Fray Bartholomew de Las Casas

From the portrair drawn and engraved by Enguidanos.

Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings

By Francis Augustus MacNutt

To my beloved wife, Margaret Van Cortlandt Ogden this volume is affectionately dedicated

Preface

The controversies of which Bartholomew de Las Casas was, for more than half a century, the central figure no longer move us, for slavery, as a system, is dead and the claim of one race or of men to hold property rights in the flesh and blood of another finds no defenders. We may study the events of his tempestuous life with serene temper, solely for the important light on the history of human progress.

It is sought in the present work to assign to the noblest Spaniard who ever landed in the western world, his true place among those great spirits who have defended and advanced the cause of just liberty, and, at the same time, to depict the conditions under which the curse of slavery was first introduced to North America. It in no degree lessens the glory of Las Casas to insist upon the historical fact that he was neither the first Spaniard to defend the liberty of the American Indians, nor was he alone in sustaining the struggle, to which the best years of a life that all but spanned a century were exclusively dedicated.

Born in an age of both civil and religious despotism, his voice was incessantly raised in vindication of the inherent and inalienable right of every human [pg vi] being to the enjoyment of liberty. He was preeminently a man of action to whom nothing human was foreign, and whose gift of universal sympathy co-existed with an uncommon practical ability to devise corrective reforms that commanded the attention and won the approval of the foremost statesmen and moralists of his time. True, he also had a vision of Utopia, and his flights of imaginative altruism frequently elevated him so far above the realities of this world, that the incorrigible frailties of human nature seemed to vanish from his calculations, but when the rude awakening came, he neither forsook the fight nor failed to profit by the bitter lesson.

When his dream of an ideal colony, peopled by perfect Christians labouring for the conversion of model Indians, adorned with primitive virtues, was dispelled, he girded his loins to meet his enemies with undiminished courage, on the battle-ground they themselves had selected. His moral triumph was complete, and he issued from every encounter victorious. The fruits of his victories were not always immediate or satisfying, nor did he live to see the practical application of all his principles, yet the figure of this devoted champion of freedom stands on a pedestal of enduring fame, of which the foundations rest on the eternal homage of all lovers of justice and liberty, and it is the figure of a victor, who served God and loved his fellow-men.

It will be seen in the following narrative, that monks of the Order of St. Dominic were the first to defend the liberty of the Indian and his moral [pg vii] dignity as a reasonable being, endowed with free will and understanding. Associated in the popular conception with the foundation and extension of the Inquisition, the Dominicans may appear in a somewhat unfamiliar guise as torch-bearers of freedom in the vanguard of Spanish colonial expansion in America, but such was the fact. History has made but scant and infrequent mention of these first obscure heroes, who faced obloquy and even risked starvation in the midst of irate colonists, whose avarice and brutality they fearlessly rebuked in the name of religion and humanity: they sank, after lives of self-immolation, into nameless graves, sometimes falling victims to the blind violence of the very Indians whose cause they championed—protomartyrs of liberty in the new world.

The conditions under which Las Casas and his co-workers laboured were discouragingly adverse. The mailed conquerors and eager treasure-seekers who followed in the wake of Columbus were consumed by two ruthless passions—avarice and ambition.

Avarice and ambition alone, however, do not adequately explain their undertakings, and we find among them a fierce zeal for Christian propaganda strikingly disproportionate to their fitness to expound the doctrines or illustrate the virtues of the Christian religion. They seem to have frequently compounded for their sins of sensuality and their deeds of blood by championing the unity and purity of the faith—two things that were held to be of paramount importance, especially in Spain, where [pg viii] to be outside formal communion with the Church was to be either a Jew or a Mahometan, or in other words, an enemy of God.

Perverted as their conception of the true spirit of Christian propaganda may appear to us, it may not be doubted that many of these men were animated by honest missionary zeal and actually thought their singular methods would procure the conversion of the Indians. On the other hand, few of those who left Spain, animated by high motives, resisted the prevalent seductions of avarice and ambition, amidst conditions so singularly favourable to their gratification, and we find Las Casas denouncing, as ridiculous and hypocritical, the pretensions to solicitude for the spread of religion, under cover of which the colonists sought to obtain royal sanction for the systems of slavery and serfage they had inaugurated.

The essential differences observable in the Spanish and English colonies in America are traceable to the directly contrary systems of government prevailing at that time in the mother countries. All nations of Aryan stock possessed certain fundamental features of government, inherited from a common origin. Climatic and geographical conditions operated with divers other influences to produce race characteristics, from which the several nations of modern Europe were gradually evolved. Within each of these nations, the inherited political principles common to all of them were unequally and diversely developed. The forms of political liberty continued to survive in Spain, but, under [pg ix] Charles V., the government became, in practice, an absolute monarchy, the liberties of the Córtes and the Councils being gradually overshadowed by the ever-growing prerogatives of the Crown.

In England, on the contrary, the share of the people in the government was, in spite of opposition, of steady growth, only interrupted by occasional periods of suspension, while the power of the Crown declined. These conditions were repeated in the colonies of the two nations, with some variations of form that were due to local influences in each of them. The Spanish colonies relied entirely on the Crown and were, from the outset, over-provided with royal officials from the grade of viceroy to that of policeman, and even with clergy, all of whom were appointed by the king's sole authority and were removable at his pleasure. These settlements generally owed their existence to private enterprise, having been founded by explorers and treasure-seekers, but in none of them did the colonists enjoy any political rights or liberties, other than what it pleased the sovereign to grant them.

They were ruled through a bureaucracy, of which were the members were rarely efficient and usually corrupt, hence it followed that Spaniards were bereft of any incentive to colonise, save one—their individual aggrandisement. Their inherited habit of obedience reconciled them to the absence of any share in the direction and control of the colony in which their lot was thrown, but such a system of administration deprived them of the possibility of acquiring experience in the management [pg x] of public affairs. Its effects were pernicious and far-reaching, for when the colonies outgrew the bonds that linked them to Spain, their people, ignorant of the meaning of true liberty, and untrained in self-government, followed their instinct of blind submission to direction from above, and fell an easy prey to demagogues. Deprived of participation in framing the laws, the colonists employed their ingenuity in devising means to evade or nullify those which they deemed obnoxious or contrary to their interests, and constant practice soon perfected their perverted activities in this direction, until obstruction and procrastination were erected into a system, against which even royal decrees were powerless.

The results that followed were logical and inevitable. Laws devoid of sufficient force to ensure their effective execution fail to afford the relief or protection their enactment designs to provide, and ineffectual laws are worse than no laws at all, for their defeat weakens the government that enacts them and tends to bring all law into contempt. Conditions of distance, the corruption of the colonial officials, the conflict between local authorities, and the astutely organised opposition of the colonists repeatedly thwarted the honest efforts of the home government to safeguard the liberty of the Indians, which the Spanish sovereigns had defined to be natural and inalienable, definitions that had received the solemn sanction of the Roman pontiffs.

Spanish and English methods of dealing with the aboriginal tribes of America offer as sharp a contrast [pg xi] as do their respective systems of colonial government. Whether the devil himself possesses ingenuity in inflicting suffering, superior to that displayed by the Spanish conquerors and their immediate followers, has never been demonstrated. The gentle, unresisting natives of the West Indian Islands, whose delicate constitutions incapacitated them to bear labours their masters exacted of them, were their first victims. The descriptions penned as of the cruelties practised on these harmless creatures dispense me from the ungrateful task of attempting to depict them. But, while the individual Indian suffered inhuman tortures at the hands of the Spaniards, the race survived and, by amalgamation with the invaders, it continues to propagate, and to rise in the scale of humanity.

The English colonists found different conditions waiting them when they landed on the northern coasts of America, where the Indian tribes were neither gentle nor submissive. Two absolutely alien and hostile races faced one another, of which the higher professed small concern for the amelioration of the lower, while amalgamation was excluded by the mutual pride of race and the instinctive enmity that divided them. There was no enslaving of Indians, and the torturing was done entirely by the savages, but, while the English method spared the individual Indian the suffering his defenceless brother in the south had to endure, the aboriginal races have everywhere receded before the relentless advance of civilisation. The battle between the civilised and savage peoples has been uncompromising; the [pg xii] stronger of the Indian nations have gone down, fighting, while the remnants of such tribes as survive remain herded on the ever-encroaching frontiers of a civilisation in which a tolerable place has been but tardily provided for them. We cannot escape the conclusion that our treatment of the races we have displaced and exterminated has been as systematically and remorselessly destructive as was the spasmodic and ofttimes sportive cruelty operated by the Spaniards. The Spanish national conscience recognised the obligation of civilising and Christianising the Indians, a task which Spaniards finally accomplished. The Spanish sovereigns were honestly desirous of protecting their new subjects, and the injustice inflicted on the latter was done in defiance of the laws they enacted, as well as of public opinion in Spain, which condemned it as severely as could the most advanced humanitarian sentiment of our own times.

Las Casas voiced this condemnation and organised a masterly campaign of education on the subject of the proper method of dealing with the Indians. He suffered and endured for their sakes, while the men whose selfish and inhuman undertakings he thwarted poured the vilest abuse and calumny upon him. Nature had mercifully endowed him with no sensitiveness save for the sufferings of the oppressed, and he was as much a born fighter as the fiercest conqueror who ever landed in Spanish America. He waged a moral battle, animated by only the noblest motives, and in his damning arraignment of his countrymen, he eschewed personalities and, with [pg xiii] a charity as rare as it was becoming to his sacerdotal character, he occupied himself exclusively with the principles at stake, leaving the punishment of the criminals to the final justice of God.

The records of the earliest peoples of whom history preserves knowledge—Chaldeans, Egyptians, Phenicians, and Arabians—show that slavery has existed the remotest antiquity. Slavery was the common fate of prisoners of war in the time of Homer; Alexander sold the inhabitants of Thebes, and the Spartans reduced the entire population of Helos to servitude, so that Helot came to be synonymous with slave, while one of the laws inscribed on the Twelve Tables of Rome gave a creditor the right to sell an insolvent debtor into slavery to satisfy his claim. Wealthy Romans frequently possessed slaves, over whose lives and fortunes the owners were absolute masters.

Christianity first taught the unity and equality of mankind; salvation was for bond and free, for Jew and Gentile; the immortality of each human soul was affirmed; each man's body was defined of the Holy Ghost and a new dignity was conferred by these novel doctrines on universal mankind, which the lowly shared equally with the mighty. The Christian conception of liberty and equality however, referred more to the moral than to the material order. “The truth shall make you free.” It was not subversive of existing mundane conditions, but taught the duty of rendering Caesar his due, and of the servant being subject to his lord, the woman to her husband, [pg xiv] and children to their parents. The early Christians too sincerely despised the prizes of this world—including the greatest of all, liberty—to struggle for possession of any of them; unresponsive to the lure of earthly honours and treasures, they fixed their desires on things eternal. Slavery continued to coexist with Christianity: children were sold publicly in the markets of Bristol during the reign of King Alfred, and the villeins were bound to the glebe, changing masters with the transfer of the property from one proprietor to another. The laws of Richard III. and of Edward VI. dealt severely, not only with slaves, but with all deserters, runaway apprentices, and other recalcitrant dependents, who were reduced to partial or perpetual slavery for the most trivial offences. The condition of these various categories of bondmen, however, was more one of serfage and vassalage, the ancient system of slavery that had culminated in the Roman Empire having been modified by the mild doctrines of Christianity and the gradual spread of the new civilisation.

From the discoveries along the west coast of Africa, made by the Portuguese in the first half of the fifteenth century, may be dated the revival of the trade in slaves for purely commercial purposes. Portugal and southern Spain were thenceforward regularly supplied with cargoes of negroes, numbering between seven and eight hundred yearly. The promoter of these expeditions was Prince Henry of Portugal, third son of John I. and Philippa, daughter of John Gaunt, though in [pg xv] justice to that amiable and learned prince, it must be borne in mind that the capture and sale of negroes was merely incidental to explorations the unary purpose of which was purely scientific. Prince Henry held that the negroes thus captured into his dominions were amply compensated for the loss of such uncertain liberty as they enjoyed, by receiving the light of Christian teaching. It seems evident that most of them merely changed masters and probably gained by the exchange, for they were born subjects of barbarous rulers, in lands where the traffic in slaves was active. Many were obtained from the Arabs and Moors, who already held them in bondage and, without minimising the sufferings inseparable from all slave-trade, we may not unreasonably assume that those who reached Portugal and Spain were the least unfortunate of all their kind.

Las Casas, being a native of Andalusia, was familiar with this slave-trade, for Seville was well provided with domestic slaves, whose lot was not a particularly hard one. So much a matter of course was the presence of these negroes in Spain, that he never admits he had never duly considered their condition or the matter of their capture and sale. It thus fell, as will be later described, that he assented to the demands of the Spanish colonists in the Indies for permission to import Africans from Spain to take the place of the rapidly perishing Indians. In the recommendation of this measure, several later historians pretended to discover the origin of negro slavery in America, despite the authenticated fact [pg xvi] that sixteen years before Las Casas advised the importation of negroes into the Indies, the slave-trade had been begun; nor is it unlikely that other negroes had been brought to America by their Spanish owners at a still earlier date. Although the original intention had been to import only Christian negroes, this provision of the law had been easily and persistently evaded, under the leniency and indifference of the authorities, who connived at such profitable violation. It was contended that the labour problem in the colonies admitted of no other solution; the inefficient Indians were rapidly disappearing, of white labour there was none, and, to respond to the demand for labourers, the Dominican Order, in 1510, sanctioned the importation of negroes direct from Africa, still maintaining the proviso that all who were Jews or Mahometans should be excluded.

Ovando had reported the Indians as so naturally indolent that no wages could induce them to work. He represented them as flying from contact with the Spaniards, leaving Queen Isabella to suppose that their avoidance was due to a natural antipathy to white men. The Queen, in her zeal to fulfil the conditions imposed on her conscience by the papal bull of donation, was easily tricked by the representations of the Governor, coinciding as they did with those of other advisers of influence and high station, into assenting to the enforced labour of the Indians.

Her reason is explicitly stated to be “because we desire that the Indians should be converted to our holy catholic faith and should learn doctrine.” [pg xvii] For this motive, and with many restrictions as to the period of work and the kinds of labour to be performed by the natives, the gentle treatment to be shown them, and the wages to be paid them, the royal order was finally issued. It is evident that the misinformed and deluded sovereign regarded the labour of the Indians almost as a pretext for bringing them into contact with the Spaniards, solely for their own spiritual and moral advantage.

The discovery of America, following as it did so closely upon the development of the negro slave traffic, had given great impetus to it and, during the three succeeding centuries, Portuguese, Italians, Spaniards, English, and Dutch quickly became close rivals for an ignominious primacy in the most heinous of crimes. The highest figures I have found, assign to England one hundred and thirty vessels engaged in the trade, and forty-two thousand negroes landed in the Americas during the year 1786 from English ships. The annals of slavery are so uniformly black, that among all the nations there is not found one guiltless, to cast the first stone. More than their due proportion of obloquy has been visited upon the Spaniards for their part in the extension of slavery and for the offences against justice and humanity committed in the New World, almost as though they alone deserved the pillory. Consideration of the facts here briefly touched upon should serve to restrain and temper the condemnation that irreflection has too often allowed us to heap exclusively upon them for their share in these great iniquities. If they were pitiless [pg xviii] towards individuals, we have shown ourselves merciless towards the race; as a nation, they recognised moral duties and responsibilities towards Indian peoples which our forefathers ignored or repudiated; the failure of the benevolent laws enacted by Spanish sovereigns was chiefly due to the avarice and brutality of individuals, who were able to elude both the provisions of the law and the punishment their crimes merited. On the other hand, Las Casas thrilled two worlds with his denunciations of crimes which our own enlightened country continued for three centuries to protect. His apostolate was prompted, not by the horrors he witnessed nor by merely emotional sympathy, but by meditation on the fundamental principles of justice. The Scripture texts that startled him from the moral lethargy in which he had lived during eight years, revealed to him the blasphemy involved in the performance of acts of formal piety and works of benevolence, by men who degraded God's image in their fellow-men and sacrificed hecatombs of human victims to gratify their greed for riches.

From the hour of his awakening, we follow him during sixty years of ceaseless activity such as few men have ever displayed. His vehemence tormented his adversaries beyond endurance, and they charged him with stirring up dissensions and strife in the colonies, ruining trade, discouraging emigration to the Indies, and, by his importunate and reckless propaganda, with inciting the Indians to rebellion. Granting that some abuses existed, they argued that his methods for redressing them were [pg xix] more pernicious than the evils themselves; prudent measures should be employed, not the radical and precipitate method of the fanatical friar, and time would gradually do the rest. Men who argued such as the Bishop of Burgos and Lope Conchillos, were large holders of encomienda properties, who objected to having their sources of income disturbed. Las Casas penetrated the flimsy disguise they sought to throw over their real purpose, to smother the truth the better to consolidate and extend their interests, and realising that his only hope of success lay in keeping the subject always to the front, he pursued his inexorable course of teaching, writing, journeying to America to impeach judges and excommunicate refractory colonists, and thence back again to Spain to publish his accusations broadcast and petition redress from the King and his Councils.

The most respectable of his contemporary opponents in the New World was Toribio de Benevente, under his popular Indian name of Motolinia. In 1555, Motolinia wrote a letter to in which he dealt severely with the accusations of Las Casas, whom he described as a restless, turbulent man, who wandered from one colony to another, provoking disturbances and scandals. He confined himself to a general denial of the alleged outrages, without attempting to refute them by presenting proofs of their falsity, while his indignation was prompted by his patriotism. He was shocked that a Spaniard should publish such accusations against his own countrymen; [pg xx] things which would be read by foreigners and even by Indians, and thus bring reproach on the Spanish national honour. He expressed astonishment that the Emperor permitted the publication and circulation of such books, taxing their author with wilful exaggeration and false statements, and pointing out that the accusations brought more dishonour on the monarch than on his subjects.

Motolinia was a devout man, whose apostolic life among the Indians won him his dearly loved name, equivalent to “the poor man” or poverello of St. Francis, but with all his virtues, he belonged to the type of churchman that dreads scandal above everything else. The methods of Las Casas scandalised him; it wounded his patriotism that Spaniards should be held up to the execration of Christendom, and he rightly apprehended that such damaging information, published broadcast, would serve as a formidable weapon in the hands of the adversaries of his church and country. It must also be remembered that he lived in Mexico, where Las Casas admits that the condition of the Indians was better than in the islands and other parts of the coast country.

The Bishop of Burgos and Lope Conchillos will be seen to be fair exponents of the bureaucratic type of opponents to the reforms Las Casas advocated. The Bishop in particular appears in an unsympathetic light throughout his long administration of American affairs. Of choleric temper, his manners were aggressive and authoritative, and he used his high position to advance his private interests. He [pg xxi] was a disciplinarian, a bureaucrat averse to novelties and hostile to enthusiasms. He anticipated Talleyrand's maxim “Sûrtout pas de zole,” and to be nagged at by a meddlesome friar was intolerable to him. Such men were probably no more consciously inhuman than many otherwise irreproachable people of all times, who complacently pocket dividends from deadly industries, without a thought to the obscure producers of their wealth or to the conditions of moral and physical degradation amidst which their brief lives are spent.

The most formidable of all the adversaries of Las Casas was Gines de Sepulveda. A man of acute intellect, vast learning, and superlative eloquence, this practiced debater stood for theocracy and despotism, defending the papal and royal claims to jurisdiction over the New World. In striving to establish a dual tyranny over the souls and bodies of its inhabitants, he concerned himself not at all with the human aspect of the question nor did he even pretend to controvert the facts with which his opponent met him. He was exclusively engaged in upholding the abstract right of the Pope and the Spanish sovereigns to exercise spiritual and temporal jurisdiction over heathen, as well as Catholic peoples. To impugn this principle was, according to Sepulveda, to strike at the very foundations of Christendom; that a few thousands of pagans, more or less, suffered and perished, was of small importance, compared with the maintenance of this elemental principal. First conquer and then convert, was [pg xxii] his maxim. His thesis constitutes the very negation of Christianity.

