Bartolomé de las Casas on the American Conquests
Biases and Perceptions of the Spanish Conquest of the Amerindians
Apr 7, 2009
Las Casas was one of those clergymen who followed the colonizing movement across the sea. While the Spanish colonists wished to recruit the Indians’ labour, the priests were there to secure their souls for God.
Upon his arrival, however Las Casas was shocked and horrified by the atrocities being committed against the Amerindians. He wrote the treatise “Destruction of the Indies” as an appeal to King Charles V to enact firmer control over his colonial agents to prevent such cruelties.
On the Misdeeds of the Spanish
Las Casas covers events in the Cuba, Hispaniola, Panama, and Costa Rica in his work (the campaigns against the Aztec and Inca Empires had not begun yet) and each contains a graphic relation of murder, rape, and mutilation that, in a modern reader, evokes the kind of uncomprehending horror one associates with reading about the holocaust. In Hispaniola, for example, he writes of how the Spanish “would enter into a village and spare not children, or old people, or pregnant women.” He condemns the perpetrators at the same time as offending God and behaving in a way that defamed their King. On a cargo of gold sinking after leaving the Caribbean, Las Casas remarked, “and God did in this way wreak his vengeance for such great injustices.”
Biases Against the Amerindians
Having said all that, it is a mistake to think of Las Casas as a human rights advocate as people would in this day think of it. While he is quick to condemn the Spanish murderers to the fires of Hell, he also laments the fact that so many Indians have been sent to Hell, never being shown “another, better God.” He also digresses frequently on the meek and delicate-bodied Indians. So while clearly he feels for their plight and loathes the people placing them in it, he pities and looks down on the Indians in a paternalistic fashion. He also tends to exaggerate the scale of the misdeeds, and admits that he has actually witnessed only a few of them.
Implications
The moral of the story, so to say, is that while Las Casas appeals to the sense of injustice moderns feel regarding colonialism, to regard him as a paragon of enlightenment is an oversimplification. Even in his understandable moral outrage, he has biases and preconceptions which don’t stand up to modern sensibilities. In pre-modern history, there are no ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys,’ only people in keeping or in variance with the standards of their times.
Source
Las Casas, Bartolomé De, An Account, Much Abbreviated, on the Destruction of the Indies, Edited by Franklin W. Knight, Translated by Andrew Hurley, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2003.
