Bartolome De Las Casas, who lived in the Americas during the time of Christopher Columbus, Details the Abuses Commited by the Spanish Against the Native Americans, Part 1

Bartolome De Las Casas was a Spanish man, and Christian priest, who settled in the Taino region of the Carribean in the year 1502. His arrival was ten years after Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. Las Casas knew Christopher Columbus personally and was a witness to the abuse, robbery, and subjugation of the Taino people, who had been living in the Carrribean for 15,000 years before Columbus arrived on behalf of Spain.

In 1552, Las Casas wrote and published “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies” to document and report to the Queen of Castille (Spain) the atrocities committed against Native Americans by Spanish settlers across South, Central, and North America.

Below is a condensed version of of his account:

“…[G]iven that the indigenous peoples of the region are naturally so gentle, so peace-loving, so humble and so docile … I therefore concluded that it would constitute a criminal neglect of my duty to remain silent about the enormous loss of life…and so resolved to publish an account of a few such outrages (and they can be only a few out of the countless number of such incidents that I could relate) in order to make that account the more accessible to Your Highness…

Meanwhile, the boldness and the unreason of those who count it as nothing to drench the Americas in human blood and to dispossess the people who are the natural masters and dwellers in those vast and marvelous kingdoms, killing a thousand million of them, and stealing treasures beyond compare, grow by the day, and, masquerading under false colours, they do everything within their power to obtain further license to continue their conquests …This, Your Royal Highness, is a matter on which action is both urged and necessary if God is to continue to watch over the Crown of Castile and ensure its future well-being and prosperity, both spiritual and temporal. Amen.

The Americas were discovered in 1492, and the first Christian settlements established by the Spanish the following year. It is accordingly forty-nine years now since Spaniards began arriving in numbers in this part of the world. They first settled the large and fertile island of Hispaniola…with as high a native population as anywhere on earth…

God made all the people of this area, many and varied as they are, as open and as innocent as can be imagined…Never quarrelsome or belligerent or boisterous, they harbor no grudges and do not seek to settle old scores; indeed, the notions of revenge, rancour, and hatred are quite foreing to them. At the same time, they are among the least robust of human beings: their delicate constitutions make them unable to withstand hard work or suffering and render them liable to succumb to almost any illness, no matter how mild…they own next to nothing and have no urge to acquire material possessions. As a result they are neither ambitious or greedy, and are totally uninterested in worldly power…I have time and again met Spanish laymen who have been so struck by the natural goodness that shines through these people…

… from the very first day they clapped eyes on them the Spanish fell like ravening wolves upon the fold, or like tigers and savage lions who have not eaten meat for days. The pattern established at the outset has remained unchanged to this day, and the Spaniards still do nothing save tear the natives to shreds, murder them and inflict upon them untold misery, suffering and distress, tormenting, harrying and persecuting them mercilessly…When the Spanish first journeyed there, the indigenous population of the island of Hispaniola stood at some three million; today only two hundred survive…

…At a conservative estimate, the despotic and diabolical behavior of the Christians has, over the last forty years, led to the unjust and totally unwarranted deaths of more than twelve million souls, women and children among them…

There are two main ways in which those who have travelled to this part of the world pretending to be Christians have uprooted these pitiful peoples and wiped them from the face of the earth.  First, they have waged war on them: unjust, cruel, bloody and tyrannical war. Second, they have murdered anyone and everyone who has shown the slightest sign of resistance, or even of wishing to escape the torment to which they have subjected him. This latter policy has been instrumental in suppressing the native leaders, and, indeed, given that the Spaniards normally spare only women and children, it has led to the annihilation of all adult males, whom they habitually subject to the harshest and most iniquitous and brutal slavery that man has ever devised for his fellow-men, treating them, in fact, worse than animals.

The reason the Christians have murdered on such a vast scale and killed anyone and everyone in their way is purely and simply greed. They have set out to line their pockets with gold and to amass private fortunes as quickly as possible so that they can then assume a status quite at odds with that into which they were born. Their insatiable greed and overweening ambition know no bounds; the land is fertile and rich, the inhabitants simple, forbearing and submissive. The Spaniards have shown not the slightest consideration for these people, treating them (and I speak from first-hand experience, having been there from the outset) not as brute animals — indeed, I would to God they had done and had shown them the consideration they afford their animals — so much as piles of dung in the middle of the road…One fact in all this is widely known and beyond dispute, for even the tyrannical murders themselves acknowledge the truth of it: the indigenous peoples never did the Europeans any harm whatever; on the contrary, they believed them to have descended from the heavens, at least until they or their fellow-citizens had tasted, at the hands of these oppressors, a diet of robbery, murder, violence, and all other manner of trials and tribulations…”