Juan Gines de Sepúlveda

From the engraving by J. Barcelon, after the drawing of J. Maca.

Las Casas repeatedly challenged his opponents to refute his allegations or to contradict his facts and, in a letter to Carranza de Miranda in 1556, he wrote:

“It is moreover deplorable that, after having denounced this destruction of peoples to our sovereigns and their councils a thousand times during forty years, nobody has yet dreamed of proving the contrary and, after having done so, of punishing me by the shame of a retraction. The royal archives are filled with records of trials, reports, denunciations, and a quantity of other proofs of the assassinations…There exists also positive evidence of the immense population of Hispaniola—greater than that of all Spain—and of the islands of Cuba, Jamaica, and more than forty other islands, where neither animals nor vegetation survive. These countries are larger than the space that separates us from Persia, and the terra-firma is twice as considerable…I defy any living man, if he be not a fool, to dare deny what I allege, and to prove the contrary.”

His enemies were devoid of scruples, and unsparingly used every means to nullify his influence and destroy his credit. He was ridiculed as a madman—a monomaniac on the subject of Indians and their rights; his plainly stated facts were branded as exaggerations, though nobody accepted his challenge to contradict them. Such tactics alternated with others, for he was also described as a heretic, as disloyal and unpatriotic, seeking to impeach the validity of Spanish sovereignty in [pg xxiii] the Indies and to bring ruin on the national interests.

The missionary period of the life of Las Casas in America ended with his return to Spain in 1549 and the resignation of his episcopal see that followed in 1552. From that time may be dated the third and last period of his life, which was marked by his literary activity, for, though he never again visited America, his vigilance and energy in defending the interests of the Indians underwent no diminution. His writings were extraordinarily luminous; and all he wrote treated of but one subject. He himself declared that his sole reason for writing more than two thousand pages in Latin was to proclaim the truth concerning Indians, who were defamed by being represented as devoid of human understanding and brutes. This defamation of an entire race outraged his sense of justice, and the very excesses of the colonists provoked the reaction that was destined to ultimately check them.

Of all his numerous works the two that are of great and permanent interest to students of American history, the Historia General and the Historia Apologetica de las Indias, were originally designed to form a single work. The writer informs us he began this work in 1527 while he resided in the Dominican monastery near Puerto de Plata.

Fabié writes that his examination of the original manuscripts of the two works preserved in the library of the Spanish Academy of History in Madrid, shows that the first chapter of the Apologetica [pg xxiv] was originally the fifty-eighth of the Historia General. Prescott possessed a copy of these manuscripts, which is believed to have been burned in Boston in 1872, and other copies still exist in America in the Congressional and Lenox Libraries, and in the Hubert Howe Bancroft collection.

During his constant journeying to and fro, much of the material Las Casas had collected for the Historia General was lost and when he began to put that work into its actual form—probably in 1552 or 1553—he was obliged to rely on his memory for many of his facts, while others were drawn from the Historia del Almirante, Don Cristobal Colon, written by the son of Christopher Columbus, Fernando.

The first historian who had access to the original manuscript, in spite of the instruction of Las Casas to his executors to withhold them from publication for a period of forty years after his death, was Herrera, who dipped plenis manibus into their contents, incorporating entire chapters in his own work published in 1601. His book obtained a wide circulation despite the fact that it was prohibited in Spain.

It was not until 1875-1876 that a complete edition of the Historia General and the Apologetica was printed in Spanish. This work was edited in five volumes by the Marques de la Fuensanta and Señor José Sancho Rayon, and was issued by the Royal Academy of History in Madrid. A Mexican edition of the Historia General in two volumes, but without the Apologetica, appeared in 1878. [pg xxv] The Historia Apologetica treats of the natural history, the climate, the flora, fauna, and various products of the Indies, as well as of the different races inhabiting the several countries; their character, costumes, habits, and forms of government. Though its purpose bore less directly upon the injustices under which the natives suffered, it was none the less educational, the author's purpose being to put before his countrymen a minute and accurate description of the New World and its inhabitants that should vindicate the latter's right to equitable treatment at the hands of their conquerors. Misrepresented and defamed, as he maintained the Indians were, by the mendacious reports sent to Spain, Las Casas composed this interesting apology as one part of his scheme of defence. As a monument to his vast erudition, his powers of observation, and his talents as a writer, the Apologetica is perhaps the most remarkable of all his compositions.

I append to this present volume an English translation of the most celebrated of all the writings of Las Casas; that is, of the short treatise published in 1552 in Seville under the title of Brevissima Relacion de la Destruycion de las Indias, and which recited in brief form his accusations against the conquerors and his descriptions of the cruelties that formed the groundwork of all his writings.

This was the first of nine tracts, all treating different aspects of the same subject. The full titles of these little books, of which a complete set is now extremely valuable, may be found in Henry [pg xxvi] Harrisse, Notes on Columbus, pp. 18-24; also in Brunet's Manuel, the Carter-Brown Catalogue, and other bibliographical works.

The first quarto gothic edition, printed by Trujillo in Seville in 1552, entitled Las Obras Brevissima Relacion de la Destruycion de las Indias Occidentales por los Españoles, contains seven tracts. The second edition, in Barcelona, 1646, bore the title Las Obras de B. de Las Casas, and contains the first five tracts.

The Brevissima Relacion was quickly translated into most of the languages of Europe. A French version, published in Antwerp in 1579, was entitled Tyrannies et Cruautés des Espagnols, par Jacques de Miggrode. Le Miroir de la tyrannie Espagnole, illustrated by seventeen horribly realistic engravings by De Bry, contains extracts from several of the nine treatises, composed into one work, issued in Amsterdam in 1620. Other editions followed in Paris in 1635, in Lyons in 1642, and again two others in Paris in 1697 and 1701: these latter were translated and edited by the Abbé de Bellegarde.

The Italian translation, made by Giacomo Castellani, followed closely the original text, by which it was accompanied; editions were printed in Venice in 1626, 1630, and 1643, bearing the title Istoria o Brevissima Relatione della Distruttione dell' Indie Occidentali. Three different Latin versions were published as follows: Narratio regionum Indicarum per Hispanos quosdam devastatarum Verissima, per B. Casaum, Anno 1582; Hispanice, anno vero hoc Lating excusa, Francofurti, 1597; Regionum Indicarum Hispanos olim devastatarum accuratissima descriptio. Editio nova, correctior…Heidelbergae 1664. [pg xxvii] Despite the fact that Las Casas was the first and most vehement in denouncing the Spanish conquerors as bad patriots and worse Christians, whose acts outraged religion and disgraced Spain, his evidence against his countrymen was diligently spread by all enemies of his country, especially in England and the Netherlands, while Protestant controversialists quoted him against popery, and in the conduct of the conquerors the evidences of the Catholic depravity.

The earliest English edition was printed in 1583 under the title of The Spanish Colonie or Briefe Chronicle of the Acts and Gestes of the Spaniardes in the West Indies, called the Newe Worlde, for a space of XL Yeares.

John Phillips, who was a nephew of Milton, dedicated another version, called The Tears of the Indians, to Oliver Cromwell.

Other English editions, bearing different names, appeared in 1614, 1656, and 1689. This last volume bore a truly startling title: Casas's horrid Massacres, Butcheries and Cruelties that Hell and Malice could invent, committed by the Spaniards in the West Indies. It doubtless had a large sale.

Ten years later another edition was printed in London: An Account of the Voyages and Discoveries made by the Spaniards in America, containing the exact Relation hitherto published of their unparalleled cruelties on the Indians in the Destruction of about Forty Millions of People.

[pg xxviii] The Netherlands being in revolt, both against the Catholic religion and the Spanish government, it is not surprising to find that, in addition to the French editions published in Amsterdam and Antwerp, no less than six different versions were circulated in the Flemish and Dutch vernaculars, as follows: Seer cort Verhael van de destructie van d'Indien, etc., Bruselas, 1578. Spieghel der Spaenscher tyrannye, in West Indien, etc., Amstelredam, 1596. Another edition of the same followed in the same year and another in 1607. Den Spieghel van de Spaenscher Tyrannie, etc., Amstelredam, 1609. Second edition of the same work in 1621.

A German translation entitled Umständige Wahrhafftige Beschreibung der Indianischen Ländern, etc., was published at Frankfurt-am-Main, in 1645.

It seems hardly necessary, otherwise than as a matter of quaint chronicle, to notice the fantastic attempt of the Neapolitan writer, Roselli, to prove that the Brevissima Relacion was not written by Las Casas, but was composed years later by an unknown Frenchman. This suggestion was too agreeable to Spanish susceptibilities to lack approval in Spain when it was first advanced, but it has since been consigned by general consent to the limbo of fanciful inventions.

The limits of the present volume exclude the possibility of dealing adequately with a life so fertile in effort, so rich in achievement, as that of Las Casas, and I have confined myself to composing, [pg xxix] from an immense mass of material, a brief narrative of the acts and events that seem to best illlustrate his character and to establish his claim to a foremost place among the great moral heroes of the world.

I have drawn largely upon his own works, and by frequent and ample quotations from his speeches I have sought to reveal my hero more intimitely to my readers. In reluctantly quitting this field of profitable research, I confidently promise myself the satisfaction of one day seeing literature enriched by an abler presentation of this great theme than I have felt myself prepared to undertake.

FRANCIS A. MACNUTT.

SCHLOSS RATZÖTZ, TIROL,
June, 1908.

AUTHORITIES CONSULTED

Principal authorities consulted in the preparation of this work:

Contents

• [Preface]
• [AUTHORITIES CONSULTED]
• [CHAPTER I. - FAMILY OF LAS CASAS. EDUCATION OF BARTHOLOMEW. HIS FIRST VOYAGE TO AMERICA]
• [CHAPTER II. - THE DISCOVERIES OF COLUMBUS. CHARACTER OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS. THE BEGINNINGS OF SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE-TRADE]
• [CHAPTER III. - THE COLONY OF HISPANIOLA. ARRIVAL OF LAS CASAS. CONDITION OF THE COLONISTS]
• [CHAPTER IV. - THE DOMINICANS IN HISPANIOLA. THE ORDINATION OF LAS CASAS. THE CONQUEST OF CUBA.]
• [CHAPTER V. - THE SERMONS OF FRAY ANTONIO DE MONTESINOS. THE AWAKENING OF LAS CASAS. PEDRO DE LA RENTERIA]
• [CHAPTER VI. - LAS CASAS RETURNS TO SPAIN. NEGOTIATIONS. CARDINAL XIMENEZ DE CISNEROS. THE JERONYMITE COMMISSIONERS]
• [CHAPTER VII. - LAS CASAS AND CHARLES V. THE GRAND CHANCELLOR. NEGRO SLAVERY. EVENTS AT COURT.]
• [CHAPTER VIII. - MONSIEUR DE LAXAO. COLONISATION PROJECTS. RECRUITING EMIGRANTS.]
• [CHAPTER IX. - KNIGHTS OF THE GOLDEN SPUR. THE COURT PREACHERS. FURTHER CONTROVERSIES]
• [CHAPTER X. - THE BISHOP OF DARIEN. DEBATE WITH LAS CASAS. DISAGREEMENT WITH DIEGO COLUMBUS]
• [CHAPTER XI. - ROYAL GRANT TO LAS CASAS. THE PEARL COAST. LAS CASAS IN HISPANIOLA. FORMATION OF A COMPANY.]
• [CHAPTER XII. - THE IDEAL COLONY. FATE OF THE COLONISTS. FAILURE OF THE ENTERPRISE]
• [CHAPTER XIII. - PROFESSION OF LAS CASAS. THE CACIQUE ENRIQUE. JOURNEYS OF LAS CASAS. A PEACEFUL VICTORY]
• [CHAPTER XIV. - THE LAND OF WAR. BULL OF PAUL III. LAS CASAS IN SPAIN. THE NEW LAWS]
• [CHAPTER XV. - THE BISHOPRICS OFFERED TO LAS CASAS. HIS CONSECRATION. HIS DEPARTURE]
• [CHAPTER XVI. - LETTER TO PHILIP II. VOYAGE TO AMERICA. FEELING IN THE COLONIES. ARRIVAL IN CHIAPA]
• [CHAPTER XVII. - RECEPTION OF LAS CASAS IN HIS DIOCESE. EVENTS IN CIUDAD REAL. THE INDIANS OF CHIAPA]
• [CHAPTER XVIII. - LAS CASAS REVISITS THE LAND OF WAR. AUDIENCIA OF THE CONFINES. EVENTS AT CIUDAD REAL. LAS CASAS RETURNS]
• [CHAPTER XIX. - OPPOSITION TO LAS CASAS. HE LEAVES CIUDAD REAL. THE MEXICAN SYNOD]
• [CHAPTER XX. - LAS CASAS ARRIVES AT VALLADOLID. THE THIRTY PROPOSITIONS. DEBATE WITH GINES DE SEPULVEDA]
• [CHAPTER XXI. - SAN GREGORIO DE VALLADOLID. LAST LABOURS. THE DEATH OF LAS CASAS]
• [APPENDIX I. - THE BREVISSIMA RELACION]
• [APPENDIX II. - THE BULL SUBLIMIS DEUS]
• [APPENDIX III. - ROYAL ORDINANCES PROVIDING FOR THE DEPARTURE OF LAS CASAS FROM SPAIN AND FOR HIS RECEPTION IN THE INDIES]

Illustrations

• [Fray Bartholomew de Las Casas]
• [Juan Gines de Sepúlveda]
• [Christopher Columbus]
• [Cardinal Ximenez de Cisneros]
• [Charles V.]
• [Paul III.]
• [Philip II.]
• [Scenes of Las Casas's Labours]
• [Holograph of Las Casas Giving Directions for the Publication of his Work.]

CHAPTER I. - FAMILY OF LAS CASAS. EDUCATION OF BARTHOLOMEW. HIS FIRST VOYAGE TO AMERICA

The Spanish wars against the Moors, no less than the Crusades against the Moslems in the Holy Land, enlisted under the Christian standard the chivalry of Europe, and during the victorious campaign of the King, St. Ferdinand, knights from France, Germany, Italy, and Flanders swelled the ranks of the Spanish forces in Andalusia. Amongst these foreign noblemen were two French gentlemen called Casaus, who claimed descent from Guillen, Viscount of Limoges, one of whom was killed during the siege of Seville. The city was taken in 1252, and the surviving Casaus shared in the apportionment of its spoils, and founded there a family, whose descendants were destined to become numerous and illustrious. The name Casaus assumed with time the more Spanish form of Casas, though it continued to be spelled in both ways for several centuries, and Bartholomew de [pg 2] Las Casas himself used both spellings indifferently, especially during the earlier years of his life.

This family ranked among the nobility of Seville and mention is found of the confirmation by Alfonso XI. of Guillen de Las Casas in the office of regidor of the city in 1318. This same Guillen became Alcalde Mayor of Seville, and when he died his body was buried in one of the chapels of the cathedral. His son, Alfonso, is stated in the chronicles of Don Juan II. (1409) to have been appointed by the Infante, Don Fernando, to the lieutenancy of Castillo de Priego, “because he was a valiant man who could hold it well.” The names of Guillen and Bartolomé are of frequent recurrence in the annals of the family, whose members constantly occupied the honourable offices of judge, alcalde mayor, and captain, using the title of Don and intermarrying with the most illustrious families of Andalusia.

According to indications equivalent to proofs in the absence of any positive record, from such respectable forebears descended Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, who was born in Seville, in 1474. He himself speaks of Seville as his native city, and the popular tradition, which fixes the ancient suburb of Triana as his birthplace, was recognised in 1859 by the municipality of Seville assigning the name of Calle del Procurador to one of the streets of Triana, in honour of the Bishop, whose proudest title was Protector (or Procurador) General of the Indians.

In his voluminous writings, which teem with [pg 3] information about the men and events of his times, the references to his own family history are infrequent and imperfect, so that from his own records of his life, very little is to be gleaned concerning it. His father's name is variously given by different writers as Alonso, Antonio, and Francisco, while he himself states[1] that he was named Pedro, thus contradicting all his biographers from Remesal, who was the first, down to Don Antonio Fabié, whose admirable Vida y Escritos, published in 1879, was the last important contribution on this interesting subject. Zuñiga, in his Discurso de Ortices, assumed that Alonso de las Casas and Beatriz Maraver y Cegarra of Triana were the parents of Fray Bartholomew, but in the Anales de Sevilla, a later work, Francisco is given as the father's name. Neither Llorente nor Gutierrez, who has followed him, gives any authority for his affirmation that the father's name was Antonio, while Quintana and Fabié accept Remesal[2] and name the father Francisco.

The genealogy of the family furnished me by the dean of the Royal College of Heralds in Madrid shows the descent of Fray Bartholomew through his frather, named Francisco, from Alonso de Las Casas, “Señor de Gomez Cardeña, Veinticuatro de Seville, la Villa de Priego” in 1409, and his wife, Maria Fernandez Marmolejo. The children of this couple were Guillen, Isabel, Juan, Pedro, and Francisco, who is described in the genealogy as the father of Bartholomew. Pedro, whom Fray Bartholomew mentions as his father, is described as Dean of Seville, in which case his ecclesiastical state would exclude matrimony and legitimate issue.

Fabié affirms that in several passages of his writings Fray Bartholomew confirms the assertion of those authors who have designated his father as Francisco, but he does not indicate the whereabouts of these passages nor have I, in my unaided researches, succeeded in finding them. The descendants of the original founder of the family had multiplied and, by the close of the fifteenth century, were divided into many prolific branches, hence the difficulty of identifying the unimportant father of an extraordinarily important son is not wonderful. Las Casas himself may be reasonably assumed to have known his own father's name and we must conclude, in view of his assertion, that all other authorities, including the Royal College of Heralds, are wrong, and that not Francisco, but a Pedro de Las Casas, who was not however Dean of Seville, was the immediate progenitor of the illustrious Bishop of Chiapa.

The scarcity of positive information concerning his immediate family is equalled by the paucity of trustworthy details of the first twenty-eight years of Fray Bartholomew's life. He completed his studies and obtained the degree of licentiate in law at the University of Salamanca, the most celebrated in Spain, and which ranked high amongst the great seats of learning in Europe at that time. Jurisprudence was divided into the branches of Roman law as interpreted by the school of Bologna, and of canon law, the principles of which were interwoven with the common practice, whose severer tendencies they somewhat tempered. The precepts of Aristotle as interpreted by scholastics formed the basis of philosophical studies, and the Thomistic doctrine was taught by professors of the Dominican Order.

It has been judiciously observed that in that age of growing absolutism, both spiritual and temporal, only a skilful Thomistic scholar could have discerned the limits to the legitimate exercise of the royal authority which Las Casas so clearly perceived and so boldly defined in the very presence of the autocratic sovereigns of Spain.

Grammar, ethics, physics, and the branches of learning necessary to complete the education of a young man of his social position and mental capacity, were doubtless embraced in his course of study. His use of the Latin tongue was fluent, though his style has been criticised as cumbersome and wanting in elegance; certainly his writings abound in diffuse generalities, a multiplicity of repetitions, and a vast array of citations from Scripture and the classics which render his unexpurgated manuscripts wearisome enough to modern readers. He shared the defects of most of his contemporaries in this respect and followed the fashion common in his times. The training he received in the Spanish schools and the University, and which he [pg 6] afterwards perfected—as will be seen—by the studies he resumed after his profession in the Dominican Order, rendered formidable as an advocate one whom nature had endowed with a rare gift of eloquence, a passionate temperament, and a robust physical constitution which seems to have been immune to the ills and fatigues that assail less favoured mortals. Gines de Sepulveda, whose forensic encounter with Las Casas was one of the academic events of the sixteenth century, described his adversary in a letter to a friend as “most subtle, most vigilant, and most fluent, compared with whom Homer's Ulysses was inert and stammering.”

