he tells us, a maddened Indian would kill a
Spaniard, and then his death would be avenged by the massacre of a
score or a hundred natives. Immediately upon the knowledge of the death
of Isabella, in 1504, as if her humanity had been some restraint, the
barbarous proceedings were greatly intensified. The Spaniards made
the most reckless waste of the food of the natives. Las Casas says:
“One Spaniard will consume in a day the food of three Indian families
of ten persons each for a month.” He avows that when he wrote there
were scarce two hundred natives left in St. John and Jamaica, where
there had once been six hundred thousand. For reasons of caution or
prudence—we can hardly say from fear, for never was there a more
courageous champion—Las Casas suppresses the names of the greatest
offenders. The following are specimens of his method: “Three merciless
tyrants have invaded Florida, one after another, since 1510.” “A
Spanish commander with a great number of soldiers entered Peru,”
etc. “In the year 1514 a merciless governor, destitute of the least
sentiment of pity or humanity, a cruel instrument of the wrath of
God, pierced into the continent.” “The fore-mentioned governor,” etc.
“The captain whose lot it was to travel into Guatemala did a world of
mischief there.” “The first bishop that was sent into America imitated
the conduct of the covetous governors in enslaving and spoiling.” “They
call the countries they have got by their unjust and cruel wars their
conquests.” “No tongue is capable of describing to the life all the
horrid villanies perpetrated by these bloody-minded men. They seemed
to be the declared enemies of mankind.” The more generous the presents
in treasures which were made by some timid cacique to his spoilers, the
more brutally was he dealt with, in the hope of extorting what he was
suspected of having concealed. Las Casas stakes his veracity on the
assertion: “I saw with my own eyes above six thousand children die in
three or four months.”
To reinforce his own statements the Clerigo quotes letters from high
authorities. One is a protest which the Bishop of St. Martha wrote in
1541 to the King of Spain, saying that “the Spaniards live there like
devils, rather than Christians, violating all the laws of God and man.”
Another is from Mark de Xlicia, a Franciscan friar, to the King, the
General of his Order, who came with the first Spaniards into Peru,
testifying from his eyesight to all enormities, in mutilations, cutting
off the noses, ears, and hands of the natives, burning and tortures,
and keeping famished dogs to chase them.
Las Casas follows up his direful catalogue of horrors into the “New
Kingdom of Grenada,” in 1536, which he says received its name from the
native place of “the captain that first set his foot in it.” Those
whom he took with him into Peru were “very profligate and extremely
cruel men, without scruple or remorse, long accustomed to all sorts of
wickedness.” The second “governor,” enraged that his predecessor had
got the first share of the plunder, though enough was left for spoil,
turned informer, and made an exposure of his atrocities in complaints
to the Council of the Indies, in documents which “are yet to be seen.”
The spoils were prodigious quantities of gold and precious stones,
especially emeralds. The “governor” seized and imprisoned the cacique,
or inca, Bogata, requiring him to send for and gather up all the gold
within his reach; and after heaps of it had been brought, put him to
horrid torture in order to extort more.
There were published at Madeira certain “Laws and Constitutions” made
by the King at Barcelona, in 1542, under the influence of Las Casas,
as the result of a council at Valladolid. Strict orders to put a stop
to the iniquitous proceedings were circumvented by agents sent in the
interest of the authors of the outrages. The Clerigo petitioned the
King to constitute all the natives his free subjects, with no delegated
lordship over them, and enjoined upon him “to take an oath on the
Holy Gospels, for himself and his successors, to this effect, and to
put it in his will, solemnly witnessed.” He insists that this is the
only course to prevent the absolute extermination of the natives. He
adds that the Spaniards in their covetousness combine to keep out
priests and monks, not the slightest attempt being made to convert the
natives, though the work would be easy, and they themselves crave it.
“The Spaniards have no more regard to their salvation than if their
souls and bodies died together, and were incapable of eternal rewards
or punishments.” Yet he admits that it would hardly be reasonable to
expect these efforts for conversion of the heathen from men who are
themselves heathen, and so ignorant and brutish that they “do not
know even the number of the commandments.” “As for your Majesty,” the
Clerigo says, with a keen thrust, “the Indians think you are the most
cruel and impious prince in the world, while they see the cruelty
and impiety your subjects so insolently commit, and they verily
believe your Majesty lives upon nothing but human flesh and blood.”
He positively denies the imputations alleged to justify cruelty,—that
the Indians indulged in abominable lusts against nature, and were
cannibals. As for their idolatry, that is a sin against God, for
Him, not for man, to punish. The monarchs, he insists, had been most
artfully imposed upon in allowing the deportation of natives from the
Lucay Islands to supply the havoc made in Hispaniola. The Clerigo goes
into the most minute details, with specifications and reiterations of
horrors, ascribing them to the delegated authority exercised by petty
officers, under the higher ones successively intrusted with power.
There is a holy fervor of eloquence in his remonstrances and appeals to
his Majesty to keep the sole power in his own hands, as he reminds him
that fearful retributive judgments from God may be visited upon his own
kingdom. The Council of the Indies, he says, had desired him to write
to the monarch about the exact nature of the right of the kings of
Spain to the Indies; and he intimates that the zeal which he had shown
in exposing iniquities under those whom the King had put in authority
in the New World had been maliciously turned into a charge that he had
questioned the royal title to those regions. As will appear, Las Casas,
under the leadings of that intelligent search for the fundamentals of
truth and righteousness which a quickened conscience had prompted,
found his way to the principles of equity on this subject.
He had, therefore, previously sent to the King thirty well-defined and
carefully stated “Propositions,” which he regards as so self-evident
that he makes no attempt to argue or prove them. His enemies have in
view to cover up their iniquities by misleading the King. Therefore,
for conscience’ sake, and under a sense of obligation to God, he sets
himself to a sacred task. Little foreseeing that his life and labor
were to be protracted till he had nearly doubled his years, he says
that, finding himself “growing old, being advanced to the fiftieth year
of his age,” and “from a full acquaintance with America,” his testimony
shall be true and clear.
His subtle enemies plead against him that the King has a right to
establish himself in America by force of arms, however ruthless the
process,—quoting the examples of Nimrod, Alexander, the old Romans,
and the Turks. They allege also that the Spaniards have more prudence
and wisdom than other peoples, and that their country is nearest to
the Indies. He therefore announces his purpose to put himself directly
before the King, and stand for his “Propositions,” which he sends in
advance in writing, suggesting that if it be his Majesty’s pleasure,
they be translated into Latin and published in that language, as well
as in Spanish.
The “Propositions” may be stated in substance as follows; they were
keenly studied and searched by those who were anxious to detect flaws
or heresies in them:—
1. The Pope derives from Christ authority and power extending over
all men, believers or infidels, in matters pertaining to salvation and
eternal life. But these should be exercised differently over infidels
and those who have had a chance to be believers.
2. This prerogative of the Pope puts him under a solemn obligation to
propagate the Gospel, and to offer it to all infidels who will not
oppose it.
3. The Pope is obliged to send capable ministers for this work.
4. Christian princes are his most proper and able helpers in it.
5. The Pope may exhort and even oblige Christian princes to this
work, by authority and money, to remove obstructions and to send true
workers.
6. The Pope and princes should act in accord and harmony.
7. The Pope may distribute infidel provinces among Christian princes
for this work.