[Illustration: Fray Bartholomew de Las Casas]
Fray Bartholomew de Las Casas
From the portrair drawn and engraved by Enguidanos.
Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings
By Francis Augustus MacNutt
Cleveland, U.S.A.
The Arthur H. Clark Company
1909
To my beloved wife, Margaret Van Cortlandt Ogden this volume is
affectionately dedicated
PREFACE
The controversies of which Bartholomew de Las Casas was, for more than
half a century, the central figure no longer move us, for slavery, as a
system, is dead and the claim of one race or of men to hold property
rights in the flesh and blood of another finds no defenders. We may study
the events of his tempestuous life with serene temper, solely for the
important light on the history of human progress.
It is sought in the present work to assign to the noblest Spaniard who
ever landed in the western world, his true place among those great spirits
who have defended and advanced the cause of just liberty, and, at the same
time, to depict the conditions under which the curse of slavery was first
introduced to North America. It in no degree lessens the glory of Las
Casas to insist upon the historical fact that he was neither the first
Spaniard to defend the liberty of the American Indians, nor was he alone
in sustaining the struggle, to which the best years of a life that all but
spanned a century were exclusively dedicated.
Born in an age of both civil and religious despotism, his voice was
incessantly raised in vindication of the inherent and inalienable right of
every human being to the enjoyment of liberty. He was preeminently a man
of action to whom nothing human was foreign, and whose gift of universal
sympathy co-existed with an uncommon practical ability to devise
corrective reforms that commanded the attention and won the approval of
the foremost statesmen and moralists of his time. True, he also had a
vision of Utopia, and his flights of imaginative altruism frequently
elevated him so far above the realities of this world, that the
incorrigible frailties of human nature seemed to vanish from his
calculations, but when the rude awakening came, he neither forsook the
fight nor failed to profit by the bitter lesson.
When his dream of an ideal colony, peopled by perfect Christians labouring
for the conversion of model Indians, adorned with primitive virtues, was
dispelled, he girded his loins to meet his enemies with undiminished
courage, on the battle-ground they themselves had selected. His moral
triumph was complete, and he issued from every encounter victorious. The
fruits of his victories were not always immediate or satisfying, nor did
he live to see the practical application of all his principles, yet the
figure of this devoted champion of freedom stands on a pedestal of
enduring fame, of which the foundations rest on the eternal homage of all
lovers of justice and liberty, and it is the figure of a victor, who
served God and loved his fellow-men.
It will be seen in the following narrative, that monks of the Order of St.
Dominic were the first to defend the liberty of the Indian and his moral
dignity as a reasonable being, endowed with free will and understanding.
Associated in the popular conception with the foundation and extension of
the Inquisition, the Dominicans may appear in a somewhat unfamiliar guise
as torch-bearers of freedom in the vanguard of Spanish colonial expansion
in America, but such was the fact. History has made but scant and
infrequent mention of these first obscure heroes, who faced obloquy and
even risked starvation in the midst of irate colonists, whose avarice and
brutality they fearlessly rebuked in the name of religion and humanity:
they sank, after lives of self-immolation, into nameless graves, sometimes
falling victims to the blind violence of the very Indians whose cause they
championed—protomartyrs of liberty in the new world.
The conditions under which Las Casas and his co-workers laboured were
discouragingly adverse. The mailed conquerors and eager treasure-seekers
who followed in the wake of Columbus were consumed by two ruthless
passions—avarice and ambition.
Avarice and ambition alone, however, do not adequately explain their
undertakings, and we find among them a fierce zeal for Christian
propaganda strikingly disproportionate to their fitness to expound the
doctrines or illustrate the virtues of the Christian religion. They seem
to have frequently compounded for their sins of sensuality and their deeds
of blood by championing the unity and purity of the faith—two things that
were held to be of paramount importance, especially in Spain, where to be
outside formal communion with the Church was to be either a Jew or a
Mahometan, or in other words, an enemy of God.
Perverted as their conception of the true spirit of Christian propaganda
may appear to us, it may not be doubted that many of these men were
animated by honest missionary zeal and actually thought their singular
methods would procure the conversion of the Indians. On the other hand,
few of those who left Spain, animated by high motives, resisted the
prevalent seductions of avarice and ambition, amidst conditions so
singularly favourable to their gratification, and we find Las Casas
denouncing, as ridiculous and hypocritical, the pretensions to solicitude
for the spread of religion, under cover of which the colonists sought to
obtain royal sanction for the systems of slavery and serfage they had
inaugurated.
The essential differences observable in the Spanish and English colonies
in America are traceable to the directly contrary systems of government
prevailing at that time in the mother countries. All nations of Aryan
stock possessed certain fundamental features of government, inherited from
a common origin. Climatic and geographical conditions operated with
divers other influences to produce race characteristics, from which the
several nations of modern Europe were gradually evolved. Within each of
these nations, the inherited political principles common to all of them
were unequally and diversely developed. The forms of political liberty
continued to survive in Spain, but, under Charles V., the government
became, in practice, an absolute monarchy, the liberties of the Córtes and
the Councils being gradually overshadowed by the ever-growing prerogatives
of the Crown.
In England, on the contrary, the share of the people in the government
was, in spite of opposition, of steady growth, only interrupted by
occasional periods of suspension, while the power of the Crown declined.
These conditions were repeated in the colonies of the two nations, with
some variations of form that were due to local influences in each of them.
The Spanish colonies relied entirely on the Crown and were, from the
outset, over-provided with royal officials from the grade of viceroy to
that of policeman, and even with clergy, all of whom were appointed by the
king’s sole authority and were removable at his pleasure. These
settlements generally owed their existence to private enterprise, having
been founded by explorers and treasure-seekers, but in none of them did
the colonists enjoy any political rights or liberties, other than what it
pleased the sovereign to grant them.
They were ruled through a bureaucracy, of which were the members were
rarely efficient and usually corrupt, hence it followed that Spaniards
were bereft of any incentive to colonise, save one—their individual
aggrandisement. Their inherited habit of obedience reconciled them to the
absence of any share in the direction and control of the colony in which
their lot was thrown, but such a system of administration deprived them of
the possibility of acquiring experience in the management of public
affairs. Its effects were pernicious and far-reaching, for when the
colonies outgrew the bonds that linked them to Spain, their people,
ignorant of the meaning of true liberty, and untrained in self-government,
followed their instinct of blind submission to direction from above, and
fell an easy prey to demagogues. Deprived of participation in framing the
laws, the colonists employed their ingenuity in devising means to evade or
nullify those which they deemed obnoxious or contrary to their interests,
and constant practice soon perfected their perverted activities in this
direction, until obstruction and procrastination were erected into a
system, against which even royal decrees were powerless.
