CORONADO

Bartolome de las Casas arrived in San Salvador that’s in central America with his father and uncle on Columbus’ first voyage in 1493. He’s why we know about Columbus’ log, because the original, which las Casas transcribed, got lost. He saw what happened on San Salvador and in other parts of the Americas that he eventually journeyed to, and he put his observations and opinions in pamphlets and books, two of which we know as

1) History of the Indies, (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), which covers from Columbus through the conquest of Mexico, and

2) Very Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies (also published as The Tears of the Indians) (Stanford: Academic Reprints, 1953).

From the gitgo, the Dominican missionaries objected to enslaving the natives: In 1510, Frey Antón Montecino delivered a sermon composed by his fellow missionaries to the honchos at Spain’s American capital in Santo Domingo damning them for forcing the natives to work the mines and agriculture they’d started up.

Then, in late 1518, the Taino Indians on San Salvador came down with smallpox. The combination of enslavement and disease disgusted Bartolome de las Casas to the degree that he swtiched careers from being a gold hound like most of his shipmates to being a clergyman. He eventually became the bishop of Chiapas, Mexico, and castigated his fellow Spaniards noting that in San Salvador, for instance, no more than a thousand natives were left of the approximately 3 million the Spanish had seen there a mere decade from first contact. Enslavement, warfare, disease. “Who of those in future centuries will believe this? he wrote. “I myself who … saw it … can hardly believe that such was possible.”

De las Casas became a champion of the Indians, and argued against the Vatican’s position that forced conversion of heathens and infidels was okay. Claiming the Indians shouldn’t be forced to help the plantation owners and miners didn‘t make him popular with them, either, even though he didn’t take issue with replacing the natives with imported black slaves when the natives died off. But he was a real odd-ball for his time: Black slavery had been going on for centuries, but in old age he even came out against that.

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