Chapter 14
Section 14 of A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Arnie Horton.
A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé de las Casas. Translator unknown. Section 14 of the Pearl Coast, Paria, and Trinity Isle. The Spaniards made great spoils and havoc from the Parian coast to the Bay of Benaquela exclusively, which is about 200 miles.
It can hardly be expressed by tongue or pen how many and how great injuries and injustices the inhabitants of this seashore have endured from the year 1510 to this day. I will only relate two or three piacular and criminal acts of the first magnitude, capable of comprehending all other enormities that deserve the sharpest torments wit and malice can invent and so make way for a deserved judgment upon them.
A nameless pirate of the year 1510, accompanied with a parcel of sixty or seventy, arrived at Trinity Island, which exceeds Sicily both in amplitude and fertility and is contiguous to the continent on that side where it toucheth upon Paria, whose inhabitants, according to their quality, are more addicted to property and virtue than the rest of the Indians, who immediately published an edict that all the inhabitants should come and cohabit with them.
The Indian lords and subjects gave them a debonair and brotherly reception, serving them with wonderful alacrity, furnishing them with daily provisions in so plentiful a manner that they might have sufficed a more numerous company, for it is the mode among Indians of this new world to supply the Spaniards very bountifully with all manner of necessaries. A short time after the Spaniards built a stately house, which was an apartment for the Indians,
that they might accomplish their premeditated designs, which was thus effected when they were to thatch it and had raised it to men's height. They enclosed several of them there to expedite the work, as they pretended, but in truth that they who were within might not see those without. Thus part of them surrounded the house with sword in hand that no one should stir out, and part of them entered it and bound the Indians, menacing them with death
if they offered to move afoot, and if anyone endeavored to escape, he was presently hacked in pieces. But some of them partly wounded and partly unwounded getting away with others who went not into the house. About one hundred and two hundred betook themselves to another house with bows and arrows, and when they were all there the Spaniards secured the doors, throwing in fire at another place, and so they all perished. From hence they set sail
to the island of St. John with near upon one hundred and eighty slaves, whom they had bound, where they sold one half of them, and thence to Hispaniola where they disposed of the rest. Now when I taxed this captain with wickedness and treachery in the very isle of St. John, he dismissed me with this answer, Forbear, good sir, I had this in commission from those who sent me hither, that I should surprise them by the spettiest pretense of peace, whom
I could not seize by open force, and in truth this same captain told me with his own mouth that in Trinity Isle alone he had met with a father and mother in civil usage, which he uttered to his greater confusion and the aggravation of his sins. The monks of our order of St. Dominic on a certain time held a consult about sending one of their fraternistic men into this island, that by their preaching they might instruct them in the Christian
faith and teach them the way to be saved, of which they were wholly ignorant, and to this end they sent thither a religious and licentiate in theology, or doctor in divinity as we term it among us, a man famous for his virtue and holiness, with a lake his associate to visit the country, converse with the inhabitants, and find out the most convenient places for the erection of monasteries. As soon as they were arrived according to custom, they were
entertained like celestial messengers with great affection, joy and respect, as well as they could, for they were ignorant of their tongue, and so made use of signs for the present. It happened that after the departure of that vessel that brought these religious men, another came into the port, whose crew, according to their hellish custom, fraudulently and unknown to the religious, brought away a prince of that province as captive, who was called
Alphonsus, for they are ambitious of a Christian name, and forthwith desire without farther information that he would baptize him. But the said lord Alphonsus was deceitfully over persuaded to go on board of them with his wife and about seventeen more, pretending that they would give him a collation, which the prince and they did, for he was confident that the religious would by no means suffer him be abused, for he had no so much confidence
in the Spaniards. But as soon as they were upon deck, the perfidious rogues set sail for Hispaniola, where they were sold as slaves. The whole country being extremely discomposed and understanding that their prince and princess were violently carried away, addressed themselves to these religiosos who were in great danger of losing their lives. But they being made to understand this unjust action were extraordinarily afflicted, and tis probable would have suffered
death rather than permit the Indians to be so injuriously dealt with, which might prove an obstruction to their receiving of and believing in God's word. Yet the Indians were sedated by the promises of the religious, for they told them they would send letters by the first ship that was bound for Hispaniola, whereby they would procure the restitution and return of their lord and his retinue. It pleased God to send a ship thither forthwith to the
greater confirming of the governor's damnation, wherein the letters they sent to the religious of Hispaniola, letters containing repeated exclamations and protestations, and protest against such actions. But those that received them denied them justice, for that they were partakers of that prey made of those Indians so unjustly and impiously captivated. But when the religious who had engaged to the inhabitants that their lord Alphonsus should
be restored within four months, and found that neither in four nor eight months he was returned, they prepared themselves for death and to deliver up their life to Christ, to whom they had offered it before their departure from Spain. Thus the innocent Indians were revenged on the innocent priests, for they were of opinion that the religious had a hand in the plot, partly because they found their promises that their lord should return within
four months ineffectual, and partly because the inhabitants made no difference between a religious friar and a Spanish rogue. At another time it fell out likewise, through the rampant tyranny and cruel deeds of evil-minded Christians, that the Indians put to death two Dominican friars, of which I am a faithful witness, escaping myself not without a very great miracle, which transaction I resolved silently to pass over, lest I should terrify
the reader with the horror of the fact. In these provinces there was a city seated on the bay of Codera, whose lord was called Higueroto, a name either proper to persons or common to the rulers of that place, a cacique of such signal clemency and his subjects of such noted virtue, that the Spaniards who came thither were extraordinarily welcome, furnished with provisions, enjoying peace and comfort, and no refreshment wanting, but a perfidious
wretch got many of them on board and sold them to the islanders of St. John. At the same time I landed upon that island where I obtained a sight of this tyrant and heard the relation of his actions. He utterly destroyed that land, which the rest of the Spaniards took very unkindly at his hands, who frequently played the pirate and robbed on that shore, detesting it as a wicked thing because they had lost that place where they used to be
treated with as great hospitality and freedom as if they had been under their own roof. Nay, they transported from this place among them to the Isles of Hispaniola and St. John to millions of men and upward and made the coast a desert. It is most certainly true that they never ship off a vessel freighted with Indians, but they pay a third part as tribute to the sea besides those who are slaughtered when found in their own houses.