The results that followed were logical and inevitable. Laws devoid of
sufficient force to ensure their effective execution fail to afford the
relief or protection their enactment designs to provide, and ineffectual
laws are worse than no laws at all, for their defeat weakens the
government that enacts them and tends to bring all law into contempt.
Conditions of distance, the corruption of the colonial officials, the
conflict between local authorities, and the astutely organised opposition
of the colonists repeatedly thwarted the honest efforts of the home
government to safeguard the liberty of the Indians, which the Spanish
sovereigns had defined to be natural and inalienable, definitions that had
received the solemn sanction of the Roman pontiffs.
Spanish and English methods of dealing with the aboriginal tribes of
America offer as sharp a contrast as do their respective systems of
colonial government. Whether the devil himself possesses ingenuity in
inflicting suffering, superior to that displayed by the Spanish conquerors
and their immediate followers, has never been demonstrated. The gentle,
unresisting natives of the West Indian Islands, whose delicate
constitutions incapacitated them to bear labours their masters exacted of
them, were their first victims. The descriptions penned as of the
cruelties practised on these harmless creatures dispense me from the
ungrateful task of attempting to depict them. But, while the individual
Indian suffered inhuman tortures at the hands of the Spaniards, the race
survived and, by amalgamation with the invaders, it continues to
propagate, and to rise in the scale of humanity.
The English colonists found different conditions waiting them when they
landed on the northern coasts of America, where the Indian tribes were
neither gentle nor submissive. Two absolutely alien and hostile races
faced one another, of which the higher professed small concern for the
amelioration of the lower, while amalgamation was excluded by the mutual
pride of race and the instinctive enmity that divided them. There was no
enslaving of Indians, and the torturing was done entirely by the savages,
but, while the English method spared the individual Indian the suffering
his defenceless brother in the south had to endure, the aboriginal races
have everywhere receded before the relentless advance of civilisation.
The battle between the civilised and savage peoples has been
uncompromising; the stronger of the Indian nations have gone down,
fighting, while the remnants of such tribes as survive remain herded on
the ever-encroaching frontiers of a civilisation in which a tolerable
place has been but tardily provided for them. We cannot escape the
conclusion that our treatment of the races we have displaced and
exterminated has been as systematically and remorselessly destructive as
was the spasmodic and ofttimes sportive cruelty operated by the Spaniards.
The Spanish national conscience recognised the obligation of civilising
and Christianising the Indians, a task which Spaniards finally
accomplished. The Spanish sovereigns were honestly desirous of protecting
their new subjects, and the injustice inflicted on the latter was done in
defiance of the laws they enacted, as well as of public opinion in Spain,
which condemned it as severely as could the most advanced humanitarian
sentiment of our own times.
Las Casas voiced this condemnation and organised a masterly campaign of
education on the subject of the proper method of dealing with the Indians.
He suffered and endured for their sakes, while the men whose selfish and
inhuman undertakings he thwarted poured the vilest abuse and calumny upon
him. Nature had mercifully endowed him with no sensitiveness save for the
sufferings of the oppressed, and he was as much a born fighter as the
fiercest conqueror who ever landed in Spanish America. He waged a moral
battle, animated by only the noblest motives, and in his damning
arraignment of his countrymen, he eschewed personalities and, with a
charity as rare as it was becoming to his sacerdotal character, he
occupied himself exclusively with the principles at stake, leaving the
punishment of the criminals to the final justice of God.
The records of the earliest peoples of whom history preserves
knowledge—Chaldeans, Egyptians, Phenicians, and Arabians—show that slavery
has existed the remotest antiquity. Slavery was the common fate of
prisoners of war in the time of Homer; Alexander sold the inhabitants of
Thebes, and the Spartans reduced the entire population of Helos to
servitude, so that Helot came to be synonymous with slave, while one of
the laws inscribed on the Twelve Tables of Rome gave a creditor the right
to sell an insolvent debtor into slavery to satisfy his claim. Wealthy
Romans frequently possessed slaves, over whose lives and fortunes the
owners were absolute masters.
Christianity first taught the unity and equality of mankind; salvation was
for bond and free, for Jew and Gentile; the immortality of each human soul
was affirmed; each man’s body was defined of the Holy Ghost and a new
dignity was conferred by these novel doctrines on universal mankind, which
the lowly shared equally with the mighty. The Christian conception of
liberty and equality however, referred more to the moral than to the
material order. “The truth shall make you free.” It was not subversive
of existing mundane conditions, but taught the duty of rendering Caesar
his due, and of the servant being subject to his lord, the woman to her
husband, and children to their parents. The early Christians too
sincerely despised the prizes of this world—including the greatest of all,
liberty—to struggle for possession of any of them; unresponsive to the
lure of earthly honours and treasures, they fixed their desires on things
eternal. Slavery continued to coexist with Christianity: children were
sold publicly in the markets of Bristol during the reign of King Alfred,
and the villeins were bound to the glebe, changing masters with the
transfer of the property from one proprietor to another. The laws of
Richard III. and of Edward VI. dealt severely, not only with slaves, but
with all deserters, runaway apprentices, and other recalcitrant
dependents, who were reduced to partial or perpetual slavery for the most
trivial offences. The condition of these various categories of bondmen,
however, was more one of serfage and vassalage, the ancient system of
slavery that had culminated in the Roman Empire having been modified by
the mild doctrines of Christianity and the gradual spread of the new
civilisation.
