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Bartolome de Las CasasA Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1552A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 12-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary: “The Province of Santa Marta”
From 1492 to the time of writing in 1542, “an uninterrupted series of Spanish plunderers” (80) arrived in Santa Marta (today the Republic of Colombia) seeking gold. Before 1523, when a permanent Spanish settlement was established, devastation of the local population was kept to the coast. At the time of settlement, and especially following 1529, there began a program of torturing local peoples and chiefs of the inland province for information on the whereabouts of gold. This accounted for the depopulation of 400 leagues of densely populated area between 1529 and 1542.
Instead of attempting to describe the list of atrocities committed here, Las Casas quotes a 1541 letter written by the bishop of the province, Fray Juan Fernández de Ángulo, to Charles V. The letter strongly urges the king to entrust the province to “someone who will love and care for it as he would his own offspring” (81), or else it will “very soon simply disappear from the face of the earth” (82). The letter encourages the king to strip the current governors of their stewardship and, much like Las Casas, accuses these so-called Christians of disgracing their religion.
In closing, Àngulo urges the king to make these men aware that “the Crown is not served by actions that are a disservice to God” (83). Las Casas ends the chapter describing the cruelty of the Spanish against their native slaves, saying he cannot even describe “one hundredth part of the afflictions and calamities wrought among these innocent people” (84). He prays that “God grant enlightenment to those who are in a position to do something about what has been happening” (84), a clear message to his royal audience.
Chapter 13 Summary: “The Province of Cartagena”
Cartagena is positioned “some fifty leagues down the coast to the west of Santa Marta” (85). The Spanish committed atrocities here “from 1498 or 1499 right down to the present day” (85).
Chapter 14 Summary: “The Pearl Coast, Paria and Trinidad”
The Spanish had been in the Pearl Coast region (today known as the Paria Peninsula of Northeast Venezuela) since 1510, deceiving the locals through friendship to sell them into slavery.
In 1516 a Spanish commander (Juan Bono) and 60 to 70 men settled on the island. The natives built them a large log cabin, which the Spanish immediately used as a central fort for their massacre of the villagers. They took 180 to 200 natives as slaves and sold them in Puerto Rico and Hispaniola. Las Casas personally met Bono, who regretted the treatment of the natives but said he was just following orders (87).
A party of Dominican missionaries was accepted by the natives but quickly followed by conquistadors who took the chief, his wife, and 100 other natives as slaves to Hispaniola. The natives held the missionaries accountable, and two were executed. While the missionaries were innocent, the locals were not at fault for their actions, “for they thought the missionaries had been party to the act of treachery” (90). These executed missionaries are doubtless martyrs of the faith. On another occasion two Dominicans and a Franciscan were killed due to similar treachery.
Overall, 2 million inhabitants of the province were taken as slaves, and many died on the journey. Las Casas tells a clearly fantastical tale of one slave ship that, without compass, only kept its bearings by the sting of dead bodies in its wake (92). Those who survived such journeys reached their slave markets starving and near death, and then were split into “little flocks” (92).
The Spanish used many natives as pearl divers, who died within a few days of their work due to exhaustion and exposure. Las Casas calls their lives “a living hell” (94) and notes that Bahamians, due to their skill in swimming, were so often taken for this work that the Bahamas were completely uninhabited.
Chapter 15 Summary: “The River Yuyapari”
The Yuyapari River runs 200 leagues into the province of Paria. In 1528 the Spanish moved up this stream, massacring the villagers around it and burning them at the stake.
Chapters 12-15 Analysis
These chapters are primarily occupied with the capture of natives as slaves for sale in markets on other islands. They differ from other chapters, therefore, which emphasize the butchery that natives faced over enslavement. Though he abandoned this perspective in later years, Las Casas initially argued for the import of African slaves into the New World to reduce the enslavement of indigenous American peoples. Historians interpret this argument to mean that Las Casas was less concerned with slavery and more concerned with atrocity as crimes against god. These chapters work to stymy such a reading.
The modern reader of these chapters receives valuable information about the geographical realities of the New World’s slave trade. The development of a bustling slave trade in the region reflects the slow dissolution of Ferdinand and Isabella’s prohibition of the sale of natives as slaves. These chapters form a graphic survey of the early slave trade, cementing Las Casas’s account as an early abolitionist text.
Chapter 14 contains Las Casas’s only account of a personal meeting and conversation with one of the Spanish commanders. Though never named, this commander (Juan Bono) is somewhat humanized by his admission that he pitied the natives he killed and captured and recognized their hospitality as a people. In Bono’s further admission that he had explicit orders from his superiors to commit the atrocities Las Casas attributes to him, we encounter an early example of the common manner by which war criminals escape guilt in genocide, by casting themselves as players in a wider political and military event. Similar arguments are detailed in Hannah Arendt’s philosophical work on the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann at Nuremberg, Eichmann in Jerusalem. Here, again, Las Casas emerges not as a historian of these early atrocities but a searching prosecutor of those who abet these acts and a true student of ethics seeking to understand how humans can stoop to such terrible deeds.
In the same chapter we witness another clear use of fabliaux. Las Casas describes a slave ship without a compass that uses the dead bodies of the starved slaves in its wake to orient itself on its sea voyage. This story is an obvious use of hyperbole to demonstrate the high death tolls associated with the Spanish slave trade. However, use of fantastical anecdotal evidence and embellished death toll numbers allow Las Casas’s contemporaries as well as modern scholars to challenge the veracity of his other claims.
These chapters also share Las Casas’s common argument that these Spanish acts break divine law. This is most clear in the citation of Bishop Ángulo’s letter. In warning that the colonists’ actions were deeply unholy and the region required an honest and caring steward, the bishop implies that these atrocities risked the rewards of the entire Spanish colonial project. If they violated divine law, God would eventually remove the Americas from Spain’s control. This reminds the reader that the Pope granted sovereignty of the Americas to the Castilian Crown in 1493, the real-world divine legislation that abetted Spain’s rule. In the possibility such a grant could be revoked, Las Casas’s inclusion of this letter helps reveal the subtle religio-political negotiation that occurred between the agents of the Catholic Church and the Spanish empire.