The father of Las Casas accompanied Christopher Columbus on his second voyage to America and acquired profitable interests in the island of Hispaniola. He returned to Spain in 1496, bringing with him an Indian lad whom he sent as a present to his son, who was then a student at Salamanca.

Bartholomew's ownership of this Indian boy was brief, owing to Queen Isabella's intense displeasure when she learned that Columbus had brought, and permitted to be brought back Indians, as slaves. Nothing sufficed to appease the Queen's indignation that the Admiral should thus dispose of her new subjects without her leave and authority, and a royal order was published from Granada, where the court then was, commanding, under pain of death, that all those who had brought Indians to Spain as slaves should send them back to America. When Francisco de Bobadilla was sent in 1500 to Hispaniola to supersede Columbus as Governor, all [pg 7] these Indians returned with him and Las Casas himself states, “Mine was of the number.”

Thus strangely is the future apostle of freedom first introduced to our notice in the guise of a slave-holder, constrained by a royal edict to surrender his human property.

Upon his return from Salamanca to Seville Las Casas found himself, through his father's relations with Columbus, in daily intercourse with the men whose voyages and discoveries were thrilling Europe. Amongst these navigators was his uncle Francisco de Peñulosa, and it was but natural that his eager temperament should catch the adventurous fever which prevailed throughout Spain and notably in Andalusia. Salucchi, in his Latin treatise on Hebrew coins, says that Las Casas accompanied his father on the second voyage of Columbus in 1493 and brought back the Indian slave himself. Llorente, who has been followed by several modern writers, asserts that his first voyage to America was made with Columbus on his third expedition. He deduces this conclusion from a statement at the close of the Thirty Propositions which Las Casas addressed to the Royal India Council in 1547 and from a sentence in the First Motive of his Ninth Remedy which he presented to the Emperor in 1542. The first of these passages reads “Thus, most illustrious Sirs, have I thought since forty-nine years, during which I have witnessed evil-doings in America and since thirty-four years that I have studied law.” The passage merely refers to Columbus having [pg 8] permitted certain Spaniards who had rendered important services during his voyage to bring back each an Indian and concludes, “And I obtained one.”

Christopher Columbus

From an engraving by P. Mercuri after a contemporary portrait

The deductions of both these learned writers would seem to require more positive corroboration. Not only are they destitute of confirmation, but in the second chapter of his Historia General, Las Casas gives the names of many persons who did accompany Columbus in 1493, describing several incidents connected with that expedition and concluding by saying that he heard all these things “from my father who returned [to America] with him, when he went to found settlements in Hispaniola.” In the preface which he wrote in 1552 to accompany the publication of his history, Destruycion de las Indias, which had been composed ten years earlier, he speaks of his experience extending over more than fifty years, but in his Historia General, which is almost a diary of the first half of his life in America, the first voyage that he mentions is that of Don Nicholas de Ovando in 1502. Las Casas was most careful in describing every particular of the events in which he had a part and he nowhere mentions that he accompanied Columbus on any voyage, whereas he dwells at length upon the expedition of Ovando, and in the third chapter of the second book of the Historia General he affirms, “I heard this with my own ears for I went on that voyage with the Comendador de Lares [Ovando] to this island.” The phrase is characteristic, for the positive note is rarely absent [pg 9] in the affirmations of Las Casas, nor is it admissible that his experiences on any voyage previous to that of Ovando should find no place in the exact and scrupulous narrative he has left us of his relations with America and his beloved Indians.

In consequence of the persistent and bitter complaints of Columbus against the second Governor of Hispaniola, whose appointment violated the rights secured to the Admiral and his successors by the capitulations of Granada, the catholic sovereign decided to recall Francisco de Bobadilla, whose administration gave cause for dissatisfaction in other respects, and to send Don Nicholas de Ovando to replace him. Ovando was at that time Comendador de Lares and was later raised to the supreme commandership of the Order of Calatrava. He is described as a most prudent man, worthy to govern any number of people, but not Indians; man in word and deed, an avowed enemy of avarice and covetousness; not wanting in humility, as shown in his habits of life, both public and private, though he maintained the dignity and authority of his position.[3]

The new Governor was endowed with full powers to judge the accusations against his predecessor and to dispose of the nettlesome questions which had provoked the Roldan rebellion.

The preparations for his departure were delayed by many causes; his fleet was the most considerable one that had thus far been organised to sail for America, being composed of thirty-two vessels on [pg 10] which were to sail some two thousand five hundred persons, many of whom were knights and noblemen. Twelve Franciscan friars under the direction of their leader, Fray Alonso del Espinal, formed part of the company.

It was this brilliant expedition that Fernando Cortes intended to join when he was prevented by injuries incurred while engaged in an amorous adventure which led him over garden walls into risky situations where he ended with broken bones, and was consequently left behind. The fleet sailed from San Lucar de Barrameda on February 13, 1502, which according to Las Casas was the first Sunday in lent of that year.[4]

The usual course, by way of the Canary Islands, was followed, but after eight days at sea, a violent tempest wrecked one ship, La Rabida, with one hundred and twenty people on board, and scattered the remainder; some vessels were obliged to throw most of their cargo overboard, but all, after many dangers, gradually found refuge in various ports of the neighbouring islands.

The wreckage of La Rabida, and that of some other vessels which had also foundered while carrying sugar from the islands, drifted back to the Spanish coast and gave rise to the rumour that the entire fleet was lost. This caused such a general sense of affliction that the sovereigns, on receipt of this false report, shut themselves up in the palace at Granada and mourned for eight days.

The vessels which had weathered the tempest [pg 11] united after some delay in the port of the island of Gomera, and being joined there by another, fitted out in the Canaries by people eager to go to America, the fleet was thus brought up to its original complement. The commander divided his squadron in to two sections, the first of which, composed of the fastest vessels, he kept under his command, while the second was placed under command of Antonio de Torres. Ovando's division reached Hispaniola on the fifteenth of April and the second squadron came safely to port some twelve days later. Thus did Bartholomew de Las Casas first land in the New World.

CHAPTER II. - THE DISCOVERIES OF COLUMBUS. CHARACTER OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS. THE BEGINNINGS OF SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE-TRADE

In the ever-memorable month of October, 1492, Christopher Columbus landed on the shores of the New World he had discovered by sailing westward. To this great undertaking Columbus had advanced through a long career during which he had had unusual adventures and experiences in almost every part of the known world. A Genoese by birth, he had studied at Pavia,[5] where he had acquired some knowledge of Latin, and was introduced to the study of those sciences to which his inclinations and his opportunities enabled him later to devote himself. He knew the Atlantic Coast from El Mina in Africa,[6] to England and Iceland,[7] and he had visited the Levant[8]and the islands of the Grecian Archipelago.

Writing of himself to the Catholic sovereigns, he says that he had been a sailor from his earliest youth, and curious to discover the secrets of the [pg 13] world. This same impulse led him to the study of navigation, cosmography, and kindred sciences, and his son Ferdinand states that the book which most influenced his father was the Cosmographia of Cardinal Aliaco in which he read the following passage: Et dicit Aristoteles ut mare parvum est inter finem Hispanicæ a parte Occidentis, et inter principium Indiæ a parte Orientis. Et non loquitur de Hispaniâ citeriori quæ nunc Hispania communiter dicitur sed de Hispaniâ ulteriori quæ nunc Africa dicitur.[9]

The illustrious Florentine, Paolo Toscanelli, definitely encouraged the conviction Columbus had formed from his reading of Marco Polo's descriptions of Cipango, Cathay, and the Grand Khan, that the lands might be reached by sailing west, and there was doubtless little the ancients had written concerning the existence of islands and continents lying beyond the Pillars of Hercules with which he was not acquainted.

The story of his attempts to secure the necessary means and authority for undertaking his great enterprise does not belong to our present subject, but before hearing his own description of what and whom he found in the western hemisphere when first he landed there, it is necessary to consider the arguments by which his friends finally prevailed on the sovereigns of Castile to grant him their patronage. That they did this contrary to the the counsels of the learned cosmographers of the age and in defiance of contemporary common-sense, [pg 14] is in itself a most noteworthy fact which testifies both to the singular qualities of Columbus and to the rare sagacity of the Catholic Queen who, in her momentous decision, acted alone, there being little in the scheme to commend it to the colder temperament of King Ferdinand.

By almost no intellectual effort can we of to-day realise the chimerical stamp which the proposition of Columbus bore, and which served to mark him as an adventurer and a visionary or, to use a forceful Americanism, as a “crank” in the estimation of sensible, practical people. He has himself recorded that he believed he was acting under inspiration and was merely fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah. The council of cosmographers summoned by the Queen's confessor, Fray Hernando de Talavera, to study the project which Columbus, through the exertions of his friends, the Prior of Santa Maria de la Rabida, and Alonso de Quintanilla, treasurer of the royal household, had succeeded in presenting to the sovereigns, decided “that it was vain and impossible, nor did it belong to the majesty of such great Princes to decide anything upon such weak grounds of information.”[10]

Spain was at that time engaged in a costly war against the Moors, who still held Granada; hard pushed as the sovereigns were for money to carry on the necessary military operations, it is not strange that no funds were forthcoming to finance the visionary schemes propounded by an obscure foreigner. After some years of vain striving, [pg 15] Columbus was on the point of quitting the country in despair, when two powerful allies intervened—Cardinal Mendoza, Archbishop of Toledo, and Luis de Santangel, who held the office of Receiver of Revenues of the Crown of Aragon.

It must have argued powerfully in favour of Columbus that he had won to his support, not only several great ecclesiastics and the Duke of Medina Celi, but also two of the most astute financiers of the realm,—Santangel and Quintanilla, men not easily accessible to enthusiasms nor inclined to encourage non-paying investments.

Whatever was the motive that prompted these men to take the project under their protection, the Queen was primarily swayed by religious arguments, which also with Columbus were as powerfully operative as his desire for profit and glory.

The preface of his journal contains a review of of the year 1492, which was signalised by the fall of Granada and the final expulsion, after seven centuries, of the Moors from Spain. He recalls his petition to the Pope, asking that learned Catholic doctors should be sent to instruct the Grand Khan in the true faith, and to convert populous cities that were perishing in Idolatry, to which his Holiness had vouchsafed no answer, after which he continues:

“Your Highnesses, as Catholic Christians and Princes, promoters of the Christian religion, and enemies of the sect of Mahomet and of all idolatries and heresies, thought to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the aforementioned provinces of India to see the said [pg 16] princes, the cities, the countries, their position and everything concerning them and the way that should be adopted to convert them to our Holy Faith.”[11]

This passage reflects the mind and character of Columbus as he is described by Las Casas; for even beyond the glory of penetrating the world's mysteries that so powerfully influenced him, he nurtured dreams of religious propaganda, another crusade to recover the Holy Sepulchre, and the conversion of all the heathen to the faith.

“He fasted with strictest observance on the fasts of the church; he confessed and received communion frequently; he recited the canonical hours like an ecclesiastic or a monk; most inimical to blasphemies and oaths, he was most devoted to Our Lady and to the seraphic Father, St. Francis…most jealous of the Divine honour, eager and desirous for the conversion of these peoples, and that the faith of Jesus Christ should be everywhere spread, and singularly given and devoted to God that he might be made worthy to help in some way to win the Holy Sepulchre.”[12]

Patient, long-suffering, prone to forgive injuries, Columbus was a man of courageous soul and high aspirations, always pervaded with infinite confidence in Divine Providence and never failing in loyalty to the sovereigns whom he served.

Such were the qualities of the man whose great discovery prepared the scene on which Las Casas was to play the noblest part of all; such were the [pg 17] influences which promised to shape his actions in conformity with the intentions of the saintly Queen who sustained him. These influences are seen to be first and always religious; religious in the prevailing conception of a century, when the interpretation of the command “go ye and teach all nations” admitted of no shirking an obligation laid by the Divine command on each Christian, whether priest, king or subject. An infallible Church provided the one ordained channel of divine grace and salvation for mankind, dissent from which meant damnation, and hence into that Church all nations must be gathered.

Bearing these conditions of the age and these convictions which dominated both the Queen and Columbus well in mind, we shall later have occasion to observe the startling contradiction of essential principles of Christianity shown in the acts of the latter in his dealings with the Indians; for he not only prepared the stage Las Casas was to tread, but he likewise provided the tragedy of iniquity to be thereon enacted.

The first soil on which Columbus landed was that of a beautiful island some fifteen leagues in length, fruitful, fresh, and verdant like a fair garden, in the midst of which was a lake of sweet water. The weary eyes of the mariners, strained for weeks to catch a glimpse of the despaired-of land, were refreshed by the sight of this pezzo del cielo, and the landing of Columbus was a scene of picturesque and moving simplicity in which were not wanting the features of martial [pg 18] grandeur and religious solemnity, furnished by steel-clad knights with drawn swords, bearing the royal standard of Castile and the emblem of man's salvation, before which all knelt in a fervour of triumph and thanksgiving. Both as wondering witnesses and interested actors in this memorable drama, there appeared the natives of the island, transfixed in silent awe in the presence of their mysterious guests. Columbus describes them as well-built, with good features and beautiful eyes, but with hair as coarse as a horse's mane; their complexion was yellowish and they had their faces painted. They were entirely naked and neither carried weapons nor understood the use of such things.

“They ought,” he says, “to make faithful and intelligent servants, for I perceive they very quickly repeat all that is said to them and I believe they would very quickly be converted to Christianity as it appeared to me that they had no creed.”

In another passage he writes: “As they showed us such friendship and as I recognised that they were people who would yield themselves better to the Christian faith and be converted more through love than by force, I gave some of them some coloured buttons and some glass beads which they wore around their necks, and many other things of small value, with which they were delighted, and became so attached to us that it was a marvel to behold.”

The natives were not slow to reciprocate these gifts and hastened to offer the best of all they [pg 19] possessed to the Spaniards in return for their trifling presents.

Indeed, since it is better to give than to receive, the Admiral describes the natives of Marien as being of such a generous disposition that they esteemed it the highest honour to be asked to give. What could be more idyllic than his description of the people he found at Rio del Sol in Cuba?—“They are all very gentle, without knowledge of evil, neither killing nor stealing.” Everywhere he touched during his first voyage, he and his men were welcomed as gods descended upon earth, their wants anticipated, and such boundless hospitality showered upon them that Columbus was touched by the gentleness and grace of the natives.

“They are a loving uncovetous people, so docile in all things that I do assure your Highness I believe in all the world there is not a better people or a better country; they love their neighbors as themselves, and they have the sweetest and gentlest way of speaking in the world and always with a smile.”

When it came the turn of Las Casas to describe the Indians in the islands, he wrote:

“All these infinite peoples were created by God the most simple of all others, without malice or duplicity, most obedient and faithful to their rulers, whom they serve; the most humble, patient, loving, peaceful, and docile people, without contentions or tumults; neither factious nor quarrelsome, without hatred, or desire for revenge, more than any other people in the world.”

Such were the accounts of the New World given to the Catholic sovereigns by Columbus on his return from his first voyage, and afterwards by Las Casas in his terrible indictment of his countrymen's destructive invasion of those peaceful realms, peopled by innocent and genial heathen. Had Shakespeare heard this fair report when he put the description of the magic isle in the mouth of the King's counsellor, Gonzalo?

I' the commonwealth I would by contraries

Execute all things; for no kind of traffic

Would I admit; no name of magistrate;

Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,

And use of service, none; contract, succession,

Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;

No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;

No occupation; all men idle, all;

And women too, but innocent and pure;

No sovereignty;

All things in common nature should produce

Without sweat or endeavour; treason, felony,

Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine

Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,

Of it's own kind, all foison, all abundance

To feed my innocent people.[13]

Upon such virgin soil, Columbus felt confident that the gospel seed would produce an abundant harvest and he says:

“I hold it for certain, Most Serene Princes, that by means of devout, religious persons, knowing their language [pg 21] they would all quickly become Christians and thus I hope in Our Lord that your Highnesses will provide for this with much diligence to bring such numerous people into the Church and convert them, as you have destroyed those who would not confess the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; and that after this life (for we are all mortal) you will leave your kingdoms in a very tranquil state, purified from heresy and evil.”

Wonderful and humiliating is it to observe how little these first impressions of the Indians and these elevated Christian aspirations influenced his conduct in dealing with them, once he was master of their destinies.

The declared purposes of the second voyage of 1493 were the colonisation of the newly discovered countries, the conversion of the natives, and the extension of his discoveries. Pope Alexander VI. had conferred the lands thus far discovered and others to be discovered upon the sovereigns of Castile and Leon, with the fullest rights over navigation, and imperial jurisdiction over the western hemisphere. The Bull bestowing these concessions was dated the fourth of May, 1493, in the first year of his pontificate. An imaginary line, drawn from pole to pole and passing one hundred leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, separated the spheres of Spanish and Portuguese exploration, and the Bull expressly laid down as the principal reason for this grant, that the natives would be converted to Christianity.[14]

The conditions imposed by the Pontiff corresponded [pg 22] perfectly to the sincere desires of the Spanish sovereigns, who had, from their first knowledge of the existence of the Indians, displayed the keenest and tenderest zeal to provide for their welfare. They instructed Columbus to deal lovingly with the Indians, to make them generous gifts, and to show them much honour; and if perchance any one should treat them unjustly, the Admiral should punish him severely.[15]

This second expedition was composed of 1500 men, of whom twenty were horsemen; many knights and gentlemen, especially from Seville, and some members of the royal household also went. The number of officials of various grades appointed to exercise problematical functions in the new colony exceeded the necessities of the case and gave promise of the many dissensions and petty conflicts which were not slow in declaring themselves. A priest, Father Buil, and other ecclesiastics were sent to undertake the instruction and conversion of the Indians; in all, seventeen ships left the Bay of Cadiz on September 25, 1493.[16] Upon his arrival at Hispaniola, the Admiral found the little colony he had left there completely exterminated, and learned from his friend the Cacique Guacanagari that, after his departure for Spain, the Spaniards had fallen to quarrelling amongst themselves and had scattered throughout the island, provoking hostilities with the natives and had, in consequence, been killed by a neighbouring chieftain, Caonabó, who also [pg 23] burned the tower the colonists had built. The first report on the state of the new colony of Isabella, which Columbus sent to Spain in January, 1494, was in the form of an instruction to Antonio de Torres, receiver for the colony, whom Las Casas describes as “a brother of the Governor of the Infante Don Juan, a notable person, prudent and efficient for such a post.”[17] In this notable document occurs the first mention of slavery in the New World. The Admiral directs Torres to inform the sovereigns that he has made slaves of some Indians captured the cannibal islands, and has sent them to Spain have them taught Spanish in order that they may later serve as interpreters. The justification he advanced for this measure was that by taking from their surroundings they would be cured of their cannibalism, converted to Christianity, and their souls saved; besides which, if the cannibals were thus converted, the Indians of the neighbouring islands, who were peaceable and lived in fear of them, would conceive a still higher regard for the Spaniards.