From the discoveries along the west coast of Africa, made by the
Portuguese in the first half of the fifteenth century, may be dated the
revival of the trade in slaves for purely commercial purposes. Portugal
and southern Spain were thenceforward regularly supplied with cargoes of
negroes, numbering between seven and eight hundred yearly. The promoter
of these expeditions was Prince Henry of Portugal, third son of John I.
and Philippa, daughter of John Gaunt, though in justice to that amiable
and learned prince, it must be borne in mind that the capture and sale of
negroes was merely incidental to explorations the unary purpose of which
was purely scientific. Prince Henry held that the negroes thus captured
into his dominions were amply compensated for the loss of such uncertain
liberty as they enjoyed, by receiving the light of Christian teaching. It
seems evident that most of them merely changed masters and probably gained
by the exchange, for they were born subjects of barbarous rulers, in
lands where the traffic in slaves was active. Many were obtained from the
Arabs and Moors, who already held them in bondage and, without minimising
the sufferings inseparable from all slave-trade, we may not unreasonably
assume that those who reached Portugal and Spain were the least
unfortunate of all their kind.
Las Casas, being a native of Andalusia, was familiar with this
slave-trade, for Seville was well provided with domestic slaves, whose lot
was not a particularly hard one. So much a matter of course was the
presence of these negroes in Spain, that he never admits he had never duly
considered their condition or the matter of their capture and sale. It
thus fell, as will be later described, that he assented to the demands of
the Spanish colonists in the Indies for permission to import Africans from
Spain to take the place of the rapidly perishing Indians. In the
recommendation of this measure, several later historians pretended to
discover the origin of negro slavery in America, despite the authenticated
fact that sixteen years before Las Casas advised the importation of
negroes into the Indies, the slave-trade had been begun; nor is it
unlikely that other negroes had been brought to America by their Spanish
owners at a still earlier date. Although the original intention had been
to import only Christian negroes, this provision of the law had been
easily and persistently evaded, under the leniency and indifference of the
authorities, who connived at such profitable violation. It was contended
that the labour problem in the colonies admitted of no other solution; the
inefficient Indians were rapidly disappearing, of white labour there was
none, and, to respond to the demand for labourers, the Dominican Order, in
1510, sanctioned the importation of negroes direct from Africa, still
maintaining the proviso that all who were Jews or Mahometans should be
excluded.
Ovando had reported the Indians as so naturally indolent that no wages
could induce them to work. He represented them as flying from contact
with the Spaniards, leaving Queen Isabella to suppose that their avoidance
was due to a natural antipathy to white men. The Queen, in her zeal to
fulfil the conditions imposed on her conscience by the papal bull of
donation, was easily tricked by the representations of the Governor,
coinciding as they did with those of other advisers of influence and high
station, into assenting to the enforced labour of the Indians.
Her reason is explicitly stated to be “because we desire that the Indians
should be converted to our holy catholic faith and should learn doctrine.”
For this motive, and with many restrictions as to the period of work and
the kinds of labour to be performed by the natives, the gentle treatment
to be shown them, and the wages to be paid them, the royal order was
finally issued. It is evident that the misinformed and deluded sovereign
regarded the labour of the Indians almost as a pretext for bringing them
into contact with the Spaniards, solely for their own spiritual and moral
advantage.
The discovery of America, following as it did so closely upon the
development of the negro slave traffic, had given great impetus to it and,
during the three succeeding centuries, Portuguese, Italians, Spaniards,
English, and Dutch quickly became close rivals for an ignominious primacy
in the most heinous of crimes. The highest figures I have found, assign
to England one hundred and thirty vessels engaged in the trade, and
forty-two thousand negroes landed in the Americas during the year 1786
from English ships. The annals of slavery are so uniformly black, that
among all the nations there is not found one guiltless, to cast the first
stone. More than their due proportion of obloquy has been visited upon
the Spaniards for their part in the extension of slavery and for the
offences against justice and humanity committed in the New World, almost
as though they alone deserved the pillory. Consideration of the facts
here briefly touched upon should serve to restrain and temper the
condemnation that irreflection has too often allowed us to heap
exclusively upon them for their share in these great iniquities. If they
were pitiless towards individuals, we have shown ourselves merciless
towards the race; as a nation, they recognised moral duties and
responsibilities towards Indian peoples which our forefathers ignored or
repudiated; the failure of the benevolent laws enacted by Spanish
sovereigns was chiefly due to the avarice and brutality of individuals,
who were able to elude both the provisions of the law and the punishment
their crimes merited. On the other hand, Las Casas thrilled two worlds
with his denunciations of crimes which our own enlightened country
continued for three centuries to protect. His apostolate was prompted,
not by the horrors he witnessed nor by merely emotional sympathy, but by
meditation on the fundamental principles of justice. The Scripture texts
that startled him from the moral lethargy in which he had lived during
eight years, revealed to him the blasphemy involved in the performance of
acts of formal piety and works of benevolence, by men who degraded God’s
image in their fellow-men and sacrificed hecatombs of human victims to
gratify their greed for riches.
From the hour of his awakening, we follow him during sixty years of
ceaseless activity such as few men have ever displayed. His vehemence
tormented his adversaries beyond endurance, and they charged him with
stirring up dissensions and strife in the colonies, ruining trade,
discouraging emigration to the Indies, and, by his importunate and
reckless propaganda, with inciting the Indians to rebellion. Granting
that some abuses existed, they argued that his methods for redressing them
were more pernicious than the evils themselves; prudent measures should be
employed, not the radical and precipitate method of the fanatical friar,
and time would gradually do the rest. Men who argued such as the Bishop
of Burgos and Lope Conchillos, were large holders of encomienda
properties, who objected to having their sources of income disturbed. Las
Casas penetrated the flimsy disguise they sought to throw over their real
purpose, to smother the truth the better to consolidate and extend their
interests, and realising that his only hope of success lay in keeping the
subject always to the front, he pursued his inexorable course of teaching,
writing, journeying to America to impeach judges and excommunicate
refractory colonists, and thence back again to Spain to publish his
accusations broadcast and petition redress from the King and his Councils.
The most respectable of his contemporary opponents in the New World was
Toribio de Benevente, under his popular Indian name of Motolinia. In 1555,
Motolinia wrote a letter to in which he dealt severely with the
accusations of Las Casas, whom he described as a restless, turbulent man,
who wandered from one colony to another, provoking disturbances and
scandals. He confined himself to a general denial of the alleged
outrages, without attempting to refute them by presenting proofs of their
falsity, while his indignation was prompted by his patriotism. He was
shocked that a Spaniard should publish such accusations against his own
countrymen; things which would be read by foreigners and even by Indians,
and thus bring reproach on the Spanish national honour. He expressed
astonishment that the Emperor permitted the publication and circulation of
such books, taxing their author with wilful exaggeration and false
statements, and pointing out that the accusations brought more dishonour
on the monarch than on his subjects.
