topics: |  america | genocide | jamaica | spain | empire |

Las Casas arrived on the island of Cuba in 1502, and obtained a grant - a
license to extract "tribute" - over a group of Indians.  In practice, the
license made the Indians slaves, and Las Casas became an encomendero
(slaveholder).

After twelve years of this life, with daily contact with the excesses
perpetrated on amerindian slaves, he gave up his encomienda in 1515 after
his conscience was awakened by Antonio de Montesinos, a Dominican friar who
arrived in Hispaniola (today's Haiti+Dom. Rep) in 1510.  By 1512 he was
working with the Dominicans.  Eventually he started a crusade in Europe to
stop the Spanish genocidal enslavement of the native amerindians.


	
	1570 map (Ortelius, Americæ sive novi orbis, nova descriptio)
	source: U. Alabama library / nationalhumanitiescenter.org


According to Las Casas the population of Hispaniola went from three million
(others suggest more than 1 mn) to 46,000 between 1492 and 1510.  While
many died from illness, a large fraction were also killed in wanton
violence and for opposing the repressive measures.  The total number killed
over the entire Spanish new world numbered between 12 and 15 million.



Title page, 1598 edition [Frankfurt] published by
Theodore de Bry with his engravings

The encomienda system

Part of the promise of Christopher Columbus' journeys to the new world was
that the Spanish court could get "as much gold as they need - and as many
slaves as they ask.”

Unfortunately he found no gold, so after numerous slave raids, five hundred
captives were sent to Spain. Two hundred died on the voyage. The rest were
put up for sale by a local church official. Columbus, who was full of
religious talk, later wrote, “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on
sending all the slaves that can be sold.”

By the end of Columbus' fourth voyage, more than 90% of the arawaks in
Hispaniola (where he had put up a fort from ship timber), had died.
	(see Howard Zinn, A Young People's History of the United States)

The encomienda was the local outcome of the emphasis on finding slaves.

An encomienda (from encomendar, “to entrust”) was a grant of a group of
Indians to a conquistador or official.  Though the encomienda did not specify
a land grant, in reality the encomenderos gained control of the Indians’
lands.  The encomendaro was to use the Indians to get gold or labour, but
was required to protect them and instruct them in the Christian faith.
As las Casas records, most of them failed to protect them in any way.

The Encomienda system had its orgins during the Reconquista (“Reconquest”) of
Muslim Spain (13th-15th c.), when the adelantados (spanish nobles)
were granted the right to extract tributes from Muslims and other peasants in
conquered areas.  In practice, large numbers of Muslims were exported as
slaves all over the Mediterranean:

	The successes of the 13th c. reconquista led to an increase in the
	number of Muslims who became enslaved, as well as an increase in the
	involvement of Jews in this slave trade.  Mallorca soon became the
	principal center for a burgeoning trade in captured Muslims.
		[p.65, Jonathan Ray, The Sephardic Frontier: The Reconquista
		and the Jewish Community in Medieval Iberia, 2008]

Slavery in Christian Spain

Bensch, Stephen P. "From prizes of war to domestic merchandise: the changing
face of slavery in Catalonia and Aragon, 1000-1300." Viator 25.83 (1994):
47.

	Most investigations of medieval slavery have concentrated on the
	disappearance of Roman slavery before the year 1000 or on the
	expanding slave trade in the fourteenth and fifteenth century. This
	article examines how new power relations affected the nature of
	slavery in Catalonia and Aragon between 1000 and 1300, as the
	military balance in the Iberian peninsula shifted in favor of the
	Christian north. Acquired through war and distributed through a
	tributary economy, Muslim slaves were at first not easily integrated
	into the world of their owners. The rise of a commercial economy,
	however, transformed slavery into primarily an urban phenomenon. As
	artisans and prosperous burghers acquired slaves for domestic labor,
	women began to appear much more frequently than men on the slave
	market and were more firmly attached to the households of their
	owners than earlier. Slavery was therefore not a mere vestigial
	element of a vanished Roman world; rather, it takes us to the heart
	of social change in the medieval Mediterranean. Six documents are
	included in the appendix.