This reasoning doubtless commended itself to most people, but the sagacious Queen instantly put her finger upon the flaw in the argument, and on the margin of Columbus's report is written her answer: “This is all very well and so it must be done; but let the Admiral see whether it might not be there arranged to bring them to our Holy Catholic Faith and the same with the Indians of those islands where he is.” [pg 24]

The next suggestion, despite any possible excellence of his motives, was a frank proposal to establish a thriving trade in human flesh as barefaced as could be made by the least scrupulous “blackbirder.” The Admiral, always dwelling upon the spiritual welfare of the cannibal natives, proposed that the more of them that could be captured, the better it would be, and then, mingling temporal advantages to Spaniards with spiritual blessings to the natives, he explained that the quantities of live stock and other necessaries required by the colonists, might be paid for by the sale of slaves sent back to Spain in the ships which would bring these supplies several times a year to the colony. The sovereigns are to be reminded that they may collect duties on this slave-trade, and an early answer is desired in order that the arrangements for the new commerce may be pushed forward.[18]

The Queen's observation on this passage was not as positive as it might have been and, though the proposition was evidently repugnant to her, she merely directed that the matter be suspended for the present until some other way of providing on the spot be found and that the Admiral should report further. Columbus, however, did not wait to receive the royal approval of his slave-trading schemes. During a voyage which resulted in the discovery of Jamaica and other islands, he visited that of San Juan (Puerto Rico) for the purpose of capturing more cannibals, and on his return Hispaniola, where he had left his brother [pg 25]Don Diego in charge as President and Don Pedro Margarite as Captain-General, he found affairs in the worst possible condition owing to the foolish and inconsiderate conduct of the colonists, which had converted the friendly natives into hostile enemies and placed the very existence of the colony in jeopardy. After some hostilities, a degree of tranquillity was established and Columbus laid a tribute upon the entire population of the island which required that each Indian above fourteen years of age who lived in the mining provinces was to pay a little bell filled with gold every three months; the natives of all other provinces were to pay one arroba of cotton. These amounts were so excessive that in 1496 it was found necessary to change the nature of the payment, and, instead of the gold and cotton required from the villages, labour was substituted, the Indians being required to lay out and work the plantations of the colonists in their vicinity. This was the germ of the cruel and oppressive repartimientos and encomiendas which were destined to depopulate the islands and to bring an indelible stigma on the Spanish colonial system in the Indies. In that year, 1496, Bartholomew Columbus sent three hundred natives, who were convicted or accused of killing Spaniards, to Spain to be sold as slaves. Though the Spanish sovereigns admitted a difference in the status of such natives, there is nevertheless a letter of theirs addressed to Bishop Fonseca, who was at the head of Indian affairs, directing him to receive no money from the sale of Indians until theologians and canonists had [pg 26] pronounced upon the question whether they might with a good conscience, permit such Indians to be sold. No positive decision is recorded, but order were given that all Indians taken in acts of flagrant “rebellion” and found guilty should be sent to Spain. There was but one fate awaiting them so that, if not formally approved, the enslaving of Indians, accused of rebellion, was by this edict tolerated.

Another piece of colonial legislation was effected in 1497 by the issue of a royal patent to the Admiral, authorising him to grant parcels of land in the islands to the Spanish colonists; there is no mention in this grant of repartimientos of Indians to work on the lands. The affairs of the colony were not prospering, complaints against the Admiral were numerous, and the situation was much complicated by the open rebellion of the chief justice, Roldan, in which the unfortunate Indians found themselves, whether they would or no, involved on one side or the other and, no matter which way victory went, upon them it fell to pay the costs. Regular raids were organised upon tribes and villages, on the pretext that a chief had not performed the services required in lieu of tribute and had fled with his people to the forests; pursuit followed and all who were captured were considered rebels taken in open fight and were immediately dispatched in the vessels of Columbus's fleet, which had reached Hispaniola in August, 1498, to be sold as slaves in Spain. Still invoking the name of the Holy Trinity, Columbus explained to the sovereigns [pg 27] that he could supply as many slaves as the Spanish market required, estimating, according to his information, that four thousand could be disposed of, the value of whom, together with that of a shipment of logwood, would amount to 40,000,000 maravedis. The consignment mentioned consisted of six hundred slaves, of whom one third was given to the masters of the ships to cover the carrying charges.

In the same letter, Columbus asked that the colonists should be allowed to use Indian labour for a year or two until their affairs should become more settled and prosperous, and so satisfied was he with the equity of this arrangement that he set it at once in operation without waiting for the royal sanction of his plan. After two years of dissensions, Roldan and his rebellious supporters were pacified and Columbus partitioned lands and slaves among them with unstinted generosity. Those of Roldan's adherents who elected to remain in the colony received from the Admiral repartimientos, consisting of a certain number of hillocks of cazabi (the plant from which flour for cassava bread was made), which were placed in charge of a cacique whose people were obliged to till them for the profit of the holder. This was the second stage in the development of repartimientos, viz., the Indians were bound to the land and forced to cultivate it. Fifteen of the Roldan party, however, decided to return to Spain, each of whom received from one to three slaves, whom they took back with them in October, 1499.

The Queen's proclamation issued at Seville, [pg 28] Granada, and elsewhere ordering all holders of slaves given them by Columbus to return them forthwith to Hispaniola under pain of death distinguished, however, between such and the others who had been taken as prisoners of war and sold into slavery. The distinction is a fine one and points to the conclusion that even Queen Isabella admitted that some Indians might, for defined causes, be enslaved, and that her assent was based upon some pronouncement of the canonists and theologians to whom she had submitted the question; but there is nothing to show that the slaves given to Roldan's followers were captured in any different way from the others. This inconsistency, which so sadly weakens the noble character of the royal proclamation and detracts from the merits of the Queen as an enemy of slavery, could hardly have proceeded from her own inclinations but was rather the outcome of some casuistry that constrained her action without convincing her judgment. The Queen doubtless saw with pain and disappointment that, owing to the Admiral's measures and proposals, which were in surprising contradiction with the lofty and pious principles he professed, her own Catholic aspirations for the speedy conversion of the Indians and the pacific extension of Spanish rule were being thwarted. The noise of the controversies in which the sublime unreason of Columbus had fortunately prevailed over the scientific opinions of the age, the interest of the Queen, and all the circumstances of his first voyage had fastened the attention of the Spanish and [pg 29] Portuguese courts upon his expedition, excluding any hope that failure might escape notice. For he had failed in his ultimate purpose. Instead of Cathay, the Grand Khan ready to welcome Christianity and a short road to the wealth of the East, he had found a few semi-tropical islands, producing parrots and cocoanuts chiefly, and inhabited by harmless barbarians living in an idyllic state of poverty and idleness. The enthusiasm aroused by his first voyage subsided and his fame as an explorer was obscured by his incompetency as a governor. He himself never lived to comprehend the real importance of his discovery and he persisted in regarding the islands as the outposts of a great Oriental empire. Having sailed to seek a short route to the ancient East, Columbus was constrained to render his disappointing discovery acceptable by making it profitable and, since the promised gold and rare spices were not forthcoming, only the trade in slaves remained to furnish immediate profits. In July, 1500, Francisco de Bobadilla sailed to supersede Columbus, with full powers from the sovereigns, and had he gone as a messenger of vengeance to chastise the Admiral's moral backsliding, he could not have enacted the rôle more consistently, for, from the moment of his landing, his treatment of Columbus was ruthless, and an amazed world was shortly furnished the humiliating spectacle of the great Admiral, in chains, shipped back to the kingdom he had endowed with a world. Bobadilla's moral, social, and economic administration proved a complete failure and his own excesses contributed [pg 30] to his speedy removal, without his management of the colony having corrected the abuses he was sent out to redress or having relieved the Indians from the bonds of slavery which, in defiance of the sovereign's commands, were being daily riveted more securely upon them.

The justified protests of Columbus found a hearing, and the man who had inflicted a supreme indignity upon him was recalled, Don Nicholas de Ovando being appointed by a royal cedula of September 3, 1501, to succeed him.

CHAPTER III. - THE COLONY OF HISPANIOLA. ARRIVAL OF LAS CASAS. CONDITION OF THE COLONISTS

The arrival of Don Nicholas de Ovando's fleet at Hispaniola was an event of the greatest importance to the colony. The first news that greeted the new arrivals was that of the discovery of a huge nugget of gold, the largest yet found and which, in fact, was never again equalled in size until the rich lodes in California were tapped in 1849, for it weighed thirty-five pounds and was valued at 3600 pesos in the money of that time.

This famous nugget was found eight or nine leagues from the settlement of San Domingo, by an Indian girl, who, while resting from her labours, idly turned up the soil with an instrument she held, and thus brought to light the wonderful treasure. The Governor appropriated it for the King, paying its value to the two owners of the mine. The jubilant Spaniards used the nugget, which was shaped like a broad, flat dish, to serve up a roast sucking-pig at a banquet given in honour of the occasion, saying that no king ever feasted from such a platter. Las Casas remarks that as for the miserable Indian girl who found it, we may without sin suppose that they never gave her so much as a [pg 32] red silk petticoat, and lucky was she indeed if she got even a mouthful of the pig!

The second piece of glad news the colonists communicated was, that owing to a recent uprising of the Indians in a certain province, they had been able to enslave a goodly number of the rebels. Such occasions rejoiced their hearts, over the profits they thus derived from the struggles of the unhappy natives to recover their freedom, and it may likewise without sin be supposed that their ingenuity was not barren in suggesting devices for provoking such lucrative revolts.

In the instructions delivered to Ovando, as well as in the Queen's verbal behests to him before sailing, the sovereigns sought to remedy the abuses under which the Indians suffered. The Queen explicitly laid down the fundamental principle that “all the Indians in Hispaniola are and should be free from servitude; nor should they be molested by any one, but should live as free vassals, governed and protected as are the vassals of Castile.” They were to pay a tribute—all Spanish vassals were taxed—and they were to work in the gold-mines but for their labour they were to receive a daily wage. The Queen's obvious intention was that the government should, in some measure at least, be carried on for the benefit of the Indians it was instituted to govern. The orders describing the measures to be taken for the instruction and conversion of the natives were equally clear and imperative.

Ovando was authorised to permit the importation into Hispaniola of negroes who were born slaves, [pg 33] belonging to Christian owners. [19] They were consequently brought to the colony in such numbers that the Governor soon wrote to Spain, advising that the traffic in African slaves be stopped, as the negroes constantly escaped and took refuge in the forests and mountains, taking with them also many Indians. These negroes were for the most part born in Andalusia of slave parents, who had been brought there by the Portuguese who had carried on the slave-trade since early in the fifteenth century.

The first official action of the new Governor was to institute an inquiry into the administration of his predecessor, Bobadilla, against whose harsh and arbitrary treatment of him, Columbus had filed complaints. The Admiral had meanwhile been received by the sovereigns, and Queen Isabella's compassionate heart had been much grieved by the sad accounts of the indignities put upon him, the confiscation of his properties, the violation of the rights solemnly conferred upon him and his heirs under her signature, and finally the supreme outrage of his deposition and his return to Spain wearing the chains of a common malefactor. Francisco de Bobadilla had far outstripped the limits of the sovereign's intentions as well as those of his own authority and had, by his treatment of Columbus, violated the commonest sentiments of justice and humanity. Ovando made full restitution of the confiscated properties, and the rights and privileges guaranteed to Columbus were once more recognised and made valid. The latter organised [pg 34] his fourth and last expedition to America, which sailed on the ninth of May, 1502, [20] and arrived at Hispaniola after a prosperous voyage, on the twenty-ninth of June. Bobadilla set sail for Spain on board the same ship which carried the famous gold nugget, but neither arrived, as the vessel was overtaken by a violent hurricane, and was lost when barely forty hours out from port. Thus perished one whose iniquities have caused his name to be handed down to eternal execration in the pages of American history.

Such was the condition of the colony in Hispaniola, when Bartholomew de Las Casas, then a young licentiate, twenty-eight years of age, arrived there. The purpose of his coming was no different from that of the other gentlemen-adventurers who were bent on acquiring speedy fortunes in a land of supposed riches that formed the theme of fabulous and alluring tales, which often enough had but slender foundation in fact. As his father had already acquired properties in the island, it is probable that Bartholomew came to assume the direction of them. There is nothing to show that he was at that time especially impressed or moved by the sad condition of the Indians and the violation of their rights; on the contrary, he procured slaves, worked them in the mines, and attended to the cultivation of his estates with the energy he employed in every undertaking to which he put his hand. He says himself that during eight years of Ovando's governorship, this "pestilential disorder" [pg 35] took root without there being a man who spoke or heeded or thought anything about it, notwithstanding that such multitudes were being sacrificed, that out of the infinite number of the inhabitants of whom the Admiral first wrote to the Catholic sovereigns, there perished more than nine tenths in that brief period. [21]

He took part in the second war against the Cacique Cocubanó[22] in the province of Higuey, of which he afterwards wrote the most horrifying description. He related incredible cruelties, concluding thus: “All these deeds, and others foreign to all human nature did my own eyes witness, and I do not now dare to recount them, being hardly able to believe myself, lest perhaps I may have dreamed them.” Throughout these massacres Las Casas, young, enthusiastic, generous-hearted, noble-minded, and with his naturally keen sensibilities refined and sharpened by the best education of his times, appears to have played his part with the others, neither better nor worse than they, equally blind to the injustice and tyranny practised upon the inoffensive and defenceless Indians and only eager for his share of the profits derived from their sufferings. The contradiction is as flagrant as in the case of the great Admiral who initiated the system which brought all these horrors in logical sequence. The war in Higuey finished with the capture of the unfortunate Cocubanó, whom Ovando caused to be hanged at San Domingó instead of allowing [pg 36] him to be torn to pieces with pincers as the Spaniards demanded should be done. Such was the quality of mercy in that Governor's heart.

The affairs of Las Casas prospered and he grew rich, though it is difficult to believe that his yearly income from his properties amounted to 100,000 castellanos—an enormous sum, given the value of money at that time,—yet this is the figure he himself has given in his own writings. [23]

Such being the attitude of a man of finer temperament during eight years passed amidst scene of rapacious ferocity, something must be admitted to explain the callousness of men of fewer sensibilities and lower moral standards, who found themselves far removed from the usual restraint of civilised society and confronted by many hard ships and severe disappointments. The moral and physical condition of the majority of these men was indeed deplorable. Many of them had staked all they could obtain on this great venture in the Indies, hallucinated by the craze for gold, of which they dreamed as lying, waiting to be picked up, in lands where pearls strewed the sands of the beach. Rapid exploitation of such sources of fabulous wealth and a speedy return to Spain, rather than the enterprises usually suggested to Anglo-Saxons by the term “colonisation,” had lured them over the mysterious ocean. Little thought was given to the pastoral and agriculture resources of a rich soil that would have yielded abundant crops in response to the simplest tillage [pg 37] and made of the islands a granary sufficient to feed all Spain. Unaccustomed to manual labour, ignorant of the simplest principles of mining, poorly supplied—when at all—with the necessary implements, they rushed to the mines with but scanty provision even of food; fevers seized them, strange diseases attacked them—most of all, disillusion confronted them; out of Ovando's 2500 men more than one thousand died within a brief period, in the most wretched manner. Those who had the courage and strength to work, barely made enough to feed themselves, for it not infrequently happened that after the royal fifth was deducted and other expenses met, the remainder, when divided, hardly gave to each colonist more than his daily, scanty living. The state of degradation into which they sank was pitiable and there is little cause to wonder that, in their brutalised condition, they took small account of the physical sufferings of the Indians and no interest at all in weighing their claims to liberty and just treatment. The few who did turn their attention to agriculture fared better, both as to the comforts of their surroundings and the profits they derived from their occupation; their Indians likewise led far easier lives than their fellows who worked for the miners. The vicious principles underlying slavery once established, innumerable abuses are bound to follow, and when responsibility for an iniquitous system is widely distributed, even the most humane unconsciously drift into acquiescence in continuous and monstrous acts of inhumanity, partly from want of strength to combat [pg 38] the established order of things and partly from the easy ability of each to shift his share of the blame for what his instincts condemn, onto the shoulders of others. Reforms left to the collective conscience of such a community are apt to languish. Such is man's nature that the most unnatural and abnormal conditions come to be tolerated by common acquiescence, until something—an event without or a stirring of his soul within—startles his better self into a realisation of his surroundings, the scales fall from his eyes which, having, he saw not, and in a flash, the iniquity of proceedings to which he has assented, in which he has shared, and by which he has profited, becomes manifest.

In the Indies a premium was placed on rebellion; the oftener the Indians could be goaded into open revolt, the more slaves could be acquired according to due process of law, and everybody's profits increased. To such profitable encouragement the colonists were not slow to respond and they were fertile in devices for rendering the lives of the Indians intolerable.

No champion was forthcoming to defend the helpless native or even to make his woes known; the tender-hearted Queen, who loved justice and hated iniquity, was remote and her beneficent intentions towards her humble subjects in the islands were inoperative. “The heavens are high and the Tzar is far” say the long-suffering mujiks, whose road to their “little father's” throne is barred by an army of interested bureaucrats. Tyranny is of divers sorts and one tyranny differs from another [pg 39] other in infamy, but the worst tyranny of all is the dual tyranny over both body and soul exercised collectively by irresponsible men over their fellows, and this was the tyranny of such slavery as prevailed in the Spanish colonies. The specious argument that the only way to convert the Indians was to keep them among the Spaniards, was constantly insisted upon in pious phrases meant to delude the Queen by a display of zeal in carrying out her plan for their conversion. Ovando wrote complaining of the desertion of the Indians, who escaped whenever they could from contact with the Spaniards and fled in numbers to the remotest recesses of the forests, facing starvation rather than endure their life in the settlements. And what wonder! for would any rational Indian voluntarily live amidst such surroundings and submit to such labour for the sole benefit of his tyrants? Nothing that the afflicted natives saw of the religion or the civilisation of the Spaniards could possibly attract them to either.

CHAPTER IV. - THE DOMINICANS IN HISPANIOLA. THE ORDINATION OF LAS CASAS. THE CONQUEST OF CUBA.

In the month of September of the year 1510, the first Dominican friars, four in number, arrived in Hispaniola from Spain under the leadership of their Prior, Pedro de Cordoba, a man of gentle birth, distinguished appearance, gracious manners, and great piety. He had exceptional gifts as a preacher and, in selecting the men of his Order to accompany him, he chose those who, to their exemplary life and zeal for conversions, united facility in expounding Christian doctrine. Two, especially, out of his company, were men of unusual ability—Fray Antonio de Montesinos and Fray Bernardo de Santo Domingo.

One of the colonists, Pedro Lumbreras, gave the missionaries shelter, and arranged to supply them with provisions, and the monks, without losing any time, set to work to improve the habits and morals of the easy-going Spaniards in the colony. The Viceroy being absent in the city of Concepcion de la Vega at that time, the Prior went thither to announce their arrival and pay his respects, accomplishing the tedious journey of thirty leagues on foot, sleeping on the ground and living on bread [pg 41] and water. He arrived at La Vega on a Saturday, and the next day, being Sunday in the octave of All Saints, he preached a sermon on the glories of paradise prepared for the saints, of which Las Casas says, “It was a sermon so lofty and so divine that I held myself happy to hear it.” In response to the Prior's invitation at the close of his discourse, his hearers sent their Indians, men, women, and children, to the church, after dinner. The Prior, holding a crucifix in his hand, and assisted by interpreters, then gave the Indians their first exposition of Christian doctrine, beginning with the creation of the world and finishing with the Crucifixion. This was the beginning of anything like a serious and practical effort to carry out the reiterated instructions of the Spanish sovereigns to instruct the Indians and convert them to Christianity.

In that same year, Las Casas took holy orders, and, though it is not clear whether his ordination occurred before or after the memorable sermon of Prior Pedro de Cordoba, it is evident that the impression he received from that discourse powerfully influenced him at a critical moment of his life and contributed to form the special vocation to which he afterwards devoted himself.