Motolinia was a devout man, whose apostolic life among the Indians won him
his dearly loved name, equivalent to “the poor man” or poverello of St.
Francis, but with all his virtues, he belonged to the type of churchman
that dreads scandal above everything else. The methods of Las Casas
scandalised him; it wounded his patriotism that Spaniards should be held
up to the execration of Christendom, and he rightly apprehended that such
damaging information, published broadcast, would serve as a formidable
weapon in the hands of the adversaries of his church and country. It must
also be remembered that he lived in Mexico, where Las Casas admits that
the condition of the Indians was better than in the islands and other
parts of the coast country.
The Bishop of Burgos and Lope Conchillos will be seen to be fair exponents
of the bureaucratic type of opponents to the reforms Las Casas advocated.
The Bishop in particular appears in an unsympathetic light throughout his
long administration of American affairs. Of choleric temper, his manners
were aggressive and authoritative, and he used his high position to
advance his private interests. He was a disciplinarian, a bureaucrat
averse to novelties and hostile to enthusiasms. He anticipated
Talleyrand’s maxim “Sûrtout pas de zole,” and to be nagged at by a
meddlesome friar was intolerable to him. Such men were probably no more
consciously inhuman than many otherwise irreproachable people of all
times, who complacently pocket dividends from deadly industries, without a
thought to the obscure producers of their wealth or to the conditions of
moral and physical degradation amidst which their brief lives are spent.
The most formidable of all the adversaries of Las Casas was Gines de
Sepulveda. A man of acute intellect, vast learning, and superlative
eloquence, this practiced debater stood for theocracy and despotism,
defending the papal and royal claims to jurisdiction over the New World.
In striving to establish a dual tyranny over the souls and bodies of its
inhabitants, he concerned himself not at all with the human aspect of the
question nor did he even pretend to controvert the facts with which his
opponent met him. He was exclusively engaged in upholding the abstract
right of the Pope and the Spanish sovereigns to exercise spiritual and
temporal jurisdiction over heathen, as well as Catholic peoples. To impugn
this principle was, according to Sepulveda, to strike at the very
foundations of Christendom; that a few thousands of pagans, more or less,
suffered and perished, was of small importance, compared with the
maintenance of this elemental principal. First conquer and then convert,
was his maxim. His thesis constitutes the very negation of Christianity.
[Illustration: Juan Gines de Sepúlveda]
Juan Gines de Sepúlveda
From the engraving by J. Barcelon, after the drawing of J. Maca.
Las Casas repeatedly challenged his opponents to refute his allegations or
to contradict his facts and, in a letter to Carranza de Miranda in 1556,
he wrote:
“It is moreover deplorable that, after having denounced this destruction
of peoples to our sovereigns and their councils a thousand times during
forty years, nobody has yet dreamed of proving the contrary and, after
having done so, of punishing me by the shame of a retraction. The royal
archives are filled with records of trials, reports, denunciations, and a
quantity of other proofs of the assassinations…There exists also positive
evidence of the immense population of Hispaniola—greater than that of all
Spain—and of the islands of Cuba, Jamaica, and more than forty other
islands, where neither animals nor vegetation survive. These countries
are larger than the space that separates us from Persia, and the
terra-firma is twice as considerable…I defy any living man, if he be not a
fool, to dare deny what I allege, and to prove the contrary.”
His enemies were devoid of scruples, and unsparingly used every means to
nullify his influence and destroy his credit. He was ridiculed as a
madman—a monomaniac on the subject of Indians and their rights; his
plainly stated facts were branded as exaggerations, though nobody accepted
his challenge to contradict them. Such tactics alternated with others,
for he was also described as a heretic, as disloyal and unpatriotic,
seeking to impeach the validity of Spanish sovereignty in the Indies and
to bring ruin on the national interests.
The missionary period of the life of Las Casas in America ended with his
return to Spain in 1549 and the resignation of his episcopal see that
followed in 1552. From that time may be dated the third and last period
of his life, which was marked by his literary activity, for, though he
never again visited America, his vigilance and energy in defending the
interests of the Indians underwent no diminution. His writings were
extraordinarily luminous; and all he wrote treated of but one subject. He
himself declared that his sole reason for writing more than two thousand
pages in Latin was to proclaim the truth concerning Indians, who were
defamed by being represented as devoid of human understanding and brutes.
This defamation of an entire race outraged his sense of justice, and the
very excesses of the colonists provoked the reaction that was destined to
ultimately check them.
Of all his numerous works the two that are of great and permanent interest
to students of American history, the _Historia General_ and the _Historia
Apologetica de las Indias_, were originally designed to form a single
work. The writer informs us he began this work in 1527 while he resided
in the Dominican monastery near Puerto de Plata.
Fabié writes that his examination of the original manuscripts of the two
works preserved in the library of the Spanish Academy of History in
Madrid, shows that the first chapter of the _Apologetica_ was originally
the fifty-eighth of the _Historia General_. Prescott possessed a copy of
these manuscripts, which is believed to have been burned in Boston in
1872, and other copies still exist in America in the Congressional and
Lenox Libraries, and in the Hubert Howe Bancroft collection.
During his constant journeying to and fro, much of the material Las Casas
had collected for the _Historia General_ was lost and when he began to put
that work into its actual form—probably in 1552 or 1553—he was obliged to
rely on his memory for many of his facts, while others were drawn from the
_Historia del Almirante, Don Cristobal Colon_, written by the son of
Christopher Columbus, Fernando.
The first historian who had access to the original manuscript, in spite of
the instruction of Las Casas to his executors to withhold them from
publication for a period of forty years after his death, was Herrera, who
dipped plenis manibus into their contents, incorporating entire chapters
in his own work published in 1601. His book obtained a wide circulation
despite the fact that it was prohibited in Spain.
It was not until 1875-1876 that a complete edition of the _Historia
General_ and the _Apologetica_ was printed in Spanish. This work was
edited in five volumes by the Marques de la Fuensanta and Señor José
Sancho Rayon, and was issued by the Royal Academy of History in Madrid. A
Mexican edition of the _Historia General_ in two volumes, but without the
_Apologetica_, appeared in 1878. The _Historia Apologetica_ treats of the
natural history, the climate, the flora, fauna, and various products of
the Indies, as well as of the different races inhabiting the several
countries; their character, costumes, habits, and forms of government.
