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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 6-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Province of Nicaragua”
In 1522 or 1523 Dávila (again, not named in the text) set out to add Nicaragua’s fertile landscape, booming population, and large towns “to his fiefdom” (37). Unlike other islands, the flat terrain of this region gave “no mountains for the locals to hide in” (37) and allowed Spanish horsemen to easily run down the natives. Here, the Spanish justified wholesale massacre on “the flimsiest pretexts, accusing their victims of not coming quickly enough when they were summoned, or of not having brought enough cargas of maize […] or of not surrendering sufficient of their kinsmen as slaves” (37).
Slaves taken by Dávila were chained together by the neck and forced to carry massive loads. Any who fell behind were decapitated to spare the Spanish the work of unchaining them. The colonists also took up residence on the fertile lands already farmed by the natives, setting them to work as slaves on their own property. Spanish seizure of maize crops caused many families to die of hunger, with “some mothers even killing their own children and eating them” (38). Las Casas references the encomienda system, which allotted natives to the Spanish as workers of the land, noting the colonists’ abuse of this ordinance to enslave and starve native peoples (38-39). Shortly thereafter he mentions that the enslaved natives were “as free as you or me” (40), referencing their legitimate right to freedom as subjects of the Spanish Crown.
Las Casas writes that the “most insidious pestilence dreamed up by this governor” (40) was a system in which the Spanish were given license to demand slaves directly from tribal leaders or be burned alive. This caused massive devastation of native populations. Between 1522 and 1533 slaves from the region were then sold in Panama and Peru, “where they all perished” (40). Las Casas notes that all natives of the Americas were tied deeply to their homelands and died quickly when removed from them, and that the actions of the Spanish killed roughly 1 million natives.
Chapter 7 Summary: “New Spain”
New Spain hosted a slew of atrocities since its discovery in 1517. At the time of Spanish colonization, the regions around Mexico City (properly named Temixtitán or Tenochtitlán) “boasted four or five great kingdoms” (43), each of them inhabited “by more people than the combined population of Toledo, Seville, Valladolid, Saragossa and Barcelona” (43). Here Christians “butchered, burned alive or otherwise” killed 4 million people in their 12-year conquest. Las Casas calls the term “conquest” into question, stating it is “really and truly nothing other than a series of violent incursions into the territory by these cruel tyrants,” who commit acts of atrocity “far worse than the assaults mounted by the Turk in his attempt to destroy Christendom” (43). Las Casas closes the short chapter noting that no account could ever truly capture the horror of these events, even if only one or two outrages were selected “from among the so many” and described “in all their bloody and terrible detail” (43).
Chapter 8 Summary: “New Spain [continued]”
This chapter begins by detailing the massacre at Cholula, “a great city of some thirty thousand inhabitants,” which a footnote tells us is “Cortés’s most spectacular and widely reported massacre” (45). Here both dignitaries from the region and local natives were told to assemble and then slaughtered. Those who escaped and took refuge in a temple were also killed by setting fire to the temple. Cortés was responsible for an even larger massacre at the city of Tepeaca before moving on to Mexico City.
Though showered with gifts on their way, the Spanish imprisoned King Montezuma when they reached Mexico City. Many citizens performed traditional dances to entertain their imprisoned king. Under pretense of watching the dance, the Spanish drew close and slaughtered all the dancers. After this, the native population took up arms against the Spanish. The Spanish forced Montezuma to command his people to surrender, but they refused. The Spanish were forced to retreat from the city. The city was later sieged.
After taking Mexico City, the Spanish also took the provinces of Pánuco, Tuxtepec, Impilcingo, and finally Colima, “each one of them greater in extent than the kingdoms of Castile and León” (52). Las Casas reminds his reader that the point of Spanish conquest was always only to take the Americas under Spanish rule, never to murder or enslave civilians. The actions of Spanish colonizers effectively invalidated the Spanish Crown’s legal and divine rights to these lands (53-54). Similar atrocities and enslavement occurred on the islands of Guatemala and Honduras (or Guaimura), which between 1524 and 1535 led to the complete destruction of all the territories of the kingdom, “a once veritable paradise on earth” (55).
Chapters 6-8 Analysis
These chapters bear witness to the Spanish colonial machine’s continued development in the New World. Chapter 6 is Las Casas’s first example of what will become a standard practice by the Spanish, which is the chaining of natives by the neck and the decapitation of individuals who flag to avoid the work of unchaining them. Las Casas makes direct reference to both the encomienda system and the natives’ legal rights to freedom as subjects of Spain. Beyond providing a useful first-hand account of the colonists’ use and abuse of Spanish law, this chapter also effectively displays Las Casas’s expertise and ability to argue on behalf of actual Spanish law.
The chapter on Nicaragua is also a prototypical example of how Las Casas precedes description of the destruction of a community with details of its previous prosperity. Las Casas relates the richness of the landscape as well as its booming population and complex social organization. This picture of the New World as an already thriving and advanced community works against even contemporary visions of the Americas as largely depopulated and inhabited only by nomadic tribes at the time of European colonization.
Chapter 7 contains an often-cited passage used to explain Las Casas’s view on Spanish colonial action. The Spanish and Portuguese soldiers who colonized South and Central America between the 15th and 17th centuries were called conquistadors. This is a historically and religiously loaded term, as it connects the actions of the Spanish colonizers to the religious conquest of the promise land from the Arabs during the crusades. As such, it casts any military action against the natives by the Spanish as a “holy war” similar to that of the crusades (this relationship is detailed extensively in Part III of the Penguin Classics Introduction). Las Casas, however, wholly rejects this terminology, seeing nothing at all holy about Spanish action in the New World.
Chapter 8’s description of the slaughter of naked native dancers is particularly vivid and poignant. This passage, with somewhat more descriptive flair than other portions of the text, casts well the innocent and unprepared natives against the sinister and bloodthirsty Spanish. Even more importantly than this vivid description is the seminal argument of Las Casas’s text, which he puts to phrase on pages 53-54: Despite their sanction under Spanish law and the Pope’s granting of these lands to Spain’s control, the Spanish colonizers’ atrocious actions should effectively invalidate Spain’s legal and divine rights in the region. This crucial comment defines Las Casas’s entire view on the subject of Spain’s “conquest.” This chapter clarifies that A Short Account is much more than just a historical account; in fact, the text bears much more resemblance to a prosecutor’s report.