His own description of his ordination is as follows:

“In this same year and in these same days, when the father, Fray Pedro de Cordoba went to La Vega, a cleric called Bartholomew de Las Casas had sung a new mass; he was a native of Seville and among the oldest [settlers] in the island, and that was the first time that a new mass was sung in all the Indies; on account of [pg 42] being the first, the event was celebrated with great festivity by the Admiral [Don Diego Columbus] and everybody who was in the city of La Vega; they comprised a large number of the inhabitants of the island, for it was smelting time, when each brought his gold with his Indians to have it melted, all meeting together as people do to make payments, in the places where fairs are held in Castile; as there were no gold coins, they made certain pieces in imitation of castellanos and ducats, different sorts in the same smelting, where the King's fifth was melted and paid; these coins they offered [to the new priest] while others made arrieles[24] to offer. Reales were current, and many of these were presented, all of which the newly ordained priest gave to his god-father, save a few gold pieces that were especially well made. There was one notable feature of this first mass with which the clergy present were not satisfied; namely, there was not a drop of wine in the whole feast, because no ship having arrived from Castile since a long time, there was none in the entire island.”

The newly ordained priest entered immediately and zealously upon his duties, one of the first of which he considered to be the continuation of the religious instruction to the Indians he had seen so admirably initiated by Fray Pedro de Cordoba. He speedily acquired great fame throughout the colony both for his virtues and his learning, and his influence over the natives was established once and for ever.

Don Diego Columbus undertook in 1511 to conquer [pg 43] and settle the island of Cuba, which had been discovered by his father, and, by virtue of the privileges secured to him by the capitulations of Granada, he named Diego Velasquez, a native of Cuellar and one of the oldest and most respected colonists in San Domingo, commander of this enterprise. The expedition, which consisted of three hundred men, amongst whom was Fernando Cortes, landed at a port called Las Palmas in the province of Maici and the conquest was quickly and easily effected, the natives being of a pacific disposition and little skilled in the use of even such indifferent weapons as they possessed. Thirty Spaniards in Jamaica, hearing of the events in Cuba, took service under Velasquez, who appointed Panfilo de Narvaez as commander under his orders. The campaign in Cuba was signalised by the same massacres and cruelties which marked the advance of Spanish civilisation throughout the Indies; the natives were pursued and torn to pieces by fierce dogs, burned alive, their hands and feet cut off, and the miserable, terrified remnant speedily reduced to a condition of hopeless slavery. The so-called war ended with the execution of the Cacique Hatuey, and in the early part of 1512, Diego Velasquez sent for Las Casas to join him from Hispaniola. At that juncture there arrived in the port of Baracoa a vessel commanded by Cristobal de Cuellas, who brought with him his daughter, the promised bride of Velasquez. The Governor absented himself for the celebration of his marriage, leaving his kinsman Juan de Grijalva in command of fifty men during [pg 44] his absence, and charging Las Casas to act as assistant and counsellor to Grijalva, who was a beardless youth and, though of excellent disposition, was without experience. The news of Las Casas's presence quickly spread amongst the Indians of Bayamo, who had fled in terror before the horses of Narvaez into the province of Camaguey, and, feeling reassured and confident of protection, they now began to return little by little, asking pardon for the opposition they had made to the Spanish force and offering to assist and serve the invaders. The veneration of the natives for Las Casas, their only friend, was a most touching thing to see, for they trusted him without reserve, believing him to be omnipotent and knowing him to be good; they called him by the same title, Behique, which they gave to their own magicians and both reverenced and feared him as being almost divine. As the tribes came in, bringing gifts to the Spanish commander, they also brought offerings to Las Casas and when assured by him that the past was pardoned and forgotten, their confidence was completely restored.

Peace being thus established in the province of Bayamo, Velasquez sent orders to Narvaez that he should advance into the province of Camague with all the force he had, which, united to that of Grijalva, amounted to about one hundred men, and that Las Casas should accompany the expedition.

The spiritual and martial forces seemed to work in harmony; Grijalva was obedient to the counsels of Las Casas, and Narvaez, although a hardened [pg 45] campaigner and a man of violent temperament, was not indifferent to the priest's influence, backed as he knew it to be by the warm personal support of his Governor, Velasquez. Some thirty leagues from Bayamo, and before entering the province of Camaguey, the expedition arrived at a town called Cueyba, where they were well received by the Indians and where they found, in a sort of chapel, a statue of the Blessed Virgin which had been presented to the cacique some time before by Alonso de Ojeda who, after shipwreck and untold hardships, had reached that place and been cared for by the natives. Ojeda had carried this image for many weary days, confiding in its protection to rescue him from the dangerous plight in which he found himself, and some of his companions who were now with the Narvaez party praised its beauty so highly to Las Casas that he conceived the idea of offering to trade for it a very good Flemish statue of his own. His proposal, however, was not agreeable to the cacique, who had, on his part, become much attached to his own image, and the next morning when Las Casas went to the little chapel, which the Indians kept nicely adorned with cotton hangings and flowers, he was surprised to see that the statue was missing from its customary place above the altar. Upon inquiry he was told by the Indians that their chief, fearing that he would be forced to accept Las Casas's offer to exchange, had taken his statue and fled into the forests to save it. There was even a fear that a general uprising might result to defend the cherished [pg 46] statue, so Las Casas at once sent messengers to the cacique to assure him that he not only no longer wished to make the exchange but had decided to make him a present of his own Flemish statue as well.

Twenty leagues beyond Cueyba the expedition entered the province of Camaguey, and, at the entrance of the various towns, the Indians came out to welcome the Spaniards, offering them provisions of fish, game, and cassava. Las Casas called together the children everywhere and baptised them, concerning which he afterwards said that many were thus destined for glory in good time, for shortly afterwards there was hardly one of those children left alive.

Nothing inspired more wonder in the Indians than the transmission of news from one place to another by means of writing, and the letters the Spaniards sent to one another excited the greatest awe amongst them. So great had the influence of Las Casas amongst them become, that he had only to send any piece of paper fastened to the end of a stick, carried by a messenger who had been instructed to say what he wanted, for his orders to be scrupulously obeyed; without the paper, the verbal message was shorn of its authority, with the paper it commanded entire obedience. To forestall excesses on the part of the soldiers, Las Casas hit upon the device of sending a messenger ahead, carrying one of these papers, to tell the Indians that the expedition was approaching and that he desired them to have provisions ready and to vacate one part of their village which [pg 47] the Spaniards might occupy. The messenger announced these dispositions, which must be obeyed under pain of the Behique's displeasure, and the Spaniards, on their arrival, invariably found everything prepared for them and free quarters in which to lodge. Narvaez agreed to give strict orders to his men to keep to their own part of the village, and any one who violated this command or sought to mix with the Indians was punished.

At a village called Caonao, one of the characteristic pieces of inexplicable cruelty, that so frequently occurred, took place. Before reaching that town, the expedition had stopped to eat in a dry river bed (barranca), where there was a quantity of soapstone on which the men sharpened their weapons. Upon entering the town and before taking possession of their quarters, they found some two thousand Indians peaceably squatting about the square, after their fashion, curious to see them and observe the movements of the wonderful horses at which they never tired of looking. While the provisions which the Indians had got ready were being distributed, somebody—it was never discovered who—without cause or rhyme or reason suddenly ran amok, drew his sword, and began slashing right and left amongst the defenceless natives, and, as though crazed, the other soldiers fell to work in the same fashion, so that, before one half the Indians realised what was happening, the place was piled with dead and wounded. Narvaez looked on unmoved, but Las Casas, who was not in the square when the massacre began, hearing what was afoot, rushed [pg 48] thither in rage and despair to stop the slaughter. “What do you think of what our Spaniards have done?” Narvaez coolly asked him, and the priest in a fury replied: “To the devil with you and your Spaniards.” He finally succeeded in arresting the butchery, not forgetting, in the midst of all, to administer baptism to the dying. His indignation on this occasion burst all bounds and, from his own description, it may be inferred that his language towards his countrymen was not in strict conformity with sacerdotal usage. No sufficient explanation of this lamentable occurrence has ever been given, but Las Casas says that if the man who began the massacre was the one he suspected, he later met a dreadful death. It has been alleged that a soldier mistook some movement of the crowd in pressing forward to see the horses, for a beginning of hostilities, and, as there had been a surprise practised on Narvaez's men a short time before in Bayamo, the man was seized with a sudden panic of fear that the little force of one hundred men was about to be attacked and overcome by mere force of numbers while off their guard, lost his head, and began to use his sword; the others, seeing their comrade fighting, rushed into the melee and before reason could get the upper hand, the mischief was done. The natural consequence of this unprovoked massacre was a general flight of the Indians from their towns, all who could, taking refuge in the neighbouring islands.

The Spanish camp was established near Caonao and one day shortly after the massacre an old [pg 49] Indian servant of Las Casas, called Camacho, came to him to say that a young man about twenty-five years old and his younger brother had returned and begged to be admitted as servants into his household. This young Indian was baptised under the name of Adrianico and served as interpreter and intermediary to induce the other Indians to return to their villages, so that little by little some degree of peace and tranquillity was established throughout the province. The Governor quickly discovered that the simplest means of securing obedience was to send a messenger bearing any bit of paper on a stick, to say in the name of Las Casas whatever was to be done, and this became the means usually employed to maintain order. Thousands of the natives were instructed and baptised during this expedition. It was at this time that news was received of the existence of several Spanish prisoners held by a cacique, in the province of Havana, some hundred leagues distant, and Las Casas sent his habitual Indian messenger carrying the sacred paper to tell that cacique that the paper meant he was to send those prisoners at once, under pain of the Behique's severest displeasure. After the departure of this messenger, the Spaniards struck their camp and went on to a place called Carahale, which Las Casas named Casaharta on account of the abundance of excellent provisions they received there; these seem to have consisted principally of parrots, of which the Spaniards consumed no less than 10,000 beautifully plumaged birds in the brief period of fifteen days they stopped there. Indeed, [pg 50] the amount the Spaniards ate amazed the frugal natives, for it took more to feed a soldier for one day than an Indian family required in a month, At this place there arrived one day a canoe, in which were two Spanish women, in the costume of Mother Eve, one of them about forty years old and the other eighteen. They were the prisoners sent back from Havana by the cacique who had meanwhile received the magic paper ordering their release. They described the slaughter of some Spaniards upon their arrival at the port which, since that time, has consequently been called Matanzas; several had managed to defend themselves but had afterwards been hanged by a cacique on a ceiba tree, leaving only the two women, whose lives were spared. This news so irritated Narvaez that he ordered eighteen caciques who had come in response to Las Casas's papers, bringing food for the Spaniards, to be put in chains, and but for the priest's threat that he would have him severely punished by Velasquez, and even report the case to the King, he would have hanged them. Las Casas, by his vigorous and menacing attitude, secured the immediate release of all the caciques but one, who was kept a prisoner until Diego Velasquez joined the expedition and released him. [25]

At another village, a Spaniard, also a survivor of the Matanzas massacre, was brought forward and delivered to the Spaniards by the cacique, who declared he loved him and had treated him as his own son. Great rejoicing celebrated the finding of this [pg 51] man, and both Las Casas and Narvaez embraced the cacique with fervour. The Spaniard had nearly forgotten his mother-tongue and was in all respects so entirely like the Indians in his manners and ways that every one laughed a good deal at him. Little by little he recovered the use of his Spanish and was able to give much information concerning the country.

Upon the arrival of Diego Velasquez, whose bride had died very shortly after her marriage, a town was founded on the banks of a large river, called by the Indians the Arimao, where very rich gold-mines were discovered. In this newly founded town of Xagua, as it was named, Las Casas received a valuable repartimiento of land and Indians in recognition of the services he had rendered during the expeditions, for, though he was the enemy of all cruel treatment and the protector of the natives against his callous-hearted countrymen, his conscience on the subject of repartimientos was not yet fully awakened.

During his residence in the island of Hispaniola, Las Casas had been close friends with a man named Renteria, whom he describes as a most virtuous, prudent, charitable, and devout Christian, given entirely to the things of God and religion and little versed in the things of this world, to which he paid small attention; he was so open-handed by instinct that his generosity was almost the vice of carelessness rather than a virtue. He was pure and humble in his life and was a man of some learning, devoted to the study of the Scriptures and commentaries to the Latin tongue, and was a skilful penman. [pg 52] Pedro de la Renteria, to whom Diego Velasquez had given the office of alcalde in the island of Cuba was a Biscayan, son of a native of Guipuzcoa, and such was the intimacy between him and Las Casas in Hispaniola that they shared their possessions in common, though in the management of their affairs, it was the latter who took the direction entirely, as being the more capable and practical of the two. [26]

Upon Pedro de la Renteria, the Governor conferred a repartimiento of lands and Indians adjoining the one given to Las Casas and the two had their business interests in common. Las Casas owns, with compunction, that he became so absorbed at that time in developing his new estates and working his mines that what should have been his principal care, the instruction of the Indians, fell into the second place, though despite his temporary blindness to his higher duties, he protests that, as far as their temporal wants were concerned, he was humane and kind, both from his naturally benevolent instincts and from his understanding of the law of God. This we may easily believe to be the case and, though his zealous soul may afterwards, when all his energies of body and mind were exclusively dedicated to his apostolate, have found grounds for self-reproach for neglecting the spiritual wants of his Indians at that time, it is more than probable that, even so, his care of them might well have served as a pattern to his fellow-colonists and more than satisfied the natives, who adored him.

CHAPTER V. - THE SERMONS OF FRAY ANTONIO DE MONTESINOS. THE AWAKENING OF LAS CASAS. PEDRO DE LA RENTERIA

The company of four Dominican monks under their Prior, Pedro de Cordoba, had been increased until their community numbered twelve or fifteen men, the severity of whose rule had been much augmented in the New World in order to maintain the just proportion between their penitential lives and the hard conditions of the colony in which they lived. Their observation of what was happening around them and of the injustice and cruelty daily practised on the natives in defiance of the wishes of the Spanish sovereigns, forced upon them the duty of protesting against such violation of all laws, human and divine. They had received into their community, as a lay-brother, a man who, two years before, had murdered his Indian wife and had afterwards fled to the forests where he lived as best he could. The information furnished by this repentant criminal still further amplified the insight of the monks into the treatment meted out to the Indians and quickened their determination to attempt to stay the iniquities of their countrymen.

The first man to raise his voice publicly in America against slavery and all forms of oppression of the Indians was Fray Antonio de Montesinos, who preached to the colonists of Santo Domingo a discourse, of which unfortunately no full report now exists. The monks had made a point of inviting the Viceroy, the Treasurer, Passamonte, and all the officials to be present in church on the Sunday fixed for the sermon, and it was known throughout the colony that a matter of particular importance was to be the subject of the discourse, though no one suspected its nature. The text chosen was from St. John: “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness,” and the friar, who was blessed with the dual gifts of eloquence and moral courage, drove his arguments and admonitions home with such force that, though he was heard to the close without interruption, the principal persons of the colony held a meeting after church and decided that the preaching of such revolutionary doctrines must be silenced. They repaired to the monastery to make their protest, and to demand that Fray Antonio should retract or modify his words the following Sunday. The Prior received the angry deputation and, after listening to their demands, informed them that the discourse preached by Fray Antonio represented the sentiments of the entire Dominican community and had been pronounced with his full approbation. The colonists became only the more enraged at this answer and declared that, unless the preacher retracted, the monks should pack their goods and return to Spain, to which the prior with quiet irony replied: “Of a truth, gentlemen, that will give us little trouble”; which indeed was the fact, for Las Casas says that all they possessed of books, vestments, and clothing would have gone into two trunks. The most that the Prior would concede was that the subject should be treated again on the following Sunday.

Fray Antonio once more ascended the pulpit and before the assembled colony announced his text: “Repetam scientiam meam a principio et operatorem meum probabo justum” (Job xxxvi. 3). Not only did he repeat the sense of what he had already said, but he elaborated still more forcibly his theme, and ended by announcing that the sacraments of the Church would henceforth be refused to all who persisted in the evil courses he denounced, and defying his hearers to complain of him in Spain.

Amongst the men on whose startled ears these denunciations fell, were hidalgos of high birth, reduced by reckless courses to expatriate themselves in search of fortunes with which to return and resume their extravagances in Spain; contemptuous of all forms of labour, they passed their enforced exile in gambling, dicing, and debauchery in the company of their Indian mistresses, chosen among the native beauties. They alternately courted the favour of the Viceroy or intrigued against him as seemed most profitable to their interests; they displayed few of the virtues and most of the vices common to their class in Spain. Others belonged in the unfailing and [pg 56] numerous category of adventurers, ever ready to play a new stake in a new country; they constituted an equally reckless but more resourceful element in the colony, though their contribution to the moral tone of the community was likewise insignificant. Columbus had sought and obtained an authorisation to deport from Spain criminals under sentence of either partial or perpetual banishment, while other delinquents had had their sentences remitted on condition that they would emigrate to the Indies. So dissolute was the general tone of the colonies and so depraved the habits of many of the colonists that Columbus could, with sincerity, exclaim, “I vow that numbers of men have gone to the Indies who did not deserve water from God or man.”

Las Casas, who loved sinners as much as he loathed sin, observed this motley population with a more tolerant eye and affirmed that even amongst those who had lost their ears, he still found sufficiently honest men; it was not difficult to lose one's ears in those days. The voice of Fray Antonio cried indeed in a moral wilderness! But however far these men had strayed from the true spirit of their religion, they had no intention of foregoing the ministrations of the church, and they clung tenaciously to the outward observance of forms and ceremonies as an offset against their lax conformity to its moral precepts.

To be thus placed between the ban of excommunication and the renunciation of their illegally held slaves, was an intolerable prospect. Appeal [pg 57] or protest to the Prior being useless, they despatched complaint to the King and chose for the bearer of it a Franciscan friar, Alonso de Espinal, who was instructed to unite his efforts to those of two other agents, who had already been sent to obtain an extension of the encomienda privileges. The Dominicans sent as their representative to contest the case, the offending preacher himself, some generous sympathisers having been found in the colony to furnish the money for the expenses of his journey.

The advocate for the colonists found all doors open to him and his way made easy, for there were not a few of the courtiers and other great personages in Spain who derived large profits from the abusive traffic in the Indies, but the Dominican was friendless and met with obstacles on every hand which barred his access to the King. He managed after some exercise of patience to outwit the gentlemen in attendance, and, forcing his way into the King's presence, begged to be heard. Upon receiving the royal permission to speak, the monk unfolded such a tale that the King sat stupefied with horror at his ghastly recital. “Did your Highness order such deeds to be done?” asked the monk. “No, by God, never on my life,” replied the King. The immediate result of King Ferdinand's aroused conscience was, that a commission was formed to inquire into the case and to take information on which to base a report to his Majesty. The sense of this report was that the Indians were freemen, but must be instructed in [pg 59] the Christian religion; that they might be made to labour, but not in such wise as to hinder their conversion nor in excess of their strength; that they should have houses and be allowed sufficient time to cultivate their own lands; that they should be kept in touch with the Christians and that they should be paid wages for their work, which might be in clothing and furnishings rather than in money.

While the discussions inside the commission were going on, the agents of the colonists were active in presenting their side of the case. Fray Antonio was likewise losing no time, and was astonishingly successful in that he won over the very Franciscan whom the colonists had sent to plead their cause, and converted him into his staunch ally and supporter.

The outcome of this controversy was the code of laws promulgated at Burgos on Dec. 27, 1512, and known as the Laws of Burgos. They were afterwards considerably added to by another commission, in which the Prior, Pedro de Cordoba, who had come to Spain and seen the King, sat, and their provisions, had they been conscientiously carried out in the sense their framers designed, would have considerably ameliorated the condition of the Indians. They constitute the first public recognition of the rights of the Indians and an attempt, at least, to amend their wrongs.

