Part 3 of our condensation of Las Casas’ Account of the Destruction of the Indies (the Americas).

In Part 3 of our condensation of Las Casas’ Destruction of the Indies, Las Casas briefly details the genocide commited upon the Natives in the islands of Jamaica and Puerto Rico. He then continues to detail, in a bit more depth, the events surrounding the landing of the first Spanish ‘governor’ in what he calls the ‘Mainland’ , which refers, in this context, to South and Central America, specifically the modern day countries of Colombia, Nicaragua, and Panama. The oppressive governor he refers to is Pedro Arias Dávila, born in 1440 in present day Spain.

In 1509, the Spanish, with the same purpose in mind as they had when they landed on Hispaniola, found their way to the two verdant islands of Puerto Rico and Jamaica, both of them lands flowing with milk and honey. Here they perpetrated the same outrages and committed the same crimes as before, devising yet further refinements of cruelty, murdering the native people, burning and roasting them alive, throwing them to wild dogs and then oppressing, tormenting and plaguing them with toil down the mines and elsewhere, and so once again killing off these poor innocents to such effect that where the native population of the two islands was certainly over six hundred thousands (and I personally reckon it at more than a million) fewer than two hundred survive on each of the two islands…

It was in 1514 that a governor landed on the Mainland. This man…was the cruellest of tyrants, totally devoid as he was of any feelings of mercy or even of common sense. He was determined to settle the whole area with Spaniards…He devastated the land for many leagues north of Darien right up to and including the kingdom and provinces of Nicaragua — a distance of more than five hundred leagues over some of the most fertile and densely populated areas that are to be found anywhere in the known world…Nowhere on the face of the earth had such an enormous wealth of gold been discovered, for, although the island of Hispaniola had filled Spain to overflowing with gold, and gold of the highest quality, this had all to be extracted from the bowels of the earth by the sweat of natives who toiled down the mines and, as we have noted, perished there.

This governor and his men dreamed up new ways of tormenting the native population and whole new techniques for torturing them in order to force them to reveal the whereabouts of their gold and to hand it over…

… Spanish policy toward the New World has been characterized by blindness of the most pernicious kind: even while the various ordinances and decrees governing the treatment of the native peoples have continued to maintain that conversion and the saving of souls has first priority, this is belied by what has actually been happening on the ground. The gulf that yawns between theory and practice has meant that, in fact, the local people have been presented with an ultimatum: either they adopt the Christian religion and swear allegiance to the Crown of Castile, or they will find themselves faced with military action in which no quarter will be given and they will be cut down or taken prisoner.

It as though the Son of God, who gave His life for every living soul, when He instructed His followers with the words: ‘Go ye therefore, and teach all nations’, intended heathen, living in peace and tranquility in their own lands, to be confronted with a demand that they convert on the spot, without their ever hearing the Word or having Christian doctrine explained to them; and that, should they show any reluctance to do so and to swear allegiance to a king they have never heard of nor clapped eyes on, and whose subjects and ambassadors prove to be cruel, pitiless and bloodthirsty tyrants, they should immediately surrender all their worldly goods and lose all right to their land, their freedom, their womenfolk, their children and their lives. Such a notion is as absurd as it is stupid and should be treated with the disrespect, scorn and contempt it so amply deserves.

This wicked wretch of a governor was accordingly under instructions to ensure that the terms of this government legislation were made known to the native population, as though by doing this one could justify the absurdity, unreasonableness and injustice of the terms themselves; what he did in practice, whenever he or the bandits in his employ learned that there was gold in a particular town or village, was to get his gang of robbers to make their way there at dead of night, when the inhabitants were all in bed and sound asleep and, once they got within, say, half a league of the town itself, to read out the terms of this edict, proclaiming (and only to themselves): ‘Leaders and citizens of such-and-such a town of this Mainland. Be it known to you that there is one true God, one Pope, and one King of Castile who is the rightful owner of all these lands. You are hereby summoned to pay allegiance, etc. Should you fail to do so, take notice that we shall make just war upon you, and your lives and liberty will be forfeit, etc.’

Then, in the early hours of the morning, when the poor people were still innocently abed with their with their wives and their children, they would irrupt into the town, setting fire to the houses, which were commonly of straw, and burning the women and children alive and often the men, too, before the poor wretches realized what was happening. They would slaughter the people with impunity and those they took alive they either tortured to death in an attempt to get them to tell of other towns where there might be gold or of the whereabouts of more gold in their own town, or else they branded them as slaves. Once the fires had died down or gone out, they conducted a house-to-house search for gold. This was how this wicked man and his evil followers spent their waking hours from 1514 until 1521 or 1522: amassing a huge fortune…by sending five or six or more of his close associates on raiding parties such as this and then taking his share of all the gold, pearls and jewels they plundered as well as of the slaves they took…even the first bishop of the kingdom sent his underlings so that he, too, could get his hands on a share of the loot.

My own conservative estimate of the total value of the gold stolen from that kingdom during these few years is that it amounted to more than a million castilians, and of those only some three thousand ever found their way into the royal coffers. Over eight hundred thousands souls perished as a direct result of operations such as these. The villains who succeeded the butcher of whom we have been speaking as governors of the province right up until 1533 either massacred the survivors or else turned a blind eye when others did, the few who were not slaughtered being taken prisoner and later dying in the slavery to which they were reduced after the actual fighting had come to an end…So widespread was the ruin and carnage inflicted by this wicked Spanish governor through the region that no accurate record can now be complied and today the whole area lies abandoned and deserted.”