Now the source and original of all this is the ends they have proposed to themselves, for there is a necessity of taking with them a great number of Indians that they may gain a great sum of money by their sale. Now the ships are very slenderly furnished with provisions and water in small quantity to satisfy a few. Left the tyrants, who are termed owners or proprietors of ships, should be at too great expense in victualing their vessels. Nay,
they scarce carry food enough with them to maintain the Spaniards that manage the vessel, which is the reason so many Indians die with hunger and thirst, and of necessity they must be thrown overboard. Nay, one of them told me this for a truth, that there being such a multitude of men thus destroyed, a ship may sail from the Isle of Lucaya to Hispaniola, which is a voyage of twenty leagues and upward, without chart or compass, by the sole direction
or observation of dead fluctuating carcasses. But afterward, when arrived and driven up into the Isle whither they are brought to be sold, there is no person that is in some small measure compassionate, but would be extremely moved and discomposed at the sight, vis-à-vis to spy old men and women together with naked children half starved. Then they separate parents from children, wives from their husbands, about ten or twenty in a company,
and cast lots for them, that the detestable owners of the ships may have their share, who prepare two or three ships and equip them as a fleet of pirates, going ashore ravaging and forcing men out of their houses, and then robbing them. But when the lot of any one of them falls upon a parcel, that hath an aged or diseased man, the tyrant whose allotment he is, usually burst out as followeth, let this old fellow be damned. Why do you bestow
him upon me? Must I think you be at the charge of his burial? And this sickly wretch, how comes he to be one of my allotted portion? Must I take care for his cure? Not I. Hence you may guess what estimate and value the Spaniards put upon Indians, and whether they practice and fulfill that divine and heavenly precept in joining mutual love and society. There can be nothing more cruel and detestable than the tyrannical usage of the Spaniards
towards the Indians in their pearl fishing, for the torments undergone in the unnatural exenteration and tearing out with parasitil hands the richer bowels of our common mother, or the inward cruciating racks of the most profligate heaven-daring desperado can admit of no comparison with these. Although the extracting or digging for gold is one of the sharpest subterranean drudgery, they plunge them down four or five elves deep under water,
where swimming about without breathing, they eradicate and pull up oysters wherein the pearls are engendered. Sometimes they rise up to the superfities of the water with nets full of oysters for respiration and air, but if these miserable creatures stay but a little more than is ordinary to rest themselves, the hangman is immediately upon them in a canoe or small boat, who beating them with many stripes drag them by the hair of the
head under water, that they may drudge again at their expulcation or pearl fishing. Their food is fish, and the same which contains the pearls and cassavas made of roots with a few mahits, the bread of that country. In the former there is little or no nutriment or substance, and the other is not made without great trouble, nor for all this have they a sufficient allowance thereof to support nature. Their lodging or bed is the earth
confined to a pair of stocks for fear that they should run away, and it frequently happens that they are drowned with the toil of this kind of fishing and never more seen. For the tuberoms and maroxi, certain marine monsters that devour a complete proportioned man wholly at once, prey upon them under water. You must consider withal that it is impossible for the strongest constitution to continue long under water without breathing, and they ordinarily
die through the extreme rigor of the cold, spitting blood which is occasioned by the too great compression of the breast, procreated by a continued holding breath under water, for by too much cold a profluvium of blood follows. Their hair naturally black is changed into a combust, burnt or sun color like that of the sea wolves. Their shoulders and backs covered or over spread with a saltish humor that they appear rather like monsters in human
shape than men. They have destroyed all the lukaeans by this intolerable or rather diabolical exercise for the customary emolument or gain of luka, and by this means gained the value of fifty, sometimes one hundred crowns of every individual Indian. They sell them though it is prohibited publicly, for the lukaeans were excellent swimmers, and several perished in this isle that came from other provinces.
End of section 14.