Three years elapsed between the date of Fray Antonio's first courageous plea on behalf of the Indians and the entrance of Las Casas upon the active apostolate in their favour, to which the [pg 60] of his long life was devoted. There being no other priest at hand, Las Casas was invited to say mass and preach at Baracoa on the feast of Pentecost in 1514, and in searching the Scriptures for a suitable text he happened upon the following verses in the thirty-fourth chapter of Ecclesiasticus, which arrested his attention and started the train of reasoning destined to produce great results.

“He that sacrificeth of a thing wrongfully gotten, his offering is ridiculous, and the gifts of unjust men are not accepted. The most High is not pleased with the offerings of the wicked; neither is He pacified for sin by the multitude of sacrifices.”

“Whoso bringeth an offering of the goods of the poor doeth as one that killeth the son before his father's eyes.”

“The bread of the needy is their life; he that defraudeth him thereof is a man of blood.”

“He that taketh away his neighbour's living, slayeth him; and he that defraudeth the labourer of his hire is a bloodshedder.”

The perusal of these simply worded texts, replete with terrible significance, quickened the conscience of Las Casas more powerfully than the spectacle of actual enormities happening daily for years under his very eyes, though doubtless the influence of these many occurrences was cumulative and had led him, gradually and unconsciously, up to the state when but a touch was necessary to strip the last disguise from the heinous abuses practised in the colony. Until then he had been [pg 60] zealous in protecting the Indians against massacre and pillage, but to the injustice of the servitude imposed upon them, he was insensible, and he recounts humbly enough that he had himself once been refused the sacraments by a Dominican friar in Hispaniola—possibly the redoubtable Montesinos himself—because he was a slave-holder. He sustained a discussion on the subject with the obdurate monk, whom he describes as a worthy and learned man, but to little purpose, and the Dominican wound up by telling him that “the truth has ever had many enemies, and falsehood many defenders.” Las Casas, though somewhat impressed by what had passed between them, took no heed of the admonition to release his Indians, and sought absolution from a more lenient confessor.

Much time and many terrible experiences were required to germinate and develop the seed the Dominicans had sown in his soul, but the day of fruition came with the peaceful preparation of a discourse suitable for the glorious feast of Pentecost, the birthday of the Church, into whose perpetual custody were committed the doctrines of Christ, to be infallibly guarded. Instead of disbursing these spiritual treasures to the humble Indians amongst whom he lived as a superior being, almost deified in their simple minds, he had profited by their labours as selfishly as the most godless layman in the island, without making an effort to gather them into one fold, under one shepherd, which, as a Christian priest, should have been his chief occupation. [pg 61] But if the awakening was slow, it was complete, and Las Casas was not one to shrink from following his beliefs to their logical conclusions; not only was his newly formed conviction that the treatment accorded to the Indians was a flagrant violation of all justice, and one that merited condemnation in this world and condign punishment in the next, absolute, but the first consequence following from it, and which seemed to him imperative, was that he should forthwith set the example to his fellow-colonists of freeing his serfs; the second was the devotion of all his powers to making others see the wickedness of the system by which they profited, and the terrible moral responsibility they would incur by persisting in it. He formed his determination to preach this crusade in season and out and to henceforth use every weapon in defence of the downtrodden natives.

Although he treated his own Indians kindly, and he well knew that if he renounced his “encomienda” their condition would doubtless be worse under the power of their new owner than before, Las Casas perceived how impossible it would be to preach justice for the Indians while he himself held them in bondage.

He went to the Governor, Diego Velasquez, and opened his mind fully on the subject, declaring that as his conscience no longer permitted him to hold his Indians in subjection, he had come to surrender them; and, admonishing the Governor of his own grave responsibility, he announced that henceforth his mission would be to preach this [pg 62] doctrine. He desired for the moment that his resolution should not be made public until the return to Cuba of his friend and partner, Renteria, who was at that time absent in Jamaica buying pigs and farm seeds.

The Governor listened with amazement to this new and, to him, monstrous doctrine and, out of friendly interest for Las Casas, and possibly thinking that his present intentions might subside if the renunciation of his property could be deferred, he counselled him to go slowly, saying, “Look well, father, to what you are doing, lest you may repent, for before God I would wish to see you rich and prosperous.” He urged him to take fifteen days for careful consideration of the matter and to then return and discuss his intentions. This did not suit the temper of Las Casas who answered: “My lord, I am much honoured by your desire for my prosperity and for all the other favours you do me; but consider, my lord, that the fifteen days have passed, and should I repent of my intention I have expressed to you and desire to hold the Indians, and should you, out of the regard you bear me, wish me to keep them or to renew your grant to me, may it please God to punish you severely, nor to pardon you this sin. I only beg your lordship that all this shall remain secret and that you will not grant the Indians to any one, until Renteria's return, so that his affairs may sustain no damage.”

The Governor reluctantly agreed and his respect for Las Casas being much increased, he thenceforward [pg 63] forward consulted him in all that concerned the welfare of the Indians.

On the feast of the Assumption, Las Casas preached a sermon on the contemplative, as compared with the active life, in the course of which he yielded to an impulse to make his intention publicly known. Turning towards the Governor's seat, he said: “My lord, I give you permission to tell to all what we have privately agreed upon between us, and I avail myself of the same to announce it to all here present.” He then launched into a fervid discourse upon the blindness, the injustice, the tyranny and cruelty that marked the colonists' treatment of the Indians, declaring that their salvation was to be despaired of unless they liberated their slaves and treated the natives humanely. The assembly was moved to mingled admiration and astonishment, for most of the colonists would as soon have thought it a sin to work their beasts of burden as their Indians, so deeply ingrained was their belief that the natives were created to serve them. Some were stimulated to sentiments of compunction, but not to the extent of imitating the preacher's heroic example of renouncing the source of his income in deference to his moral principles. [27]

While Las Casas was passing through these experiences in Cuba, his friend and partner, Renteria, was, by a singular coincidence, arriving at analogous convictions concerning the Indians and pondering upon the formation of some plan by which the diminishing remnant of them might be rescued [pg 64] from servitude and converted to the Christian religion. During lent of that year he made a retreat in a Franciscan monastery in Jamaica whither, as has been said, he had gone to procure farm stock. During this period of seclusion from temporal distractions, he came to the conclusion that the best means to benefit the natives would be to found several schools or colleges into which the Indian boys and younger men might be collected, and he formed the determination to go himself, if necessary, to Spain and seek royal approval and support for this project. Las Casas had meantime become so impatient of further delay in beginning his labours that, having made public his intentions, he abandoned his original idea of waiting for Renteria's return before starting for Spain. Although he was without funds and had no means of getting any save by the sale of a mare worth a hundred pesos of gold, he wrote to Renteria telling him that he was about leaving Cuba for Spain on business of great importance, so that, if his friend wished to see him before he started, he must hasten back from Jamaica. Renteria, in consequence, finished his business in the island and returned as quickly as possible to Cuba, where he was met upon landing by the Governor, Las Casas, and numerous others, for he was a very popular and much esteemed man in the colony. It was only when the two friends finally found themselves alone that an exchange of confidences became possible, and Renteria, yielding to the insistence of Las Casas, unfolded his plan for the establishment [pg 65] of Indian schools. Each in turn was surprised and gratified to learn the project of the other and, after some discussion and arguments, it was decided that, of the two, Las Casas was the one who must go to Spain. Renteria disposed of his Jamaica purchases and, out of the profits, furnished his friend with money enough to defray the expenses of what was foreseen would be a long and doubtless costly sojourn at court.

At this same juncture, the Dominican Prior in Santo Domingo sent four of his monks to establish a community in Cuba, choosing as their Prior, Fray Bernardo, who is described as both a pious and a learned man. The Governor of Cuba received these religious with great satisfaction, but to no one did their coming afford greater joy than to Las Casas. The Dominicans began a series of earnest and edifying sermons, in the course of which practical applications of Scripture texts were made to the actual condition of affairs in the colony; and, by using the information furnished them by Las Casas, the preachers were able to make very forcible home thrusts on the subject of the injustice of the system of serfage and the grave responsibility of those Spaniards who oppressed the Indians. These sermons disturbed the conscience of the colonists but not to the point of amending their evil system, so the chief result was a general feeling of dissatisfaction within themselves and one of intensified exasperation towards the preachers of such uncomfortable doctrine. The monks, on their part, realising that it was idle to combat with purely spiritual weapons [pg 66] a system of evils which everybody was interested in maintaining, perceived their only hope of success lay in having their hands strengthened by royal support, and accordingly their Prior decided to go to Spain with Las Casas, where they might co-operate in their undertaking.

CHAPTER VI. - LAS CASAS RETURNS TO SPAIN. NEGOTIATIONS. CARDINAL XIMENEZ DE CISNEROS. THE JERONYMITE COMMISSIONERS

Las Casas was fully conscious of the hostility his mission was bound to provoke, and how odious he would make himself, not only to the colonists, but also to the members of the India Council, the courtiers, and to many influential persons in Spain, all of whom had investments in the colonies and drew incomes from the very abuses he was to combat; he therefore took the precaution of drawing up a sworn and witnessed statement, ad perpetuam rei memoriam, with the legal formalities dear to Spanish usage, in which he recounted all the services of every kind that he had rendered in the colonies. Lest obstacles might be put in the way of his departure, he resorted to a little dissimulation and caused the report to be spread that he intended to go to Paris to finish his law studies and take his degree at the university there. The colonists, including the Governor, were duped by this subterfuge and he departed in company with the Prior, who took with him a deacon of his order, Fray Diego de Alberca. The first stage of their journey was to Hispaniola, where the [pg 68] Prior was seized by a severe illness, to which he succumbed in the town of San Juan de la Maguana.

In the city of Santo Domingo, Las Casas encountered his old friend and precursor in the defence of the Indians, Prior Pedro de Cordoba, to whom he recounted all that had befallen him in Cuba, his newly found vocation, and his intention to visit Spain and lay the case for the Indians before the King. The Prior praised his resolution, but in wishing him all success, he explained the situation he would find awaiting him in Spain, where the all-powerful Bishop of Burgos, who was at the head of Indian affairs, and the royal Secretary, Lope Conchillos, were entirely in favour of the system of repartimientos and encomiendas, being themselves shareholders in colonial enterprises. As not uncommonly happens, it was on the estates of such absentee owners that the Indians were most cruelly handled, being mercilessly overworked by overseers anxious to curry favour at home by the remittance of ever-increasing revenues.

Although he was sufficiently impressed by what he heard, the zeal of the new apostle was undiminished. The Dominican community in Hispaniola being in sad need of funds, the Prior decided to profit by the occasion and to send one of his monks with Las Casas to Spain to solicit aid. He chose for this mission the same Fray Antonio de Montesinos, whose earnestness in behalf of the natives rendered him a sympathetic companion, while his own experience in handling the question in Spain, promised to be of great assistance to Las Casas. They [pg 69] sailed in September, 1515, and after a prosperous voyage arrived safely at Seville, where Montesinos lodged in the monastery of his Order, while Las Casas was given hospitality by his relatives.

The Archbishop of Seville at that time was Fray Diego de Deza, a Dominican who stood high in King Ferdinand's favour, and the first service Montesinos rendered his companion was to present him to the Archbishop, to whom he had already given some account of the objects which brought them both to Spain, and of the zeal of Las Casas in a cause which the Dominican Order had made peculiarly its own. It required no persuasion to enlist the good offices of the Archbishop, who was in entire sympathy with their undertaking and promptly furnished Las Casas with a warm letter to the King, commending both the cause and its advocate. To facilitate his approach to the King, he furnished Las Casas also with letters to influential persons in the royal household.

No better beginning could have been desired, and Las Casas set out for Plasencia where the King then was, arriving there a few days before Christmas in the year 1515. Thanks to the counsels and information given him by Montesinos, Las Casas knew something of the court and upon what persons he might count, who might still be won over, and who were to be avoided. Among these last, the most notorious and powerful opponents were the Bishop of Burgos and the Secretary, Lope Conchillos. Whatever virtues the former may have possessed they were certainly not of the apostolic [pg 70] order and his appointment to the high office of President of the India Council was one of the earliest and greatest calamities that overtook American interests. Las Casas was careful, therefore, to defer meeting these two personages and to refrain from disclosing the object of his presence until he should have first secured a hearing from the King, whose sympathy he hoped to enlist before his opponents could prejudice the monarch against him. Again fortune favoured him, and two days before Christmas he was closeted with the King, and explained in the fullest detail the state of things in the islands; the extinction of the natives, which was following rapidly on the barbarities and rapacity of the Spaniards, and the violation of the royal provisions which the benevolence of the late Queen and the sagacity of the King had decreed. He was astute enough to couple with the argument that these iniquities lay heavily on the royal conscience, the assurance that the revenues from the Indies would infallibly diminish until they ceased altogether, unless these crying abuses were corrected. In this conversation the charming personality, cultivated intelligence, and earnest convictions of Las Casas told powerfully, and he recounted horrifying incidents to the astonished sovereign which, it may be rightly imagined, lost nothing in the recital by such an eloquent and fervent advocate. Again he was completely successful, for King Ferdinand promised him another and longer audience before Easter in which he would go more fully into the matter. He slyly [pg 71] notes in closing his own description of the audience and its results, that neither Conchillos nor the Bishop of Burgos was much overjoyed when they heard from the King what subject was under discussion.

Diego Velasquez was well aware that Las Casas would spare no means to carry on his propaganda and that his first step would doubtless be to engage the attention of the Admiral, Diego Columbus, whose lieutenant Velasquez was, and that of the King as well, if he could reach him. He wrote therefore to the Treasurer, Passamonte, who in turn wrote to Conchillos and the Bishop of Burgos warning them of what was on foot.

The monks of the Dominican Order were, in those days, to be found in many posts of influence, not the least of which was that of confessor to the King, and to Fray Tomas de Matiencio, the ghostly father of King Ferdinand, Las Casas did not fail to go at the outset. Matiencio had already shown pronounced sympathy with the cause of the Indians and was, therefore, to be counted upon as a firm ally, both because of his personal convictions and for motives of solidarity with his Order. Through his confessor, Ferdinand sent to tell Las Casas that he should preceed him to Seville and wait for his arrival there, when the promised audience would be granted him; the King's departure was fixed for the fourth day after Christmas, so it may be seen that this affair did not drag just then at the Spanish court. The confessor also advised Las Casas not to avoid the Bishop of Burgos and Conchillos; but, on the [pg 72] contrary, to go openly to both and to explain as frankly to them as he had done to the King, the exact condition of the Indians, the motives which had prompted him to intervene, and the measures he judged necessary to stop the depopulation and ruin of the colonies. Matiencio reasoned that, as the matter must ultimately come into the hands of these two men, and as they had to be reckoned with, it was far wiser to give them the fullest information at the outset, hoping also that Las Casas's moving description of the sufferings the Indians endured might modify their opposition. This counsel did not accord with the plan of Las Casas but he allowed his judgment to be overruled by the royal confessor's advice and sought out Conchillos as being the less intractable of the two. The letter from the Archbishop of Seville procured him a courteous reception and had he come seeking a benefice or some preferment from the King, he might have counted upon the favour and assistance of the Secretary to advance his suit, but, as he piously phrases it, he had, by divine mercy, been rescued from the darkness in which, like all the others, he had wandered, a lost man, and was liberated from all desire for any temporal benefits. Save the gracious words and courtly blandishments which Conchillos showered upon him, nothing resulted from the interview.

His reception by the Bishop of Burgos was of a totally different order and, though it is to be lamented that this prelate did not possess more of the virtues becoming his state, it must be noted in his favour [pg 73] that hypocrisy was wanting in his unlovely character. Amongst other atrocities which Las Casas brought to his attention was the death of seven thousand Indian children within three months, on which he dwelt, hoping to touch some humane chord in the Bishop. He was deceived. “Look what an ignorant fool you are!” exclaimed his lordship. “What is this to me or what to the King?” This rough answer goaded his patience beyond control and Las Casas shouted in reply: “That all these souls perish is nothing to you and nothing to the King! Oh, Eternal God! then to whom is it anything?” With this he left the Bishop's presence.

The activity of Las Casas, his earnestness and his eloquence produced immediate effects, for he forced Indian affairs upon the languid attention of indifferent people and aroused so much interest in them that they became a topic of general discussion. He recounted his experiences to Archbishop Deza on his return to Seville, and begged him to arrange that both Conchillos and the Bishop of Burgos should be present at the audience the King had promised him, so that he might put the case fully, for he desired to charge them directly in the royal presence with responsibility for the massacres and cruelties to the Indians and for the damage done to the royal interests by their maladministration of the colonies. His project for this dramatic encounter was forestalled, and all the hopes born of the royal assurances given him at Plasencia were dashed by the news that reached Seville of the [pg 74] death of King Ferdinand, which occurred at Madrigalegos on January 23, 1516.

This sudden stoppage of his carefully planned campaign was discouraging enough to Las Casas but he was not disheartened, and resolved to set out at once for Flanders where the young King Charles then was and to present his plans to the monarch before he arrived in Spain.

King Ferdinand's last will designated Cardinal Ximenez de Cisneros as regent of the kingdom until his successor's arrival in Spain.

In a century prolific in great men, Cardinal Ximenez de Cisneros was among the greatest. Descended from an honourable family, he entered the Church, where a career of great promise opened before him. At an early age, however, he quit the secular priesthood for the cloister and became a monk of the Franciscan Order, in which the austerity of his observance of that severe rule of life and the vigour of his intellect advanced him to the position of a Provincial.

Much against his own inclination, he had accepted the post of confessor to Queen Isabella and from thence forward he became, in spite of himself, a dominant figure in the political and ecclesiastical affairs of the realm. The Queen raised him to the primatial see of Toledo, which carried with it his elevation to the Roman purple. The Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo was the richest and most important person in Spain, after the sovereign; but promotion to this lofty dignity, with its obligations to the pomp and magnificence imposed by the [pg 75] usage of the times, in no way modified the austerity of Cardinal Ximenez's life. He still wore the rough habit of St. Francis under his purple and he patched its rents with his own hands. Amidst palatial surroundings he slept on the floor or on a wooden bench—never in a bed—and he held strictly to the diet of a simple monk. No man was less of the world than he, though none was more in it or knew it better. He became as renowned for his wisdom and ability in conducting affairs as he had long since been for his sanctity, and the confidence which the King and Queen reposed in him caused him to be admitted to their counsels on all the most important matters of government.

Cardinal Ximenez de Cisneros

From a relief preserved in the Universidad Central. Photo by J. Laurent & Co., Madrid

When the death of King Ferdinand occurred, the Cardinal was nearly eighty years of age, yet he accepted and assumed the regency imposed upon him by the King's testament. Adrian of Utrecht, Dean of the University of Louvain, who had resided for some months at the court of King Ferdinand in the quality of ambassador from Prince Charles, produced full powers from the young sovereign, which conferred upon him the regency after Ferdinand's death. Cardinal Ximenez acknowledged him without delay, and a joint regency was instituted in which Adrian's part was merely nominal, as the actual government was carried on exclusively by the Cardinal.