Though its purpose bore less directly upon the injustices under which the
natives suffered, it was none the less educational, the author’s purpose
being to put before his countrymen a minute and accurate description of
the New World and its inhabitants that should vindicate the latter’s right
to equitable treatment at the hands of their conquerors. Misrepresented
and defamed, as he maintained the Indians were, by the mendacious reports
sent to Spain, Las Casas composed this interesting apology as one part of
his scheme of defence. As a monument to his vast erudition, his powers of
observation, and his talents as a writer, the _Apologetica_ is perhaps the
most remarkable of all his compositions.
I append to this present volume an English translation of the most
celebrated of all the writings of Las Casas; that is, of the short
treatise published in 1552 in Seville under the title of _Brevissima
Relacion de la Destruycion de las Indias_, and which recited in brief form
his accusations against the conquerors and his descriptions of the
cruelties that formed the groundwork of all his writings.
This was the first of nine tracts, all treating different aspects of the
same subject. The full titles of these little books, of which a complete
set is now extremely valuable, may be found in Henry Harrisse, _Notes on
Columbus_, pp. 18-24; also in Brunet’s _Manuel_, the Carter-Brown
Catalogue, and other bibliographical works.
The first quarto gothic edition, printed by Trujillo in Seville in 1552,
entitled _Las Obras Brevissima Relacion de la Destruycion de las Indias
Occidentales por los Españoles_, contains seven tracts. The second
edition, in Barcelona, 1646, bore the title _Las Obras de B. de Las
Casas_, and contains the first five tracts.
The _Brevissima Relacion_ was quickly translated into most of the
languages of Europe. A French version, published in Antwerp in 1579, was
entitled _Tyrannies et Cruautés des Espagnols_, par Jacques de Miggrode.
_Le Miroir de la tyrannie Espagnole_, illustrated by seventeen horribly
realistic engravings by De Bry, contains extracts from several of the nine
treatises, composed into one work, issued in Amsterdam in 1620. Other
editions followed in Paris in 1635, in Lyons in 1642, and again two others
in Paris in 1697 and 1701: these latter were translated and edited by the
Abbé de Bellegarde.
The Italian translation, made by Giacomo Castellani, followed closely the
original text, by which it was accompanied; editions were printed in
Venice in 1626, 1630, and 1643, bearing the title _Istoria o Brevissima
Relatione della Distruttione dell’ Indie Occidentali_. Three different
Latin versions were published as follows: _Narratio regionum Indicarum per
Hispanos quosdam devastatarum Verissima_, per B. Casaum, Anno 1582;
_Hispanice, anno vero hoc Lating excusa_, Francofurti, 1597; _Regionum
Indicarum Hispanos olim devastatarum accuratissima descriptio. Editio
nova, correctior…_Heidelbergae 1664. Despite the fact that Las Casas was
the first and most vehement in denouncing the Spanish conquerors as bad
patriots and worse Christians, whose acts outraged religion and disgraced
Spain, his evidence against his countrymen was diligently spread by all
enemies of his country, especially in England and the Netherlands, while
Protestant controversialists quoted him against popery, and in the conduct
of the conquerors the evidences of the Catholic depravity.
The earliest English edition was printed in 1583 under the title of _The
Spanish Colonie or Briefe Chronicle of the Acts and Gestes of the
Spaniardes in the West Indies, called the Newe Worlde, for a space of XL
Yeares_.
John Phillips, who was a nephew of Milton, dedicated another version,
called _The Tears of the Indians_, to Oliver Cromwell.
Other English editions, bearing different names, appeared in 1614, 1656,
and 1689. This last volume bore a truly startling title: _Casas’s horrid
Massacres, Butcheries and Cruelties that Hell and Malice could invent,
committed by the Spaniards in the West Indies_. It doubtless had a large
sale.
Ten years later another edition was printed in London: _An Account of the
Voyages and Discoveries made by the Spaniards in America, containing the
exact Relation hitherto published of their unparalleled cruelties on the
Indians in the Destruction of about Forty Millions of People_.
The Netherlands being in revolt, both against the Catholic religion and
the Spanish government, it is not surprising to find that, in addition to
the French editions published in Amsterdam and Antwerp, no less than six
different versions were circulated in the Flemish and Dutch vernaculars,
as follows: _Seer cort Verhael van de destructie van d’Indien_, etc.,
Bruselas, 1578. _Spieghel der Spaenscher tyrannye, in West Indien_, etc.,
Amstelredam, 1596. Another edition of the same followed in the same year
and another in 1607. _Den Spieghel van de Spaenscher Tyrannie_, etc.,
Amstelredam, 1609. Second edition of the same work in 1621.
A German translation entitled _Umständige Wahrhafftige Beschreibung der
Indianischen Ländern_, etc., was published at Frankfurt-am-Main, in 1645.
It seems hardly necessary, otherwise than as a matter of quaint chronicle,
to notice the fantastic attempt of the Neapolitan writer, Roselli, to
prove that the _Brevissima Relacion_ was not written by Las Casas, but was
composed years later by an unknown Frenchman. This suggestion was too
agreeable to Spanish susceptibilities to lack approval in Spain when it
was first advanced, but it has since been consigned by general consent to
the limbo of fanciful inventions.
The limits of the present volume exclude the possibility of dealing
adequately with a life so fertile in effort, so rich in achievement, as
that of Las Casas, and I have confined myself to composing, from an
immense mass of material, a brief narrative of the acts and events that
seem to best illlustrate his character and to establish his claim to a
foremost place among the great moral heroes of the world.
I have drawn largely upon his own works, and by frequent and ample
quotations from his speeches I have sought to reveal my hero more
intimitely to my readers. In reluctantly quitting this field of
profitable research, I confidently promise myself the satisfaction of one
day seeing literature enriched by an abler presentation of this great
theme than I have felt myself prepared to undertake.
FRANCIS A. MACNUTT.
SCHLOSS RATZÖTZ, TIROL,
June, 1908.
AUTHORITIES CONSULTED
Principal authorities consulted in the preparation of this work:
ANTONIO DE REMESAL, _Historia de la Provincia de San Vicente de
Chiyapa_, 1619.