Constable, Olivia Remie. "Muslim Spain and Mediterranean slavery: the
medieval slave trade as an aspect of Muslim-Christian relations."
in Christendom and Its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution, and Rebellion,
1000-1500 (2002): 264.

	Between 8th to 13th c. the Iberian slave trade shifted from Muslim
	control, when Christian and pagan slaves were transported from Europe
	into the Islamic world by way of Andalusi markets, to a pattern
	whereby Spanish Muslims were enslaved in Christian Spain and sold
	throughout the NW Mediterranean.

Many slaves would convert to Christianity - and become free, "due to the
long-standing prohibition against Jews owning Christian slaves." [Ray p.77]
This resulted in many Jewish appeals to the state for compensation, and
decrees that slaves seeking conversion in a church be first checked for
insincerity over a few days.  Clearly much of the conquered Muslim population
converted.

See also: The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought James H. Sweet,
		The William and Mary Quarterly v.54(1) (Jan., 1997), p.143-166

Encomiendas in the Antilles

Thus, the encomienda system had its origins in Spain, but in the new
colonies, far away from the civlizing gaze, it made for severe excesses.

Although the original intent of the encomienda was to reduce the
abuses of forced labour (repartimiento), in practice it became a form of
enslavement.

las Casas writes that "there were countless people that I saw burned alive
or cut to pieces or tortured."

	
	They would erect long gibbets . . . and bind thirteen of
	the Indians at one time, in honour and reverence, they
	said, of Our Redeemer and the twelve Apostles, and put
	firewood around it and burn the Indians alive.
	[John Carter Brown Library, Brown U.;
	source : nationalhumanitiescenter.org



Another time, because the Indians did not give him a coffer filled with
gold, . . . they killed an infinite number of souls, and cut off the hands
and noses of countless women and men, and others they threw to the savage
dogs, who ate them and tore them to pieces...

Anton de Montesinos

Into this world, in 1511, came the dominican friar Anton de Montesinos.
In a 1511 sermon in the cathedral in Santo Domingo, in the presence of
admiral Diego Colon and a number of royal officials, he inveigled against
the brutal practices of the encomendero:

	I have come here in order to declare it unto you, I the voice of
	Christ in the desert of this island.  Open your hears and your
	senses, all of you, for this voice will speak new things harshly, and
	will be frightening.  ...

	You are living in deadly sin for the atrocities you tyrannically
	impose on these innocent people.

	Tell me by what right of justice do you hold these Indians in such a
	cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged such
	detestable wars against these people who dealt quietly and peacefully
	on their own lands?  Wars in which you have destroyed such an infinite
	number of them by homicides and slaughters never heard of before. Why
	do you keep them so oppressed and exhausted, without giving them
	enough to eat or curing them of the sicknesses they incur from the
	excessive labor you give them, and they die, or rather you kill them,
	in order to extract and acquire gold every day.

  	Aren't they human beings?  Have they no rational soul?  Aren't you
	obliged to love them as you love yourselves?" [report by Las Casas]

The unexpected severity of the sermon infuriated the officials, who
immediately demanded a retraction.  The cathedral was full of encomenderos
the following Sunday, expecting a recantation.  But the Dominicans banded
together and refused, leading to a confrontation within the church.
[for details see "Columbus and Las Casas: The Conquest and Christianization
of America, 1492-1566" (1994), by David M. Traboulay, p.45-46]

[the name Anton de Montesinos is given variously; las Casas refers to him
as Anton Montesino; modern commentators often write it as Antonio de
Montesinos.

The conversion of Las Casas

In perspective, a greater victory for the Dominicans was in terms of the
few who were converted, such as de las Casas.