It could hardly have been otherwise, for Adrian, as a foreigner, was unpopular in Spain, where he exercised no influence; he did not even speak Spanish and being, moreover, of a scholarly disposition, [pg 76] little used to the intricacies of affairs of state, he was doubtless glad enough to shelter himself behind the powerful figure of his masterful colleague. The Cardinal was adored by the people; the sanctity of his life, the integrity of his character, the superlative order of his genius, and his princely munificence made him more powerful than any sovereign. Some of the great nobles who had imagined that the regency of an aged monk would favour the designs of their invasive ambitions were sharply checked by the energy of the new regent, who had organised an efficient body of troops in his own pay and speedily made it apparent that Spain had a ruler with whom it was perilous to trifle. One incident in the contest he sustained in defence of the crown's prerogatives against the encroachments of the feudal nobles, illustrates his character. The Duke of Infantado, the Grand Admiral of Castile, and the Count of Benevente came as representatives of the nobles, to inquire into the nature of the powers by which the regent exercised such absolute authority. After hearing them courteously, the Cardinal produced the late King's testament and its formal ratification by the absent King Charles. As they raised some objections to the extent of the powers these documents gave him, he led them to a window of his apartment commanding a view of a large encampment of soldiers and artillery, saying, “There are the powers I have received from his Catholic Majesty, by which I govern and shall continue to govern Castile, until the King, my master and yours, shall take [pg 77] possession of his kingdom.” This answer both astonished and silenced them and they withdrew convinced of the futility of conspiracies against a man so well prepared and so determined.

The supreme object of his regency was to consolidate the union of the various kingdoms and principalities of the peninsula into one state—in other words to create a nation. This he did, and thus laid the foundations of Spain's greatest power and glory, for he delivered the kingdom to the young monarch in a more prosperous condition than it had ever before enjoyed, and with the royal authority more widely extended and more firmly grounded than any other Spanish sovereign had ever possessed it.

The regency of Cardinal Ximenez did not last two years, yet such was the permanent character of his beneficent influence upon the national development, that the memory of his services is still undimmed in Spain. Amongst the statesmen of his times, he was facile princeps and he enjoys the unique distinction of being the only prime-minister in history who was regarded as a saint by his own contemporaries. [28]

To this ascetic and autocratic but not unkindly statesman Las Casas decided to address himself, and he proceeded to Madrid to acquaint the two regents with the abuses prevailing in the Indies and to announce his intention of going to Flanders [pg 78] unless the necessary measures for the relief of the oppressed Indians could be devised in Spain before the King arrived. He drew up a statement of the case in Latin, which he submitted to the Ambassador Adrian, and another, identical, in Spanish, for Cardinal Ximenez. The gentle-hearted Fleming was horrified by what he read of the atrocities perpetrated in the King's name in the colonies, and repairing to the apartment of Cardinal Ximenez, who lodged in the same palace, asked him if such enormities were possible. As the Cardinal already had plenty of information on the subject from his brother Franciscans, he replied that all that Las Casas stated was true and that there was even more besides. He signified to Las Casas that his proposed journey to Flanders was unnecessary as he would himself provide means in Madrid for correcting the abuses in the colonies. There began at once a series of conferences to which Cardinal Ximenez summoned his colleague in the regency, the licentiate Zapata, Dr. Carbajal, and the distinguished jurist Dr. Palacios Rubios; in the course of these debates Las Casas fully exposed the evils of the colonial administration and proposed the measures which, in his judgment, were necessary to remedy them. The Cardinal-regent always had by him as a consultor the Bishop of Avila, who was also of his Order, but he rigorously excluded the obnoxious Bishop of Burgos from all participation in Indian affairs, to the no small perturbation of that prelate. Las Casas relates a significant incident that happened during one of these conferences, illustrating the [pg 79] means employed by his opponents to confute his statements. Cardinal Ximenez ordered the Laws of Burgos, which, since 1512, were supposed to be in full force in the Indies for the protection of the natives, to be read aloud; upon reaching one of the articles, the reader falsified the text; Las Casas, who knew every line of those acts by heart, objected and the Cardinal ordered the reader to repeat; he did so in the same language, whereupon Las Casas once more objected, saying, “The law does not say that.” The Cardinal, rendered impatient by the repeated interruption, turned to Las Casas and remarked with severity, “Either be silent or look well to what you say.” “Your Eminence may take my head off if what this clerk is reading be truly found in that law,” replied Las Casas promptly. Taking the articles from the hands of the reader he showed his Eminence that the sense had not been correctly read. The confusion of the clerk, whom Las Casas refuses to dishonour by naming him in his history, was complete. The outcome of these discussions was that Las Casas, Dr. Palacios Rubios, and Fray Antonio de Montesinos (who had meanwhile arrived in Madrid) were deputed by the Cardinal-regent to draft a project of laws which would sufficiently protect the Indians and secure fair government in the colonies. By common consent of his collaborators, the task of framing these laws was left exclusively to Las Casas. His propositions were:

Both Fray Antonio and Dr. Palacios Rubios approved these articles and the latter somewhat added to and improved them, recomposing them in the proper legal terminology of the time, after which they were again submitted, discussed, and in some unimportant details, amended, in the above-mentioned council presided over by the Cardinal, The next important step was to place the execution of these new provisions in the hands of trusted delegates who would apply them rigorously and in the sense designed by the council, for there had been no lack of excellent decrees, having the same end in view, but which had, in the past, been rendered null and of no effect, through the connivance of the colonial authorities, to whom their execution had been entrusted. Las Casas, for the best of motives, declined having any part in designating such officers and in consideration of certain rivalries existing between the Franciscan and Dominican Orders, especially in Indian affairs, the Cardinal finally decided to confide the necessary powers to the monks of St. Jerome, an Order which had thus far taken no part in colonial affairs. Upon receiving the Cardinal's notification of this intention, the General of that Order, who resided at San Bartolomé de Lupiano, summoned a chapter of all the priors of Castile, in which twelve monks were designated, amongst whom the regent might make his selection. Four priors came to Madrid to notify this result to his Eminence, and one afternoon [pg 81] the two regents, accompanied by the entire court, rode out to the monastery of St. Jerome near the Buen Retiro Gardens, where they lodged, to receive the formal answer of the chapter. Las Casas was, of course, present, and the regents were received by the monks in the sacristy of the church, which had been appropriately prepared for the great occasion. Cardinal Ximenez addressed the assembly, highly commending the willingness of the Jeronymites to undertake such a meritorious task, and then ordered that Las Casas be summoned to hear the result.

The boyish enthusiasm of Las Casas's character appears on this occasion, for, consumed with impatience, tortured by hopes and fears, he had waited outside in the upper cloister as long as he could stand it and had then finally descended a staircase which brought him unexpectedly to the sacristy door, just in time to hear that he was being searched for; some one asked him if he knew Las Casas, to which he meekly replied, “I am he.” As he could not get in at that door, he had to go round through the church, which obliged him to traverse the choir, where all the great people of the court in attendance on the regents were waiting and who, so Las Casas observes, were all glad to see him, except perhaps the Bishop of Burgos. This hour of Las Casas's triumph was complete; on his knees before the Cardinal-regent, in the presence of the assembled Priors of Castile and the entire court, he heard, with ill-repressed tears, the announcement that all he had most earnestly striven and prayed for was now [pg 82] to be realised and that he himself was designated to confer with the General of the Jeronymites concerning the choice of the men who were to execute the new laws in the Indies. The Cardinal, who unbent to few, treated Las Casas with genial familiarity and when the latter declared that he did not need the money his Eminence had provided for his expenses, as he had enough of his own, he smilingly observed, “Go to, father, I am richer than you.”

Not a moment of time was wasted, and that very evening Las Casas received his instructions and twenty ducats for the expenses of his journey to Lupiano, whither he set out the following morning. One of the twelve monks amongst whom the selection was to be made was in that monastery, and the General had him called and presented him to Las Casas, who was as pleased with his robust appearance, which promised to support the physical hardships of colonial life, as he was with all that he heard of his virtues and learning, though his face was as ugly a one as ever a man had; this was Fray Bernardino de Mazanedo, the Prior of Mejorada, and he was selected as one of the commission; Luis de Figueroa and the Prior of St. Jeromino in Seville were finally agreed upon between Las Casas and the General to complete the number.

No sooner had the Jeronymite monks arrived in Madrid than the agents of the colonists, and all those who were interested in maintaining the encomiendas and repartimientos, whose suppression [pg 83] meant the diminution of their incomes, laid instant siege to them. Las Casas was abused and even threatened in the public streets, and a well organised campaign of calumny and misrepresentation was set actively in motion. The Indians were represented as lazy, filthy pagans, of bestial morals, no better than dogs, and fit only for slavery, in which state alone there might be some hope of instructing and converting them to Christianity. Las Casas was flouted as a fanatic, bent on destroying the Spanish colonies, and as an enemy of his country's interests. So adroitly were these and other arguments presented, and so overwhelming was the mass of testimony favourable to the colonists that constantly reached the Jeronymites from all sides, that they began to be ill-affected towards Las Casas and to disregard his suggestions. Dr. Palacios Rubios was so disturbed by their new inclination, that after conversations with them, in which their changed views were plainly manifested, he declared it would be disastrous to send such men; he forthwith determined to stop their departure, if possible, before it was too late.

Cardinal Ximenez fell seriously ill at this time and Palacios Rubios sought access to him in vain. As soon as his Eminence had sufficiently convalesced to attend to business, he ordered the final instructions to be given to the Jeronymites and their departure to be hastened. One of the orders directed them, upon arriving in Hispaniola, to at once annul the encomiendas held by members of [pg 84] the Royal Council for the Indies. This struck a hard blow at Conchillos and the Bishop of Burgos amongst others, for the former lost eleven hundred Indians and the latter eight hundred, [29] nor from that time forth did any member of the Council openly hold property in slaves, though Las Casas was sceptical as to whether they did not continue to have private interests. Another similar order obliged all judges and royal officials in the colonies to surrender their slaves. The general sense of the instructions furnished to the Jeronymites for their guidance was in conformity with the ideas of Las Casas and the articles were indeed drawn up by him, although certain concessions which did not meet with his approval had been made to public opinion, and the important property-owners in the colonies were sufficiently powerful at court to obtain some modifications and to suppress some provisions in favour of the Indians, which seriously hampered the original proposals. In spite of the declaration formally set down in the will of Isabella the Catholic that the Indians were and must be considered free men, the contrary opinion had come to prevail, and in the beginning of his negotiations in Spain Las Casas himself had not ventured to insist too much or too openly on this point, until one day, when in conversation with Cardinal Ximenez, he queried by what principle of justice the Indians were held in subjection. His Eminence answered with some vivacity: “With no justice, for are they not free men? And who can doubt [pg 85] they are free?” From thenceforward Las Casas sustained this opinion unflinchingly.[30] The licentiate Zuazo of Seville was appointed to accompany the Jeronymites and to open an inquiry (tomar la residencia) into the administration of the colonial officials. The powers of the friars were the fullest possible and enabled them to inquire into all matters touching the welfare of the Indians and to correct abuses, but they were not “governors” as has been supposed and stated by many writers, but rather overseers, charged to ensure the proper execution of the laws which had been enacted to protect the natives.

As soon as the instructions were delivered to the Jeronymites, Las Casas received the following order from the Cardinal-regent:

“The Queen and the King. Bartholomew de Las Casas, priest, native of the city of Seville, and resident of the island of Cuba which is in the Indies.”

“For as much as we are informed that you have been and are resident in those parts for a long time, from which you know and are experienced in their affairs, especially in what touches the well-being and usefulness of the Indians, and you know and are acquainted with their life and conversation from having dwelt with them, and because we know your good zeal in our Lord's service, from which we hope that you will execute with all diligence and care what we shall charge and command you and will see to what contributes to the welfare of the souls and bodies of the Spaniards and Indians who live there; by these presents we command you to repair to [pg 86] those regions of the said Indies, such as the islands of Hispaniola, Cuba, San Juan, and Jamaica as well as to the mainland; and you shall advise, inform, and give your opinion to the pious Jeronymite fathers whom we despatch to effect the reformation of the Indies, and to other persons who may assist them in this, concerning everything which touches the liberty, good treatment and welfare of the souls and bodies of the said Indians in the said islands and mainland; and that you shall write to us giving information concerning everything that may be done or should be done in the said islands; and that you shall do everything required for our Lord's service; for all of which we give you full power, with all its casualties, dependencies, emergencies, annexes, and connexes; and we command our Admiral and appellate judges and all other justices whatsoever of the said Islands and Tierrafirma that they protect you and cause this power to be protected and that they shall not oppose or go contrary to its form and tenor nor consent that such be done at any time or in any way under pain of our displeasure and of 10,000 maravedis for each person who may act to the contrary.”

“Done at Madrid the 17th day of September in the year 1516 F. Cardinalis, Adrianus Ambasiator—By command of the Queen and the King her son, our sovereigns, the governors in their name. George de Baracaldo.”

In addition to this full power, Las Casas was given the title of Protector-General (or Procurator-General) of all the Indians, to which office an annual salary of one hundred dollars was attached, an amount which, for the times, was a considerable one.

Though everything now seemed ready for the departure of the Jeronymites and Las Casas, the [pg 87] members of the Council still advanced objections to the instructions which Palacios Rubios had drawn up for the licentiate Zuazo, who had been deputed to take the residencia of the colonial judges; it was feared that some severe decisions might be given on acts which these latter had performed in the interests of the members of the India Council, whose tools they were. Las Casas employed his usual direct tactics to overcome these delays and brought the matter to the Cardinal's notice. His Eminence summoned the licentiate Zapata and Dr. Carbajal into his presence and ordered them to sign Zuazo's papers; they obeyed, but contrived to affix a mark in cipher to their signatures which would enable them later to complain to the King that the regent had forced them to sign.

In taking leave of the Cardinal, Las Casas frankly declared that he feared the Jeronymites had been so tampered with and influenced before starting on their mission, that more evil than good was to be apprehended from their action. The Cardinal, nonplussed for an instant by these forebodings, exclaimed, “Whom then can we trust?” quickly adding, “Go on and do you look out for everything.”

This unpromising joint-commission sailed from San Lucar on November 11, 1516, but in separate vessels, the Jeronymites keeping aloof from Las Casas, who they contrived should not embark on the same ship with themselves. Their vessel reached Hispaniola thirteen days earlier than the other, which had been obliged to stop at Puerto Rico to discharge freight.

By detaching themselves from Las Casas at the very outset, the three Jeronymites doubtless intended to affirm the impartial and independent attitude essential to the judicial character of their mission. They were not carried to the Indies on any such wave of righteous zeal and indignation as bore the impetuous reformer on its crest. They were cloister-bred men, cautious and prudent in their decisions and deliberate in their acts, and they doubtless felt that for them to arrive in company with Las Casas would be to prejudice the impartiality of their proceedings in the eyes of all the colonists. They were sent to the colonies to carry out instructions of a most delicate and difficult nature and it was their obvious preference to fulfil their mission, as far as possible, without friction. In this exercise of caution, Las Casas beheld weakness and even treachery. His passionate nature chafed and raged at the deliberateness with which these impassive monks moved, and he was not slow to denounce them as having been won over by the blandishments of the colonial officials to betray the mission with which they were entrusted. His passion for justice, associated as it was with unrealisable ideals, refused to take account of the multifarious difficulties in the way of the reforms on which his heart was set, and he despised the obstacles to their consummation, through which he would have crashed, regardless of the consequences. Despite the sincerity of these one-sided views of the great Protector, it must be conceded that the problems confronting the Jeronymites were complex [pg 89] and difficult of solution. The prompt and reckless execution of their instructions would have overturned the entire economic system of the colonies which, however unjust in its principles, was the established condition of things, and would have certainly brought financial ruin as the first consequence. The situation was one which called for all their circumspection if the Jeronymites were to make their authority effective and their decisions operative. They were the first of all the men sent by the Spanish government to effect reforms in the colonies, whose intention to discharge their duty was conscientious, though Las Casas does not even admit this in their favour, for he declares that they had relatives in the islands whom they desired to benefit, and that in writing to the Governor of Cuba they even signed themselves as his “chaplains,” which seemed to him conclusive proof of their too subservient attitude towards the higher colonial authorities.

The Jeronymites, however, had been furnished with two sets of instructions and it was within their discretion to guide their policy according to either, as their judgment formed on the spot might dictate. The first set of instructions was in conformity with the plan drawn up by Las Casas and Palacios Rubios; the second was provided in case the result of their investigations showed the full application of the first to be inexpedient, for Cardinal Ximenez, though sympathising with the ideas of Las Casas, was not led by him, but viewed the situation, as he did every other that concerned the welfare of the [pg 90] Spanish realm, from the standpoint of a statesman trustee for the absent sovereign.

The first measures of the Jeronymites were in the right direction, but they were far too timid and temporising to satisfy the expectations of Las Casas; the conditions he had foreseen were only too prompt in declaring themselves, for the Jeronymites showed themselves somewhat insensible to the crying abuses which he incessantly pressed upon their attention. They did not give full credit to all of his representations and even ignored many of the proofs he adduced. They had failed to find the picture he had drawn in Spain of the Indians an entirely accurate one, and they resisted his reiterated demand that they should scrupulously obey the injunction to at once deprive all royal judges and officials of their encomiendas. The exasperation of Las Casas at this time pushed him to excesses which aroused such a storm of ill-feeling and hostility against him that his good friends the Dominicans feared for his life and insisted that he should come to live with them in their monastery, where he would be safer from any violence his enemies might attempt. Whether it was feasible to proceed in the drastic manner demanded by Las Casas is open to doubt. It is evident that the colonists would have offered an obstinate resistance, to combat which the three Jeronymites had nothing but the moral force of their commission. Even with our present facilities for rapid communication, it is not always easy for the central authority to control its agents and ensure the faithful execution of its [pg 91] intentions. In the sixteenth century, time and distance influenced powerfully the action of the government representatives. Their instructions were made complex, voluminous, in the effort to cover every possible emergency, but no foresight sufficed for the purpose, while the legal system in use opened many loopholes for evading or postponing the application of unpopular measures. An appeal from a royal commissioner's decision, to the India Council or to the King, entailed a delay of many long months or even years, during which each party contested every point. The outcome of such proceedings was problematical but the resisting party was always certain of the one positive advantage of delay.

CHAPTER VII. - LAS CASAS AND CHARLES V. THE GRAND CHANCELLOR. NEGRO SLAVERY. EVENTS AT COURT.

As soon as Zuazo arrived, nearly three months after the Jeronymites, Las Casas immediately lodged against members of the audiencia, an accusation of having encouraged and shared in the man-hunts in the Lucayan islands and the enslavement of the captured natives. The Jeronymites, whose every act was now one of opposition to Las Casas, showed much annoyance at this impeachment of the royal functionaries. They solicited divers opinions, addressing themselves to the accused officials, who naturally exculpated themselves, to the Franciscan monks, who were not over-friendly to the Indians, and to the Dominicans, who were their warm advocates. Much discussion ensued, and meanwhile the perplexed Jeronymites did nothing, so that matters continued as they had been before their arrival, except that the sufferings of the Indians were augmented by their owners, who feared that the encomienda system was nearing its end and hence worked their Indians to death, sparing neither women nor children, so as to get all the profit they could out of them before they lost them. Charges and counter-charges were sent [pg 93] to Spain, the Jeronymites complaining of Las Casas and he in turn denouncing them to Cardinal Ximenez, though many of his letters were intercepted and never reached their destination. Things had come to such a pass that the only hope of remedy lay in Las Casas returning to Spain to file complaints against the very men he had himself caused to be sent to the Indies and in whose impartiality and humanity he had placed all his hopes. Both the Dominicans and Franciscans, for once in accord in this business, addressed letters to the King and the Cardinal in defence of Las Casas, armed with which he sailed in May, 1517, for Spain and within fifty days arrived at Aranda de Duero, where he found his friend and protector, the Cardinal-regent, stricken with a serious illness.

The arrival in Spain of the young King, Charles I.—better known in history under his imperial title of Charles V.,—after repeated postponements was now confidently expected. During his regency, Cardinal Ximenez had been frequently embarrassed by the influences surrounding the King in his distant Flemish court. He had written with characteristic frankness advising the King not to bring a Flemish household with him into Spain, and as soon as the date for the royal journey was fixed, the Cardinal set out to meet his arriving sovereign, travelling as fast as his age and infirmities would allow. He had arrived at Aranda de Duero, where he was seized with an illness of such a mysterious character that his friends hinted that he had been poisoned.