DAVILA PADILLA,_ Historia de la Fundacion_, etc., 1625.
ANTONIO DE HERRERA, _Historia General de las Indias Occidentales_,
1601.
GONZALO FERNANDEZ DE OVIEDO Y VALDÉZ (in Ramusio). MOTOLINIA in
volume i. of Icazbalceta’s _Documentos Ineditos_.
JUAN DE TORQUEMADA, _Monarquia Indiana_, 1614.
AGOSTINO DE VETANCOURT, _Teatro Mexicano_, 1698.
FRAY DOMINGO MARQUEZ, _Sacro Diario Dominicano_, 1697.
J.A. LLORENTA, _Œuvres de Las Casas_, 1822.
JOSÉ ANTONIO SACO, _Historia de la Esclavitud_, 1875-78.
MANUEL JOSÉ QUINTANA, _Vidas de Españoles Celebres_, 1845.
CARLOS GUTIERREZ, _Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, sus Tiempos y su
Apostolado_, 1878.
ANTONIO MARIA FABIÉ, _Vida y Escritos de Don Fray Bartolomé de Las
Casas_, 1879.
SIR ARTHUR HELPS, _The Spanish Conquest in America._
HENRY STEVENS, _The New Laws of the Indies_, 1893.
ARISTOTLE, _Politics_ (Canon Weldon’s translation).
WILLIAM ROBERTSON, _History of America. History of Charles V._
FLÉCHIER, _Vie de Ximenez_.
MARSOLLIER, _Vie de Ximenez_.
BAUDIER, _Histoire de Ximenez_.
HENRY HARRISSE, Notes on Columbus.
JUSTIN WINSOR’S _Narrative and Critical History of America_.
JOHN BOYD THATCHER’S_Christopher Columbus._
CONTENTS
Preface
AUTHORITIES CONSULTED
CHAPTER I. - FAMILY OF LAS CASAS. EDUCATION OF BARTHOLOMEW. HIS FIRST
VOYAGE TO AMERICA
CHAPTER II. - THE DISCOVERIES OF COLUMBUS. CHARACTER OF THE AMERICAN
INDIANS. THE BEGINNINGS OF SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE-TRADE
CHAPTER III. - THE COLONY OF HISPANIOLA. ARRIVAL OF LAS CASAS. CONDITION
OF THE COLONISTS
CHAPTER IV. - THE DOMINICANS IN HISPANIOLA. THE ORDINATION OF LAS CASAS.
THE CONQUEST OF CUBA.
CHAPTER V. - THE SERMONS OF FRAY ANTONIO DE MONTESINOS. THE AWAKENING OF
LAS CASAS. PEDRO DE LA RENTERIA
CHAPTER VI. - LAS CASAS RETURNS TO SPAIN. NEGOTIATIONS. CARDINAL XIMENEZ
DE CISNEROS. THE JERONYMITE COMMISSIONERS
CHAPTER VII. - LAS CASAS AND CHARLES V. THE GRAND CHANCELLOR. NEGRO
SLAVERY. EVENTS AT COURT.
CHAPTER VIII. - MONSIEUR DE LAXAO. COLONISATION PROJECTS. RECRUITING
EMIGRANTS.
CHAPTER IX. - KNIGHTS OF THE GOLDEN SPUR. THE COURT PREACHERS. FURTHER
CONTROVERSIES
CHAPTER X. - THE BISHOP OF DARIEN. DEBATE WITH LAS CASAS. DISAGREEMENT
WITH DIEGO COLUMBUS
CHAPTER XI. - ROYAL GRANT TO LAS CASAS. THE PEARL COAST. LAS CASAS IN
HISPANIOLA. FORMATION OF A COMPANY.
CHAPTER XII. - THE IDEAL COLONY. FATE OF THE COLONISTS. FAILURE OF THE
ENTERPRISE
CHAPTER XIII. - PROFESSION OF LAS CASAS. THE CACIQUE ENRIQUE. JOURNEYS OF
LAS CASAS. A PEACEFUL VICTORY
CHAPTER XIV. - THE LAND OF WAR. BULL OF PAUL III. LAS CASAS IN SPAIN.
THE NEW LAWS
CHAPTER XV. - THE BISHOPRICS OFFERED TO LAS CASAS. HIS CONSECRATION. HIS
DEPARTURE
CHAPTER XVI. - LETTER TO PHILIP II. VOYAGE TO AMERICA. FEELING IN THE
COLONIES. ARRIVAL IN CHIAPA
CHAPTER XVII. - RECEPTION OF LAS CASAS IN HIS DIOCESE. EVENTS IN CIUDAD
REAL. THE INDIANS OF CHIAPA
CHAPTER XVIII. - LAS CASAS REVISITS THE LAND OF WAR. AUDIENCIA OF THE
CONFINES. EVENTS AT CIUDAD REAL. LAS CASAS RETURNS
CHAPTER XIX. - OPPOSITION TO LAS CASAS. HE LEAVES CIUDAD REAL. THE
MEXICAN SYNOD
CHAPTER XX. - LAS CASAS ARRIVES AT VALLADOLID. THE THIRTY PROPOSITIONS.
DEBATE WITH GINES DE SEPULVEDA
CHAPTER XXI. - SAN GREGORIO DE VALLADOLID. LAST LABOURS. THE DEATH OF LAS
CASAS
APPENDIX I. - THE BREVISSIMA RELACION
APPENDIX II. - THE BULL SUBLIMIS DEUS
APPENDIX III. - ROYAL ORDINANCES PROVIDING FOR THE DEPARTURE OF LAS CASAS
FROM SPAIN AND FOR HIS RECEPTION IN THE INDIES
ILLUSTRATIONS
Fray Bartholomew de Las Casas
Juan Gines de Sepúlveda
Christopher Columbus
Cardinal Ximenez de Cisneros
Charles V.
Paul III.
Philip II.
Scenes of Las Casas’s Labours
Holograph of Las Casas Giving Directions for the Publication of his Work.
CHAPTER I. - FAMILY OF LAS CASAS. EDUCATION OF BARTHOLOMEW. HIS FIRST
VOYAGE TO AMERICA
The Spanish wars against the Moors, no less than the Crusades against the
Moslems in the Holy Land, enlisted under the Christian standard the
chivalry of Europe, and during the victorious campaign of the King, St.
