Not only were the Indians capable of manipulating and taking revenge, they also were not as unintelligent as Las Casas claims them to be. They reasoned and realized that “since the newcomers began to subject [them] to other vexations, assaults, and iniquities…these men could not, in truth, have been descended from the heavens” (Pg. 14). In addition to recognizing the treachery of the Spanish, they also took action against it which Las Casas previously asserted they were incapable of: “some of them started to conceal what food they had, others decided to send their women and children into hiding, and yet others took to the hills to get away from the brutal and ruthless cruelty that was being inflicted on them.” (Pg. 14) Thus, his claim that the Indians were too simple a race loses its creditability in the face of his own contradictory examples of their intelligence and vengeance.
Las Casas’ entire argument is further weakened by his exaggeration of the barbarism of the Spanish through careful choice of words and images. He makes a conscious effort to paint a gory picture of the cruelties suffered by the Indians at the hands of the Spanish invaders. The violence is explained in detail and the perpetrators of the crime are duly derided with references such as “ravening wolves”, “butcher” and “fiend”. With the passage of each conquest, Las Casas exposes newer ways with which the Spanish tortured the natives: “they slaughtered anyone and everyone in their path, on occasion running through a mother and her baby with a single thrust of their swords” (Pg.15) and “throwing yet others to wild dogs, sometimes sawing off their hands and feet, sometimes pulling out their tongues or hacking off their heads” (Pg. 69). Any reader would be able to easily see that such descriptions were intended to invoke a certain reaction and knowing this, may not buy his account of the atrocities. Thus, one cannot disregard exaggerations in the description of the Spanish tortures and heartlessness in order to accept the account as true.
Further, Las Casas’ account contradicted all values of a civilized society and its people. The Spanish probably were as brutal and malicious, but by failing to show that some of them might have acted in an educated, cultured and sophisticated way, Las Casas provokes the reader to question the truth of his account yet again. The intriguing thing to note here is that Las Casas confirms both the submissiveness of the natives of the New World and the barbarism of the civilized world during a span of several decades, yet he fails to convince the reader with concrete reasons as to why each acted the way they did. He simplifies the reasoning down to the innate meekness of the Natives and the inherent greed and cruelty of the conquering Spaniards.
Moreover, in each account of the violent invasion of a different island, the general story is recurrent to a point of casting a shadow on its credibility. Conquests in each of the areas – Cuba, Bahamas, New Spain, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Yucatan along with the others bear a striking similarity and repetitive description of events.
Most accounts start with the natives “com[ing] out to welcome the Spaniards with all due pomp and ceremony” (Pg. 45), followed by the Spaniards “duping the unsuspected leaders of this welcoming party into gathering into a building” (Pg. 22), and ending with the Spaniards setting fire to the building and burning alive the victims. Such recurring depiction of the slaughter and slavery at the hands of the Spanish gradually undercuts the effect Las Casas provokes from the reader initially. Further, over an area as huge as South America and Mexico, Las Casas characterizes the natives of these territories all into the same category: “naturally gentle and unaggressive” (Pg. 37). Was it really possible that the people of so many different islands had no differing characteristics and different experiences? Las Casas’ repeated generalization undermines the authenticity of his text and causes the reader to ponder on the authenticity of other facts that he has mentioned in this book.
Furthermore, while in some of the conquered areas, Las Casas professes to have seen the atrocities himself, he lends weight to atrocities committed in other parts of the New World with a similar conviction. Logically analyzed, any two set of people and any two set of events occurring would render some glaring dissimilarities with respect to the reaction of the Indians and to the way in which they surrendered.