In his laudatory biography, Francis Macnutt (1909) has cited Gines de
Sepulveda's remarks on las Casas - "most subtle, most vigilant, and most
fluent, compared with whom Homer's Ulysses was inert and stammering."
	- Francis Augustus Macnutt : Bartholomew de Las Casas; His Life,
	   Apostolate, and Writings Arthur H. Clark Co., Cleveland, 1909, 396
	   pages, [p.6]

	 
			Bartolomé de Las Casas


Las Casas and Montesinos were sent to Spain in 1515, where las Casas
remained until 1520.  During this period he established a network of
sympathizers including Cardinal Cisneros, who would later incorporate his
ideas into the church strategy for the Indies - which involved having the
Indians live, in segregated villages, under their own chiefs.
[Traboulay, Columbus and Las Casas, p.47].

In 1542, Las Casas returned to Spain to hire fresh recurits, and in 1544,
he published this volume that resulted in laws attempting to limit Spanish
excesses in the new world.  He is among the earliest voices in Europe to
raise the conscience of Christianity against the evils of slavery.

Las Casas himself, later became the Bishop in Chiapas (Mexico), and had a
role in implementing these ideas.  Unfortunately the results of resettling
the Indians in dense villages proved to be just as disastrous, with very
high mortality due to spread of contagion such as smallpox.

Estimates of depopulation

The islands were, according to las Casas:

	all of them, densely populated with native peoples called Indians.
	[Hispaniola] was perhaps the most densely populated place in the
	world. ... all the land so far discovered is a beehive of people; it
	is as though God had crowded into these lands the great majority of
	mankind. - http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bdorsey1/41docs/02-las.html

Las Casas suggests that the population of Hispaniola in 1492 was "more
than three million".

However, other estimates suggest numbers from 500,000 to more than 1
million for the initial population.  At one point he says that the
archbishop of Seville had told Las Casas that Columbus himself had claimed
to have counted 1,100,000 "heads" (1.1 million).

Spanish writers on both sides of the divide agree that by 1510, only 46,000
Indians survived in Hispaniola.  [Kiernan p.81)
Most of the remaining natives had fled to the remote mountain jungles.

Ben Kiernan in Blood and Soil: Modern Genocide 1500-2000 (p.81) reports:

	In 1509 the Spanish launched their conquests of the neighbouring
	islands of Puerto Rico and Jamaica . Their population, Las Casas
	wrote, numbered "more than 600,000 souls."  This may have been an
	official figure; Las Casas himself estimated "more than one million".
	After the iniitial massacres, the conquistadors forced the Indians
	into "hard labour of the mines, thus eradicating them from the
	earth."  Survivors numbered no more than two hundred in 1552."

While violence may have exterminated several hundred thousand, it is
estimated that larger numbers died of diseases such as smallpox, brought in
by contact with the colonizers.

New Laws of 1542

As a result of the efforts by las Casas and others, new laws (neyes
luevas) were passed in 1542, by Charles I.  The laws prohibited the
enslavement of Indians and provided for gradual abolition of the encomienda
system.  Indians were to be paid proper wages for all work.

The laws were bitterly opposed by the encomenderos, who rebelled
and in Peru, the group led by Pizzarro killed the governor Nu~nez
Vela. Subsequently, the governor of Nueva España, which included the
Spanish West Indies, did not enforce these laws.

Thus, despite the new laws, the genocide continued, resulting in the
complete extermination of the amerindian populations of the Caribbean.
There are no pure amerindian groups left on the islands, though some
aspects of their culture remains among related groups who survive in remote
areas on the mainland in Venezuela, Colombia, Guyana etc.

After the native population was exterminated, African slaves were imported
to work the farms.

A fairly large mixed ancestry population lives on the Caribbeans, such as the
Guajiros of Cuba, and some Taino groups in Puerto Rico and elsewhere.  Since
the 1980s, the groups have been trying to revitalize their culture (e.g.
the journal KACIKE)) and
the online (United Confederation of Taino People (UCTP)).




   A Taino group in the US holds rites re-affirming their lost heritage.

Excerpts

Synopsis

	from Nigel Griffin translation

Everything that has happened since the marvellous discovery of the Americas –
from the short-lived initial attempts of the Spanish to settle there, right
down to the present day – has been so extraordinary that the whole story
remains quite incredible to anyone who has not experienced it at first
hand. It seems, indeed, to overshadow all the deeds of famous men of the
past, no matter how heroic, and to silence all talk of other wonders of the
world.