Ferdinand, knights from France, Germany, Italy, and Flanders swelled the
ranks of the Spanish forces in Andalusia. Amongst these foreign noblemen
were two French gentlemen called Casaus, who claimed descent from Guillen,
Viscount of Limoges, one of whom was killed during the siege of Seville.
The city was taken in 1252, and the surviving Casaus shared in the
apportionment of its spoils, and founded there a family, whose descendants
were destined to become numerous and illustrious. The name _Casaus_
assumed with time the more Spanish form of Casas, though it continued to
be spelled in both ways for several centuries, and Bartholomew de Las
Casas himself used both spellings indifferently, especially during the
earlier years of his life.
This family ranked among the nobility of Seville and mention is found of
the confirmation by Alfonso XI. of Guillen de Las Casas in the office of
regidor of the city in 1318. This same Guillen became Alcalde Mayor of
Seville, and when he died his body was buried in one of the chapels of the
cathedral. His son, Alfonso, is stated in the chronicles of Don Juan II.
(1409) to have been appointed by the Infante, Don Fernando, to the
lieutenancy of Castillo de Priego, “because he was a valiant man who could
hold it well.” The names of Guillen and Bartolomé are of frequent
recurrence in the annals of the family, whose members constantly occupied
the honourable offices of judge, alcalde mayor, and captain, using the
title of Don and intermarrying with the most illustrious families of
Andalusia.
According to indications equivalent to proofs in the absence of any
positive record, from such respectable forebears descended Fray Bartolomé
de Las Casas, who was born in Seville, in 1474. He himself speaks of
Seville as his native city, and the popular tradition, which fixes the
ancient suburb of Triana as his birthplace, was recognised in 1859 by the
municipality of Seville assigning the name of Calle del Procurador to one
of the streets of Triana, in honour of the Bishop, whose proudest title
was Protector (or Procurador) General of the Indians.
In his voluminous writings, which teem with information about the men and
events of his times, the references to his own family history are
infrequent and imperfect, so that from his own records of his life, very
little is to be gleaned concerning it. His father’s name is variously
given by different writers as Alonso, Antonio, and Francisco, while he
himself states(1) that he was named Pedro, thus contradicting all his
biographers from Remesal, who was the first, down to Don Antonio Fabié,
whose admirable _Vida y Escritos_, published in 1879, was the last
important contribution on this interesting subject. Zuñiga, in his
_Discurso de Ortices_, assumed that Alonso de las Casas and Beatriz
Maraver y Cegarra of Triana were the parents of Fray Bartholomew, but in
the _Anales de Sevilla_, a later work, Francisco is given as the father’s
name. Neither Llorente nor Gutierrez, who has followed him, gives any
authority for his affirmation that the father’s name was Antonio, while
Quintana and Fabié accept Remesal(2) and name the father Francisco.
The genealogy of the family furnished me by the dean of the Royal College
of Heralds in Madrid shows the descent of Fray Bartholomew through his
frather, named Francisco, from Alonso de Las Casas, “Señor de Gomez
Cardeña, Veinticuatro de Seville, la Villa de Priego” in 1409, and his
wife, Maria Fernandez Marmolejo. The children of this couple were
Guillen, Isabel, Juan, Pedro, and Francisco, who is described in the
genealogy as the father of Bartholomew. Pedro, whom Fray Bartholomew
mentions as his father, is described as _Dean of Seville_, in which case
his ecclesiastical state would exclude matrimony and legitimate issue.
Fabié affirms that in several passages of his writings Fray Bartholomew
confirms the assertion of those authors who have designated his father as
Francisco, but he does not indicate the whereabouts of these passages nor
have I, in my unaided researches, succeeded in finding them. The
descendants of the original founder of the family had multiplied and, by
the close of the fifteenth century, were divided into many prolific
branches, hence the difficulty of identifying the unimportant father of an
extraordinarily important son is not wonderful. Las Casas himself may be
reasonably assumed to have known his own father’s name and we must
conclude, in view of his assertion, that all other authorities, including
the Royal College of Heralds, are wrong, and that not Francisco, but a
Pedro de Las Casas, who was not however Dean of Seville, was the immediate
progenitor of the illustrious Bishop of Chiapa.
The scarcity of positive information concerning his immediate family is
equalled by the paucity of trustworthy details of the first twenty-eight
years of Fray Bartholomew’s life. He completed his studies and obtained
the degree of licentiate in law at the University of Salamanca, the most
celebrated in Spain, and which ranked high amongst the great seats of
learning in Europe at that time. Jurisprudence was divided into the
branches of Roman law as interpreted by the school of Bologna, and of
canon law, the principles of which were interwoven with the common
practice, whose severer tendencies they somewhat tempered. The precepts
of Aristotle as interpreted by scholastics formed the basis of
philosophical studies, and the Thomistic doctrine was taught by professors
of the Dominican Order.
It has been judiciously observed that in that age of growing absolutism,
both spiritual and temporal, only a skilful Thomistic scholar could have
discerned the limits to the legitimate exercise of the royal authority
which Las Casas so clearly perceived and so boldly defined in the very
presence of the autocratic sovereigns of Spain.
Grammar, ethics, physics, and the branches of learning necessary to
complete the education of a young man of his social position and mental
capacity, were doubtless embraced in his course of study. His use of the
Latin tongue was fluent, though his style has been criticised as
cumbersome and wanting in elegance; certainly his writings abound in
diffuse generalities, a multiplicity of repetitions, and a vast array of
citations from Scripture and the classics which render his unexpurgated
manuscripts wearisome enough to modern readers. He shared the defects of
most of his contemporaries in this respect and followed the fashion common
in his times. The training he received in the Spanish schools and the
University, and which he afterwards perfected—as will be seen—by the
studies he resumed after his profession in the Dominican Order, rendered
formidable as an advocate one whom nature had endowed with a rare gift of
eloquence, a passionate temperament, and a robust physical constitution
which seems to have been immune to the ills and fatigues that assail less
favoured mortals. Gines de Sepulveda, whose forensic encounter with Las
Casas was one of the academic events of the sixteenth century, described
his adversary in a letter to a friend as “most subtle, most vigilant, and
most fluent, compared with whom Homer’s Ulysses was inert and stammering.”