Not only does he exploits words and images, but also distorts statistics and facts to his advantage. His estimates of the native population of the West Indies, and of the number of lives destroyed by the tyranny of the Spaniards are evident exaggerations, prompted, as the historian Prescott suggests, by the author's heart rather than by his head. Las Casas claims “Not a living soul remains today on any of the islands of the Bahamas, which lie to the north Hispaniola and Cuba…The native population, which once numbered some five hundred thousand, was wiped out by forcible expatriation to the island of Hispaniola”(Pg. 11). The numerical accuracy of this claim is a matter of doubt in itself since the population of the Bahamas in present day and age is 300,000, which includes tourists. With daily arrivals of numerous cargo ships and advanced soil alteration techniques for crop growth, the Bahamas still cannot support the number of persons Las Casas claims existed even in this day and age of top logistics practice. This is, along with others, a clear example of misrepresentation of facts that Las Casas uses to serve a point. In other places as well, it is surprising that he has the audacity to claim population figures without any evidence. While describing the islands of Puerto Rico and Jamaica he makes such a claim: “where the native population of the two islands was certainly over six hundred thousand (and I personally reckon it at more than a million)” (Pg. 26). How can he possibly tell that the population was more than a million? Such glaring overestimations and errors make us wonder how many more discrepancies could there have been in his account.
In another instance Las Casas claims that “what a European will consume in a single day normally supports three native households of ten persons each for a whole month” (Pg. 14). This is another example of how Las Casas strayed from reality in order to accomplish a desired response from the reader. Such hyperboles and distortions of facts may have satisfied the monstrous image of the Spaniards created elsewhere in the book, but nevertheless they questioned the authority of the author.
But did Las Casas write his scathing accounts of the Spanish conquests in a sincere attempt to alleviate the misery caused to the natives or was there some other motive behind it? Did he, through his succinctly brutal portrayal of the Spanish invaders hope to achieve more than just fairness and justice in the land? Or was he comparing the Spaniards to brutes and the natives to lambs in order to convince the Church and the King that the natives were extremely malleable people who could easily be converted to Christianity if only the not so pious Spanish invaders were brought to justice? He does mention examples of how “the local people were so affected by the doctrine and good example of the friars “(Pg. 75) that the “local chiefs brought all the idols they had previously worshipped and handed them over to the missionaries for burning as well as entrusting them with the schooling of their children”(Pg. 76).
In between Las Casas’ descriptive account of the Spanish cruelties and the local peoples’ willing subjugation, a purpose of intent to spread his faith is evident. In an instance where the missionaries had to desert the Indians Las Casas mentioned how the“…whole region was left without the light and staff of true doctrine …and the local people returned to the darkness and misery in which they had lived previously” (Pg. 79). Clearly, he believed that the Indians would only be free of their blindness and suffering if they converted to Christianity. Las Casas envisioned the Americas as a land where the Spaniards were obligated to bring the Indians to the Catholic Faith and the Christian way of life. His frequent usage of the word “Christians” (Pg. 29) as a sarcastic term in an attempt to highlight the “un-Christian” ways of the Spanish invaders is another example of his dismay at the image of Christianity being created by the invaders to the locals.
This raises the question of whether Las Casas was more of a missionary rather than a champion of self-determination. The widely held opinion of this work is that it was a sincere and brave attempt in the 16th century to alert His Majesty of the atrocities being committed by the Spanish invaders in the Americas. Las Casas has been championed as the Apostle of the Indians and his ideas hailed as the voice of 16th century Spanish conscience. However, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies itself falls short of being historically true and convincing. The blatant inaccuracies and exaggerations in Las Casas’ account were implanted to have a quick and decisive influence on the royal court which would have catalyzed the spread and increase in popularity of Christianity in the captured areas. But in the process of trying to win over the readers and royal support, it loses its credibility as the plausibility of certain aspects of the book appear to be debatable. Professor John H. Parry of Harvard University, for example, asserts in his work of synthesis The Spanish Seaborne Empire that Las Casas’ writing is “vituperative, one-sided, and at times extravagant”. In the face of its own contradictions and exaggerations, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies weakens and challenges the purpose it is striving for.
Bibliography
A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, Bartolome De Las Casas
Introduction to Post-Colonial Literature, Dr. Mariam Pirbhai
, Virtual American Biographies
, Review: Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
, The Legacy of Bartolome De Las Casas by Benjamin Keen
Introduction to Post-Colonial Literature, Dr. Mariam Pirbhai
, Virtual American Biographies
, Review: Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
, The Legacy of Bartolome De Las Casas by Benjamin Keen
, The Legacy of Bartolome De Las Casas by Benjamin Keen