In the one interview which Las Casas obtained, [pg 94] he perceived that the machinations of his enemies had not been entirely in vain, for he found the Cardinal's mind somewhat influenced by the representations which had reached him from the Jeronymites and the agents of the colonists.

Charles V. landed at Villaviciosa in Asturias on September 13, 1517. Among his first acts was the dispatch of a letter to the Cardinal, in which the latter was dismissed to his diocese with a few perfunctory expressions of regard and recognition for his services. Cardinal Ximenez breathed his last a few hours after reading this heartless communication and Las Casas was left to begin anew his life as a courtier and to cultivate the good-will of the all-powerful Flemish favourites. He was fortunate, at this time, in securing the friendship of a brother of Fray Antonio de Montesinos, named Reginaldo, who was also a Dominican and proved a staunch and resourceful ally.

Charles V.

From an engraving by Ferdinand Slema, made in 1778 after the portrait by Titian

Influences and arguments which sound strange enough in twentieth-century ears were powerful, and likely to be employed with dangerous success in Spain at that time. One of the members of the Council having asserted to Fray Reginaldo that the Indians were incapable of conversion, the friar submitted this proposition to the Prior of San Estéban in Salamanca, one of the most learned and influential men in the Dominican order, asking him to invite a body of theologians to determine whether or no such an affirmation was in accordance with Catholic doctrine, and to send him a copy of the decision. Thirteen doctors of theology and other [pg 95] ecclesiastical authorities replied with four or five signed conclusions, the last of which defined that all who held or propagated that error should be condemned to the stake as heretics. This was a weapon in Las Casas's hands which circumstances might make formidable; it was no trifling thing to be arraigned before the tribunal of the Inquisition on a charge of holding heretical doctrines, for neither rank nor calling availed to protect the offender, and it is somewhat astonishing that no reference to use of this “opinion” being made by Las Casas in any given case is found in the records of his struggle for the liberty of the Indians.

King Charles, even in his boyhood, was of a grave and thoughtful temperament, reserved and observant in an unusual degree, but however richly endowed with gifts which promised him a glorious reign, he necessarily left the administration of his government very largely under the direction of his advisers, of whom the two most influential were William de Croy, commonly called Chièvres, or by the Spaniards, Xevres, who had formerly been the King's governor, and Jean Salvage, a learned priest who was Dean of the University of Louvain. The latter's name was corrupted by the Spaniards into Juan Selvagio, and he held the office and title of Grand Chancellor, both hitherto unknown in Spain. These Flemings were odious to the Spaniards, who resented their high rank and influence and looked upon them as rapacious foreigners, who were controlling national affairs to the exclusion of those who had better claims, while they [pg 96] enriched themselves out of the Spanish treasury: none of them so much as spoke the national language and even the King's first task was to master Spanish in order to converse with his own subjects.

As the Grand Chancellor had control of the department of justice, it was to him that Las Casas first got himself presented. He was well received and afforded opportunities to state his case, and, as he produced letters given him by some French Franciscans from Picardy, whom he had known in the Indies and who were friends of the Chancellor, he soon found himself upon terms of some friendliness with him. The Chancellor found great interest in listening to all that Las Casas had to tell him, and it is not to be doubted that the latter's habitual earnestness when on this subject was increased by the evident sympathy of his listener, upon whose support the fate of his projects depended.

This friendship with the detested Flemings cost Las Casas dear with his own people, and made him more unpopular than ever. His opponents were obliged, however, to cease abusing him in their letters and official papers, for not only did the Chancellor openly befriend him, but he handed over to him most of the correspondence pertaining to Indian affairs. Las Casas translated the contents into Latin, adding his own observations or objections to the different reports or proposals, and then returned them to the Chancellor, who was delighted to have such expert assistance in dispatching complicated affairs, in which he was himself unpractised. From the Chancellor's favour to that [pg 97] of the King was but a step, and the charge of reforming Indian legislation, which Las Casas had held from Cardinal Ximenez, was renewed to him. This welcome news was given him one day by the Chancellor remarking in Latin, which was their habitual tongue, Rex dominus noster jubet quod vos et ego opponamus remedia Indiis; faciatis vestra memorabilia. Las Casas was quick to obey this congenial behest. [31]

It is indicative of the priority of importance which Las Casas habitually gave to spiritual over temporal aids, that he first had recourse to the priors of the religious orders, asking them to have their communities pray unceasingly and with special earnestness, that his mind might be illumined by divine grace to perceive what course he must follow. He next drew up his plan, but perhaps in no act of his long career is there less evidence of the action of divine guidance, for, in framing [pg 98] his project, he committed an error which he himself sincerely and frankly deplored with touching humility, and which has served all his detractors ever since as ground on which to bring a grave charge against him.

In obedience to the King's command conveyed to Las Casas through the Chancellor, he drew up a plan in which he proposed that labourers should be induced to emigrate to the Indies, by granting that each person, whether man or child, should have his expenses paid as far as Seville, the place of embarkation, at the rate of half a real per day. While waiting in Seville to start, the India House (Casa de Contractacion) was to lodge and feed them, their passage to Hispaniola was to be given them and their food furnished for one year. Any of the emigrants who, at the expiration of the first year, found themselves incapacitated on account of the climate to support themselves, should be entitled to further assistance in the form of a royal loan. Lands were to be given them gratis and also the requisite farming implements for working them, in which their rights as owners should be permanent and hereditary. A more liberal scheme of assisted emigration could hardly be imagined. Other inducements were held out to attract emigrants under the new regulations and Las Casas acceded to the request of certain of the colonists in Santo Domingo to ask the King's consent to the importation of negro slaves to replace the Indians who should be freed.

This recommendation cost Las Casas dearly [pg 99] enough and later exposed his reputation to unjustifiable attacks, some of which even represented him as having introduced negro slavery into America; others as having been betrayed by blind zeal in favour of the Indians into promoting the slave-trade at the expense of the Africans. No one more sincerely deplored his course in this matter than he himself when he realised the significance of what he had done, and the sincerity and humility of his compunction should have sufficed to disarm his detractors. The most formal accusation made by a reputable historian against Las Casas is found in Robertson's History of America, vol. iii., Year 1517, in which he charges the apostle of the Indians with having proposed to Cardinal Ximenez to purchase a sufficient number of negroes from the Portuguese settlements on the coast of Africa and to transport them to America in order that they might be employed as slaves in working in the mines and tilling the ground. Cardinal Ximenez however, when solicited to encourage the commerce, peremptorily rejected the proposition because he perceived the iniquity of reducing one race of men to slavery when he was consulting about the means of restoring liberty to another. But Las Casas, from the inconsistency natural to men who hurry with headlong impetuosity towards a favourite point, was incapable of making the distinction. While he contended earnestly for the liberty of the people born in one quarter of the globe, he laboured to enslave the inhabitants of another region and in the warmth of his zeal to save the Americans from the yoke, pronounced it to be lawful and expedient to impose one still heavier on the African.

Language could hardly more completely travesty the facts, for Las Casas neither “laboured to enslave the inhabitants of another region” nor did he “pronounce it lawful” to increase slavery amongst the Africans. The moral aspect of the question of slavery was not under consideration and the recommendation of Las Casas is seen upon examination to reduce itself to this: he advised that Spanish colonists in America should be allowed the privilege, common in Spain and Portugal, of employing negro slave labour on their properties. Since Spaniards might hold African slaves in Spain, it implied no approval of slavery as an institution, to permit them to do the same in the colonies. Las Casas was engaged in defending a hitherto free people from the curse of a peculiarly cruel form of slavery, but had he regarded the institution as justifiable in itself, he would have modified the ardour of his opposition to its extension.

The truth plainly appears in the chronicles of the times and establishes beyond cavil exactly what Las Casas did, and under what circumstances and for what purposes he made the recommendation which he never afterwards ceased to deplore. Retributive justice has followed these attempts of several lesser contemporaries of Robertson to asperse the character of one of the purest, noblest, and most humane of men, and while discredit has overtaken the inventors and publishers of these falsehoods, the investigations of impartial historians, provoked by their enormity, have resulted in banishing such fables from historical controversy.

The original basis of the charge that Las Casas favoured the introduction of negro slavery into America is a passage in Herrera's Historia de las Indias Occidentals, written in 1598, thirty-two years after the death of Las Casas, and which reads as follows:

“As the licentiate Las Casas encountered much opposition to the plan he had formed for helping the Indians and seeing that the opinions he had published had produced no result, in spite of the extraordinary credit he enjoyed with the Flemish chancellor, Juan Selvagio, he had recourse to other means to attain the same ends. He asked in 1517 that the importation of Africans be permitted to the Spaniards settled in the Indies, in order to diminish the labour and sufferings of the Indians in the mines and on the plantations, and that a good number of labourers be enrolled in Spain who would emigrate to the Indies upon the conditions and with the advantages which he proposed. This new proposition was approved by the Cardinal of Tortosa, Adrian, by the Grand Chancellor, and the Flemish ministers. The Chamber of Commerce at Seville was consulted to learn what number of Africans, Cuba, Santo Domingo, San Juan [Puerto Rico], and Jamaica would require. It was replied that it would be sufficient to send four thousand. This answer being almost immediately made known by some intriguer to the Flemish governor of Bressa, this courtier obtained the monopoly of the trade from the sovereign and sold it to some Genoese for twenty-five thousand ducats on condition that during eight years no other license should be granted by the King. This arrangement was extremely harmful to the Population of the islands, especially to the Indians for [pg 102] whose benefit it had been granted; in fact had the trade been free, all the Spaniards might have engaged in it, but as the Genoese sold their right at a very high price few Spaniards were able to pay, and the importation of blacks was almost nil. The King was counselled to pay back the twenty-five thousand ducats from his treasury to the governor and recover his rights, which would pay him well and be of great advantage to his subjects. Unfortunately the King had little money then and, as he was left in ignorance of much concerning the affairs of the Indies, nothing of what was most important was done.”

There is not a word in this passage which even refers to the introduction of negro slavery and Herrera in another passage (tom. i., dec. i., lib. iv., cap. xii.) states that a royal ordinance given on September 3, 1500, to Don Nicholas de Ovando, the Governor of Hispaniola, permitted the importation of negro slaves. This was two years before Las Casas made his first voyage as a young man of twenty-eight to America, and in 1503, the same Ovando asked that no more negro slaves be sent to Hispaniola because they escaped and lived amongst the natives whom they corrupted. [32] The number of negroes continued, nevertheless, to increase and repeated mention of their presence in the colonies is found in different passages throughout the history of Herrera and in other early writers.

Since the first half of the fifteenth century (about 1440) [33] the Portuguese had been engaged in bringing [pg 103] negroes from the west coast of Africa and selling them in Lisbon and Seville, so that during half a century before Las Casas appeared on the scene where he was destined to play so distinguished a part, Andalusia and the southern provinces of Spain were well provided with slaves and a flourishing trade was carried on. The condition of such slaves was not a particularly hard one and the children born in Spain of slave parents were Christians. Since this system was recognised by the laws of the kingdom, and indeed by those of all Christendom at that time, no additional injury would be done to the negroes by permitting Spaniards who might own them in Spain, to take them also to the colonies. Las Casas was a man of such humane temperament that oppression and injustice everywhere of whatever kind revolted him, but it can hardly be required, even of him, to be several centuries in advance of his times in denouncing a commonly accepted usage which presented, as far as we know, few crying abuses. Toleration of an established order, even though an essentially evil one, is a very different thing from the extension of its worst features in regions where it is unknown and amongst people ill-fitted to support its burdens. A small group of men, chiefly Dominican monks, with Las Casas at their head, courageously championed the cause of freedom [pg 104] and humanity in a century and amongst a people hardened to oppression and cruelty; they braved popular fury, suffered calumny, detraction, and abuse; they faced kings, high ecclesiastics, and all the rich and great ones of their day, incessantly and courageously reprimanding their injustice and demanding reform. Since the memorable day when Fray Antonio de Montesinos proclaimed himself “vox clamantis in deserto” before the astonished and incensed colonists of Hispaniola, the chorus of rebuke had swelled until it made itself heard, sparing none amongst the offenders against equity and humanity. The development of the collective moral sense of a people is only slowly progressive, and the betterment of racial conditions is more safely accomplished by evolution than revolution, hence if the moral vision of Las Casas did not detect the injustice practised on the negroes, simultaneously with his keen perception of that which was being perpetrated on the Indians, his failure cannot be justly attributed either to indifference to the lot of one race of people or to wilful inconsistency in seeking to benefit another at its expense. That his action was not understood in any such sense at the time, is conclusively proven by the fact that inconsistency was never alleged against him, nor employed as a polemical weapon in the heated controversies in which he was engaged during all his life with the keenest and most determined opponents to his views. Far afield indeed did his enemies wander, seeking for weapons both of attack and defence, and nothing that could be [pg 105] twisted into an offence against the public conscience or national interests escaped the keen eyes of the searchers. He was himself the first to perceive the error and contradiction into which he had inadvertently fallen, and forty years before Herrera's work was published, he had expressed his contrition for his failure to appreciate the conditions of African slavery, in the following passage, which occurs in the fourth volume (page 380) of his Historia General:

“The cleric Las Casas first gave this opinion that license should be granted to bring negro slaves to these countries [the Indies] without realising with what injustice the Portuguese captured and enslaved them, and afterwards, not for everything in the world would he have offered it, for he always held that they were made slaves by injustice and tyranny, the same reasoning applying to them as to the Indians.”

Fuller and more mature consideration of the entire question of slavery in all its aspects, of the right of one man or of nations to hold property in the flesh and blood of their fellow-men, conducted Las Casas directly to the necessary and generous conviction that the whole system must be everywhere condemned; for again in Chapter 128 he says of this advice which the cleric gave,

“that he very shortly after repented, judging himself guilty of inadvertence; and as he saw—which will be later perceived—that the captivity of the negroes was quite as unjust as that of the Indians, the remedy he had counselled, that negroes should be brought so that the Indians might be freed, was no better, even though [pg 106] he believed they had been rightfully procured; although he was not positive that his ignorance in this matter and his good intention would exculpate him before the divine justice.”

As has been noted, the transfer of his monopoly by the Governor of Bressa to Genoese merchants, instead of increasing the exportation of negroes to America, resulted in almost stopping the nefarious trade, hence no considerable amount of mischief is traceable to the adoption of Las Casas's suggestion, which was only one of many enumerated in his scheme. Had the project as he framed it been accepted in its entirety and loyally carried out, no increased injustice would have been done to the negroes, for it was the frightful mortality amongst the cruelly driven Indians that rapidly reduced the numbers of labourers and made gaps which could only be filled by the importation of others from elsewhere. Under a more humane system, the Indians might still have laboured, but not in excess of their powers; their lives would not have been sacrificed or rendered unendurable, while the colonists would have become rich less rapidly; there would have been no shortage of workmen and little need for the importation of Africans at a high price, even though one negro did the work of four Indians, according to the popular estimate. While many admirable suggestions of Las Casas were rejected, this blamable one concerning the permission to import negroes was accepted, and thus by a singular irony of fate, this good man, whose whole life was a self-sacrificing [pg 107] apostolate in favour of freedom, actually came to be aspersed as a promoter of slavery.

The controversy on this passage in the life of Las Casas has been touched upon here because it furnished at one time material for much discussion, [34] but the light of historical research has long since dispersed the artificial clouds which misrepresentation caused to gather about the fame of the Protector of the Indians, and there now neither is, nor can be, any doubt concerning the sentiments and intentions of one whose noble figure is too clearly defined on the horizon of history ever again to be blurred or obscured.

Another part of the plan for colonisation on the moral basis of benefiting the Indians as well as the Spaniards, was the foundation of fortified places at intervals along the coast of the territory to be granted. In each of these settlements, some thirty men should be stationed with a provision of various articles, such as the Indians prized, for trading purposes; also several missionary priests, whose occupation would be teaching and converting the Indians. It was maintained that by kind treatment the Indians could be attracted to the Spaniards and thus, little by little, become civilised, profitable, and voluntary subjects of the King.

Unfortunately for the prosperous development of these benevolent projects, the mischievous Bishop of [pg 108] Burgos and his brother, who, since the latter part of Cardinal Ximenez's regency, had been excluded from active participation in Indian affairs, began once more to exercise an influence, partly, perhaps because long experience had equipped them with a practical knowledge of details which the Grand Chancellor found useful, and partly, so Las Casas hints, because they had succeeded, by spending important sums of money, in recovering their former offices. At first the Bishop's opposition was mild enough, and he contented himself with pointing out that he had never been able to induce emigrants to go to the Indies and that Las Casas's scheme was unworkable. Las Casas, however, affirmed that he could easily find three thousand workmen as soon as he was authorised to assure them of the King's conditions, and that the Bishop had not succeeded in finding men because he had treated the islands as a penal colony, whereas now, on the contrary, the severest punishment, after the death penalty, with which a colonist in the Indies could be threatened, was that of being shipped back to Spain.

The King had left Valladolid[35] on his way to take formal possession of the kingdom of Aragon and these negotiations were being carried on at Aranda de Duero, where a halt had been made. Las Casas fell ill and the court moved on without him, but it [pg 109] is indicative of the favour he had already acquired with the King that frequently the monarch exclaimed: “Oh, I wonder how Micer Bartolomé is getting on!” Micer was the title the Flemings gave to ecclesiastics, and Charles V., who was the reverse of demonstrative, commonly used this familiar appellation in speaking of Las Casas. Before the court reached Zaragoza, the invalid was on his legs again and had rejoined the others, being received with great joy by the Grand Chancellor, [36] who was almost as enthusiastic as Las Casas himself in pushing forward the Indian reforms. Delay, however, was again caused at Zaragoza, where the King and court were established, by the illness of the ever-contrary Bishop of Burgos; while waiting there to resume business, a letter was sent to Las Casas from Seville by his friend Fray Reginaldo, containing a full account of the ruthless cruelties of one of the captains of Pedro Arias, named Espinosa, which cost the lives of forty thousand Indians. This ghastly chronicle, which was supplied by a Franciscan, Fray Francisco Roman, who wrote as an eye-witness of the atrocities, was immediately laid before the Chancellor by Las Casas; the former was much impressed by the report and directed Las Casas to go to the Bishop on his behalf and read him the letter.

The Bishop took the news coolly enough and [pg 110] merely observed that he had long since advised the recall of Pedro Arias.[37]

With the recovery of the Bishop, everything seemed ready for the resumption of business, when fate dealt Las Casas one of the hardest blows he had had to sustain. The Grand Chancellor, who owned to feeling indisposed on a Friday, became worse on Saturday, so that he had to keep his room; his illness persisted on Sunday with signs of fever and, as Las Casas tersely puts it, “they buried him on Wednesday.”

With the death of the Fleming died all hope of any immediate action in behalf of the Indians; in the absence of any other as familiar with the business of the Indian department as himself, the Bishop of Burgos found himself once more omnipotent, or as Las Casas puts it, “he seemed to rise to the heavens while the cleric [himself] sank to the depths.” The Chancellor's successor, named by the King pro tempore, was the Dean of Bisancio, a heavy, phlegmatic man who slept peacefully all through the sessions of the Council and only had sufficient perception to commend Las Casas for the zeal with which he pestered him day and night, remarking on one occasion with a dull smile: Commendamus in Domino, domine Bartholomeo, vestram diligentiam. Two such ill-assorted characters as this bovine dean and the fiery Las Casas only succeeded in tormenting one another to no purpose, though, as the latter observes, in this case “it did not kill the Dean for all that.”