Prominent amid the aspects of this story which have caught the
imagination are the massacres of innocent peoples, the atrocities committed
against them and, among other horrific excesses, the ways in which towns,
provinces, and whole kingdoms have been entirely cleared of their native
inhabitants. Brother Bartolomé de Las Casas, or Casaus, came to the Spanish
court after he entered the Order, to give our Lord, the Emperor, an
eye-witness account of these enormities, not a whisper of which had at that
time reached the ears of people here.

He also related these same events to several people he met during his visit
and they were deeply shocked by what he had to say and listened open-mouthed
to his every word; they later begged him and pressed him to set down in
writing a short account of some of them, and this he did.

Some years later, he observed that not a few of the people involved in this
story had become so anaesthetized to human suffering by their own greed and
ambition that they had ceased to be men in any meaningful sense of the term
and had become, by dint of their own wicked deeds, so totally degenerate and
given over to a reprobate mind that they could not rest content with their
past achievements in the realms of treachery and wickedness (when they honed
to perfection the art of cruelty in order to wipe human beings from a large
part of the globe), but were now pestering the Crown to grant them official
authority and licence once again to commit their dreadful deeds, or even (if
such a thing were conceivable) to devise yet worse atrocities.

He therefore decided to present this summary of what he had written to His
Royal Highness the Prince to implore him to do everything in his power to
persuade His Majesty to frustrate the plans of these men. It seemed to him a
good idea to have the account printed to enable His Highness to read it more
easily. This is the background to the following epitome, or Short Account.

[Here "The Prince" is Emperor Charles V (abdicated 1556)]

Prologue

[...]

I am persuaded that, if Your Highness had been informed of even a few of the
excesses which this New World has witnessed, all of them surpassing anything
that men hitherto have imagined even in their wildest dreams, Your Highness
would not have delayed for even one moment before entreating His Majesty to
prevent any repetition of the atrocities which go under the name of
‘conquests’: excesses which, if no move is made to stop them, will be
committed time and again, and which (given that the indigenous peoples of the
region are naturally so gentle, so peace-loving, so humble and so docile) are
of themselves iniquitous, tyrannical, contrary to natural, canon, and civil
law, and are deemed wicked and are condemned and proscribed by all such legal
codes.


	
		And thus pregnant and nursing women and children
		and old persons and any others they might take, they
		would throw them into the holes until the pits were
		filled, the Indians being pierced through by the stakes,
		which was a sore thing to see, especially the women
		with their children.
			[engraving by Theodore de Bry; image source:
			nationalhumanitiescenter.org

Introduction

http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bdorsey1/41docs/02-las.html
	 [?Knight / Hurley translation?]

And of all the infinite universe of humanity, these people are the most
guileless, the most devoid of wickedness and duplicity, ...  These people are
the most devoid of rancors, hatreds, or desire for vengeance of any people in
the world. And because they are so weak and complaisant, they are less able
to endure heavy labor and soon die of no matter what malady. The sons of
nobles among us, brought up in the enjoyments of life's refinements, are no
more delicate than are these Indians, even those among them who are of the
lowest rank of laborers. They are also poor people, for they not only possess
little but have no desire to possess worldly goods. For this reason they are
not arrogant, embittered, or greedy. [...]

. . . Into and among these gentle sheep, endowed by their Maker and Creator
with all the qualities aforesaid, did creep the Spaniards, who no sooner had
knowledge of these people than they became like fierce wolves and tigers and
lions who have gone many days without food or nourishment. And no other thing
have they done for forty years until this day, and still today see fit to
do, but dismember, slay, perturb, afflict, torment, and destroy the Indians
by all manner of cruelty -- new and divers and most singular manners such as
never before seen or read of heard of -- some few of which shall be recounted
below, and they do this to such a degree that on the Island of Hispaniola, of
the above three millions souls that we once saw, today there be no more than
two hundred of those native people remaining.

