A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies [Paperback]

Bartolome de Las Casas (Author), Nigel Griffin (Translator), Anthony Pagden (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 3, 1992 | ISBN-10: 0140445625 | ISBN-13: 978-0140445626 | Edition: 1st

Bartolome de Las Casas was the first and fiercest critic of Spanish colonialism in the New World. An early traveller to the Americas who sailed on one of Columbus' voyages, Las Casas was so horrified by the wholesale massacre he witnessed that he dedicated his life to protecting the Indian community. He wrote "A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies" in 1542, a shocking catalogue of mass slaughter, torture and slavery, which showed that the evangelizing vision of Columbus had descended under later conquistadors into genocide. Dedicated to Philip II to alert the Castilian Crown to these atrocities and demand that the Indians be entitled to the basic rights of humankind, this passionate work of documentary vividness outraged Europe and contributed to the idea of the Spanish 'Black Legend' that would last for centuries.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Bartolome de las Casas was born in Seville around 1484. At the age of eighteen he left for the New World, where he participated in the conquest of Cuba and witnessed the first full-scale massacre of an Indian community. He became a priest and entered the Dominican order. He dedicated himself to the protection and defence of the Indians. Anthony Pagden teaches in the Department of History at John Hopkins University, Baltimore. He is the author of The Fall of Natural Man and Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination. Nigel Griffin read modern languages at Oxford and was a Fellow of New College in the 1970s. He now concentrates on writing and translating and has worked for both the UN and the World Bank.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics; 1st edition (November 3, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140445625
• ISBN-13: 978-0140445626
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #120,719 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A written protest, October 3, 2001

By 

Enrique Torres "Rico" (San Diegotitlan, Califas) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Paperback)

There are two sides to every story and the fact that De Las Casas takes the side of the indigenous people as opposed to his native Spain is especially poignant. The writing style is repititive, old world and filled with the horrors of war but De Las Casas does this to especially hammer home his point. He gives examples, over and over, of the injustices carried out by Cortez and Pizarro throughout the Americas from Mexico to Peru, under the auspices of the flag and cross, all in the name of God and country. It is a first hand report on the atrocities that greed and glory created. It was a plea for his King to understand how his represenatives abroad and the encomienda had drifted far from the ideals originally intended and persued. The woodcuts reproduced from a 17th century version are especially telling of the cruelties imposed with graphic examples. There are groups of people being strung up and burned alive with their feet barely dangling above the flames. The violence was inhumane to the point where women hung themselves with their children attached and hung to their bodies rather than be a meal to the hungry dogs that assisted the Spaniards and had to be fed. The genocidal colonization became a perverted vision of evangelization that was nothing short of hell for the Indians. It is important to see the other side of colonization, as written by the "The Defender and Apostle of the Indians" to understand both sides of the story. Our education system is full of European versions of the conquest, this is the anti-European version by someone who lived the experience. Recommended for students of history that want a different perspective from the one we are most familiar with that glitters from behind a golden cross.

57 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The key to the Spanish Black Legend, April 24, 2001

By 

Stephen Taylor (Chapel Hill, North Carolina) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Paperback)

The debate below, I think, could have been lifted right from the sixteenth century. You might take a look at it before reading my review, which is intended as a corrective.

Bartolomé de Las Casas, born in 1474, came to Cuba with Diego Velázquez's expedition in 1511 as a soldier. In Cuba, he became an "encomendero", receiving Indian labor parcelled out to the conquistadors. The horrors of the conquest of the Caribbean sparked a religious conversion in him and he became a Dominican friar in 1515. Soon, he made his way to the Central American mainland, where he started missionary work among the Maya in Guatemala. Dubbed later "The Apostle to the Indians" for his work on their behalf, he was eventually appointed Bishop of Chiapas. An intimate friend of the Indians, fluent in their languages, Las Casas witnessed Spanish cruelties perpetrated against them between the very year of his arrival and some years before his death in Spain in 1566.

In 1552, Las Casas published his empassioned "Short Account" (actually written 13 years earlier), in which he laid bare Spanish cruelties in America. Though generally condemned as slander in Spain, the book rapidly became popular in the rest of Europe, where it served to fuel anti-Spanish hate. Spain's enemies used it to depict Spaniards as evil tyrants and to rationalize carving out their own empires in the Americas. New editions appeared repeatedly, even as late as 1898, during the Spanish-American War.

Few credible historians take the "Account" for gospel truth. Much of what Las Casas says is certainly true. And while the rest is exaggerated, it is not "propaganda". Whatever truth the narrative has, though, what I think many people miss when they read it is its importance in understanding the Spanish Black Legend.

The Black Legend is the perception of Spain as a uniquely cruel and bigoted nation in excess of reality. Spanish culture is boiled down to the Inquisition and the bullfight. Spain's authors are ignored. The Spanish did nothing in the Americas but kill millions of Indians. This is the legacy of the 16th century. The substance of many European attitudes toward Spain up to about 1950 can be traced right to Las Casas' "Account." Appearing at the time when England and the Netherlands were emerging as major powers, grappling with Spain, the imagery from the book was woven right into their national mythologies. Because of historical circumstance, other nations that committed atrocities far worse than Spain's -- France, Britain, the United States -- never had to undergo the same humiliating scrutiny, the same alienation. Las Casas's book, certainly agaist its author's will, helped shape this.

There are more reliable accounts of the "destruction of the West Indies", including some by Las Casas. The account's real value is the key it offers to understanding Western perceptions of Spain. Like so many anti-Spanish documents of its time, the book, in the end, can tell us as much about the fascinating figure of its author and the character of Spain's enemies as about the horrors of the conquest and the nation it vilifies.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dominican monk writes in 1542 of atrocities in the New World, August 31, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Paperback)

Fifty years after Columbus found this world, a friar had witnessed himself and heard from others about the true nature of the conquest. Greed for gold and slaves under the name of Christianity and the Spanish soveriegn. If the Journal of Columbus begins the story, this could be its conclusion, (although he did write a longer History of the Indies after this brief one). Any romantic ideas about the conquest will be wiped out after reading this. Probably the most horrific view of the conquest, it summarizes the suffering of native victims at the hands of both Spaniard and German conquerers until that time. It fails to some extent by lumping men of conquest with those who showed criminal madness, although this was often true as well. And he makes no mention of how many of the deaths he tallys were due to disease and not direct butchery. In the history of the discovery this work tells the story of the losers, whose suffering and shameful deaths would otherwise have remained silent (even better in this regard than The Broken Spears). Contains engraved illustrations from a 17th century edition.