THE twin horrors of murder and greed define A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, Bartolomé de las Casas’s 1542 polemic on the unrelenting atrocities committed by the Spanish and, to a lesser degree, the Germans against the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and Latin America. De las Casas, a Dominican friar, witnessed some of this violence himself, a fact that lends his account a disturbing authority. The deaths come by sword and lance, by fire, drowning, starvation and torture. They are plentiful, varied and vividly rendered. Again and again, the reader is brought face to face with the grotesque machinery of colonial conquest and with a history that constitutes a terrible part of the Caribbean experience.
The Spanish made a ritual of murder and mutilation, torture and rape, plunder and destruction. The “destruction” of the book’s title refers not merely to the violent deaths of individuals but to the systematic killing of populations, what de las Casas repeatedly describes as “depopulation”, a seemingly simple word that, in its proper context, amounts to wanton and reckless slaughter. It is a difficult book to read, not because of any density or difficulty in its prose, although there is some of that, but because of the sheer relentlessness of the violence, which might be tolerable if it were fiction, as in Cormac McCarthy’s ultraviolent novel, Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West. De las Casas spares the reader little. Torture abounds: burning, starvation, quartering, stabbing, drowning, mutilation and rape. After two or three chapters, the accumulation becomes almost unbearable. Captives are roasted over fires to extract information. Whole towns are “put to the sword”. Babies are seized, swung by their legs and thrown into fires, or have their heads dashed against stones. It is a nightmare book, stubbornly and almost obsessively focused on the atrocities committed by Spanish colonials in the Americas.
Yet the book is also, and perhaps more profoundly, a meditation on greed. Here, greed knows no horizon when the object is gold. The book is a catalogue of plunder, with the later logic of colonial predation already fully visible. The murders de las Casas describes are not simply cruel; they are, in many instances, extrajudicial even by the standards of the time and profoundly irreligious. The latter point matters greatly to de las Casas, a Christian friar and a witness to some of the slaughters. He is appalled by the contradiction between the professed faith of the conquistadors and the violence they inflict upon the people they have conquered. He comes to understand that, in the pursuit of gold, every imaginable horror becomes permissible. Gold is the Spaniards’ deity, as one of the doomed caciques declares as he prepares to be burned.
What makes the violence so appalling is its apparent lack of necessity. The Indigenous peoples were often willing to surrender their gold without being forced. They offered it to the Spaniards in considerable quantities, yet the conquistadors, consumed by their appetite, remained convinced that there was always more. Thus, torture was used not because the Indigenous peoples refused to give up their wealth but because the Spaniards could not believe that what they had received was enough. The point is central to de las Casas’s indictment: greed is not satisfied by possession. It creates its own insufficiency. There is always another town to ransack, another village to raze, another people to pillage.
The injustices are of a kind that haunt because they suggest something elemental about human behaviour: the capacity to suspend common decency when greed becomes the governing principle. Greed here knows no horizon. Not all the gold in the world is enough, and there are no moral limits to the means of acquiring it.
In her recent novel Paradise Once, which I reviewed in this column, Olive Senior writes with great imaginative force about the depopulation of Xaymaca (Jamaica) and Cuba by the Spaniards: the razing of villages, the murder of inhabitants and the flight of survivors into the mountains. One can hardly read Senior’s account without thinking of de las Casas. In his narrative, however, there is scarcely any refuge. Those who flee are pursued, rounded up on horseback and “run through” or “put to the sword”. These phrases, chilling in their matter-of-factness, manage to conceal as much as they show. They suggest the act of killing without fully conveying the brutality of slaughter.
De las Casas is, among other things, a writer of extraordinary detail. His attention is not limited to geography and historical circumstance. He gives us the names of Indigenous kings, princes and princesses; he offers glimpses of their societies and customs; and, with mordant carefulness, he records the circumstances of their deaths. Through these details, what is destroyed is revealed as something more than a population. Entire societies and cultures are being dismantled.
The horse becomes a formidable instrument of conquest, allowing the Spaniards to pursue, surround and run down those attempting to escape. Sword and lance complete the work. The technology of violence is intimately connected to the technology of conquest. Then there is fire, which the Spaniards employ with a particularly horrifying avidity. De las Casas describes occasions on which Indigenous people are herded into buildings, locked inside and the buildings “put to the torch”. The phrase is almost banal compared with the horror it describes. Fire is only one method. There is the cutting off of hands, noses, ears and lips: mutilation used as punishment and as a means of extracting information.
What is striking, especially in contrast, is the description de las Casas gives of the Indigenous peoples themselves. The people the Spaniards encounter are often portrayed as peaceful, trusting and hospitable. They welcome strangers into their midst with kindness and civility. The contrast is very stark: on one side, a culture of hospitality; on the other, a culture of conquest whose appetite appears to grow with every victory. The meek are massacred in Xaymaca, Cuba, Santo Domingo, Haiti and many other parts of the Caribbean and Latin America. The strategy is depressingly consistent: kill, plunder, torture, extract and move on. The geography changes; the method does not. Murder everyone and take their gold. Torture those who remain to discover where more gold may be found. The repetition is itself part of the horror.
A persistent motif of the book is the sheer senselessness of the slaughter. There is little evidence of the kind of sustained military resistance that might explain, though certainly not justify, the scale of violence. When resistance does occur, the Indigenous people are often routed by superior weapons and military organisation. For the most part, however, de las Casas presents them as peaceful and co-operative with the invaders. There is no war in the strict sense of the term. There is no sustained Indigenous threat capable of explaining the violence that follows. What we encounter instead is something closer to bloodlust: violence that feeds upon itself and cannot be satisfied by victory because victory only opens the possibility of further plunder.
This is perhaps the most disturbing dimension of de las Casas’s account. The violence is not presented as an unfortunate excess of conquest, an occasional lapse in discipline or an aberration committed by a few bad men. It appears repeatedly, across territories and communities, as part of a system of ethnic cleansing. The murder of Indigenous people, the destruction of their communities, the seizure of their wealth and the use of terror to compel submission become recurring features of the colonial enterprise.
A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies is both difficult and necessary. Its subject is not simply the cruelty of individual men. It is the moral catastrophe that occurs when conquest, religion, technology, and greed combine, and when the humanity of the conquered is subsumed by the conqueror’s appetite. This catastrophe is relentlessly enumerated through villages destroyed, bodies mutilated, children murdered and societies erased.