The father of Las Casas accompanied Christopher Columbus on his second
voyage to America and acquired profitable interests in the island of
Hispaniola. He returned to Spain in 1496, bringing with him an Indian lad
whom he sent as a present to his son, who was then a student at Salamanca.
Bartholomew’s ownership of this Indian boy was brief, owing to Queen
Isabella’s intense displeasure when she learned that Columbus had brought,
and permitted to be brought back Indians, as slaves. Nothing sufficed to
appease the Queen’s indignation that the Admiral should thus dispose of
her new subjects without her leave and authority, and a royal order was
published from Granada, where the court then was, commanding, under pain
of death, that all those who had brought Indians to Spain as slaves should
send them back to America. When Francisco de Bobadilla was sent in 1500
to Hispaniola to supersede Columbus as Governor, all these Indians
returned with him and Las Casas himself states, “Mine was of the number.”
Thus strangely is the future apostle of freedom first introduced to our
notice in the guise of a slave-holder, constrained by a royal edict to
surrender his human property.
Upon his return from Salamanca to Seville Las Casas found himself, through
his father’s relations with Columbus, in daily intercourse with the men
whose voyages and discoveries were thrilling Europe. Amongst these
navigators was his uncle Francisco de Peñulosa, and it was but natural
that his eager temperament should catch the adventurous fever which
prevailed throughout Spain and notably in Andalusia. Salucchi, in his
Latin treatise on Hebrew coins, says that Las Casas accompanied his father
on the second voyage of Columbus in 1493 and brought back the Indian slave
himself. Llorente, who has been followed by several modern writers,
asserts that his first voyage to America was made with Columbus on his
third expedition. He deduces this conclusion from a statement at the
close of the Thirty Propositions which Las Casas addressed to the Royal
India Council in 1547 and from a sentence in the First Motive of his Ninth
Remedy which he presented to the Emperor in 1542. The first of these
passages reads “Thus, most illustrious Sirs, have I thought since
forty-nine years, during which I have witnessed evil-doings in America and
since thirty-four years that I have studied law.” The passage merely
refers to Columbus having permitted certain Spaniards who had rendered
important services during his voyage to bring back each an Indian and
concludes, “And I obtained one.”
[Illustration: Christopher Columbus]
Christopher Columbus
From an engraving by P. Mercuri after a contemporary portrait
The deductions of both these learned writers would seem to require more
positive corroboration. Not only are they destitute of confirmation, but
in the second chapter of his _Historia General_, Las Casas gives the names
of many persons who did accompany Columbus in 1493, describing several
incidents connected with that expedition and concluding by saying that he
heard all these things “from my father who returned [to America] with him,
when he went to found settlements in Hispaniola.” In the preface which he
wrote in 1552 to accompany the publication of his history, _Destruycion de
las Indias_, which had been composed ten years earlier, he speaks of his
experience extending over more than fifty years, but in his _Historia
General_, which is almost a diary of the first half of his life in
America, the first voyage that he mentions is that of Don Nicholas de
Ovando in 1502. Las Casas was most careful in describing every particular
of the events in which he had a part and he nowhere mentions that he
accompanied Columbus on any voyage, whereas he dwells at length upon the
expedition of Ovando, and in the third chapter of the second book of the
_Historia General_ he affirms, “I heard this with my own ears for I went
on that voyage with the Comendador de Lares [Ovando] to this island.” The
phrase is characteristic, for the positive note is rarely absent in the
affirmations of Las Casas, nor is it admissible that his experiences on
any voyage previous to that of Ovando should find no place in the exact
and scrupulous narrative he has left us of his relations with America and
his beloved Indians.
In consequence of the persistent and bitter complaints of Columbus against
the second Governor of Hispaniola, whose appointment violated the rights
secured to the Admiral and his successors by the capitulations of Granada,
the catholic sovereign decided to recall Francisco de Bobadilla, whose
administration gave cause for dissatisfaction in other respects, and to
send Don Nicholas de Ovando to replace him. Ovando was at that time
Comendador de Lares and was later raised to the supreme commandership of
the Order of Calatrava. He is described as a most prudent man, worthy to
govern any number of people, but not Indians; man in word and deed, an
avowed enemy of avarice and covetousness; not wanting in humility, as
shown in his habits of life, both public and private, though he maintained
the dignity and authority of his position.(3)
The new Governor was endowed with full powers to judge the accusations
against his predecessor and to dispose of the nettlesome questions which
had provoked the Roldan rebellion.
The preparations for his departure were delayed by many causes; his fleet
was the most considerable one that had thus far been organised to sail for
America, being composed of thirty-two vessels on which were to sail some
two thousand five hundred persons, many of whom were knights and noblemen.
Twelve Franciscan friars under the direction of their leader, Fray Alonso
del Espinal, formed part of the company.
It was this brilliant expedition that Fernando Cortes intended to join
when he was prevented by injuries incurred while engaged in an amorous
adventure which led him over garden walls into risky situations where he
ended with broken bones, and was consequently left behind. The fleet
sailed from San Lucar de Barrameda on February 13, 1502, which according
to Las Casas was the first Sunday in lent of that year.(4)
The usual course, by way of the Canary Islands, was followed, but after
eight days at sea, a violent tempest wrecked one ship, _La Rabida_, with
one hundred and twenty people on board, and scattered the remainder; some
vessels were obliged to throw most of their cargo overboard, but all,
after many dangers, gradually found refuge in various ports of the
neighbouring islands.
The wreckage of _La Rabida_, and that of some other vessels which had also
foundered while carrying sugar from the islands, drifted back to the
Spanish coast and gave rise to the rumour that the entire fleet was lost.
This caused such a general sense of affliction that the sovereigns, on
receipt of this false report, shut themselves up in the palace at Granada
and mourned for eight days.
The vessels which had weathered the tempest united after some delay in the
port of the island of Gomera, and being joined there by another, fitted
out in the Canaries by people eager to go to America, the fleet was thus
brought up to its original complement. The commander divided his squadron
in to two sections, the first of which, composed of the fastest vessels,
he kept under his command, while the second was placed under command of
Antonio de Torres. Ovando’s division reached Hispaniola on the fifteenth
of April and the second squadron came safely to port some twelve days
later. Thus did Bartholomew de Las Casas first land in the New World.