The island of Cuba is almost as long as from Valladolid to Rome; today it
is almost devoid of population.

The island of San Juan [Puerto Rico] and that of Jamaica, large
and well-favoured and lovely islands both, have been laid waste. On the Isles
of the Lucayos [Bahamas] . . . where there were once above five hundred
thousand souls, today there is not a living creature. All were killed while
being brought, and because of being brought, to the Island of Hispaniola
where the Spaniards saw that their stock of the natives of that latter island
had come to an end. . . .

Two principal and general customs have been employed by those, calling
themselves Christians, who have passed this way, in extirpating and striking
from the face of the earth those suffering nations. The first being unjust,
cruel, bloody, and tyrannical warfare. The other -- after having slain all
those who might yearn toward or suspire after or think of freedom, or
consider escaping from the torments that they are made to suffer, by which I
mean all the native-born lords and adult males, for it is the Spaniards’
custom in their wars to allow only young boys and females to live -- being to
oppress them with the hardest, harshest, and most heinous bondage to which
men or beasts might ever be bound into. . . .

12 to 15 million killed

there have been unjustly slain more than twelve million men, women, and
children. In truth, I believe without trying to deceive myself that the
number of the slain is more like fifteen million.

	
	on not finding gold, "they killed an infinite number
	of souls, ... and cut off the hands and noses of countless
	women and men, and others they threw to the savage dogs,
	who ate them and tore them to pieces."
	source: https://abagond.wordpress.com/2013/09/20/the-taino-genocide/
	(similar atrocities are also attributed to Balboa in Panama).


The cause for which the Christians have slain and destroyed so many and such
infinite numbers of souls, has been simply to get, as their ultimate end, the
Indians’ gold of them, and to stuff themselves with riches in a very few
days, and to raise themselves to high estates -- without proportion to their
birth or breeding, it should be noted -- owing to the insatiable greed and
ambition that they have had, which has been greater than any the world has
ever seen before. . . [A]ll the Indians of all the Indies never once did
aught hurt or wrong to Christians, but rather held them to be descended from
heaven, from the sky, until many times they or their neighbours received from
the Christians many acts of wrongful harm, theft, murder, violence, and
vexation. . . .

[Las Casas proceeds to recount specific acts of cruelty perpetrated on the
people of Hispaniola, San Juan (Puerto Rico), Jamaica, Cuba, Nicaragua, New
Spain (Mexico), the Yucatan, Guatemala, Venezuela, Peru, Granada and other
small Caribbean islands, and “Florida,” referring to Spanish claims north of
Mexico in North America.]

Impact

The Short Account had a great impact on European society.  Nigel Griffin
writes
	Before the century was out translations of the work had appeared in
	Flemish, English, French, German, and Latin. The first English
	version, entitled The Spanish Colonie … was made by one ‘M. M. S.’
	and printed in London by Thomas Dawson for William Brome in 1583. It
	was this version that Samuel Purchas used in Part IV of Purchase his
	Pilgrime. Facsimiles of this translation were published in the
	U.S. in 1966 and 1977.

There has been much academic research also on las Casas, (and it continues
even today).

Las Casas' work led to a darker image for Spanish (and Portuguese)
colonialism when compared to the British - which has been lamented in the
Spanish world (in the epynomous book by Julian Judeiras, 1914) as
La Leyenda Negra (The Black Legend).  This idea suggests that the
Spanish empire has been presented in a deeply negative light, and positive
achievements have been ignored, presenting the conquistadors as "cruel,
bigoted, exploitative and self-righteous in excess of reality."

While this five-century old work is clearly one-sided - it mentions
diseases among the Indians rarely except to mention that the encomenderos
took no steps to treat the Indians - nonetheless, it was a very powerfully
constructed polemic, and quite an eye-opener for many in Europe.  It fueled
the anti-slavery seintiment over the next two centuries, and may have
played a role almost as significant as that of Martin Luther nailing his
theses on the church at Wittenberg a few decades earlier.