51 pages • 1 hour read
Bartolome de Las CasasA Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1552A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Hispaniola”
This short chapter provides gruesome detail of the atrocities committed on the island of Hispaniola, which was “the first to witness the arrival of the Europeans and the first to suffer the wholesale slaughter of its people” (14). Once on the island, Europeans quickly set about “taking native women and children both as servants and to satisfy their own base appetites” (14) and taking all food “natives contrived to produce by the sweat of their brows” (14). This led the natives to hide food, as well as women and children, or escape to the hills.
The wife of an island chief—identified in a footnote as Guarionex, one of the five kings of Hispaniola—was raped by a European commander. This led to a native revolt that was easily stifled by superior Spanish military technology. In these events the Spaniards massacred villages “as though they were so many sheep herded into a pen” (15). This massacre included women and infants: “they grabbed suckling infants by the feet and, ripping them from their mothers’ breasts, dashed them headlong against the rocks… [or] threw them over their shoulders into a river” (15). Manners of murder included disembowelment, hanging by the neck over fire, and hunting with dogs. Spanish casualties were very low, though when they did occur the Spanish unofficially agreed that “for every European killed one hundred natives would be executed” (17).
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Kingdoms of Hispaniola”
Hispaniola was divided into five local kingdoms, all ruled by their own local king. The first kingdom was called Magua, meaning Kingdom of the Plain. Las Casas calls this large plain “one of the wonders of the world” (18), full of over 30,000 rivers rich in alluvial gold.
To the mountains of the west was the province of Cibao, ruled by Guarionex, a “dutiful and virtuous” leader with a “placid temperament” (18). Guarionex, “much devoted to the King and Queen of Spain” (19), offered bountiful gold to the Spanish and voluntarily opened his land to cultivation. The Spanish in return raped his wife and captured the fleeing ruler, sending him back to Spain on a ship that was lost at sea. Las Casas observes, “A fortune in gold sank beneath the waves that day […] In this way, God passed judgement on the great iniquities committed by the Spanish” (20).
The second kingdom to the north of the plain was known as Marien, a “rich region, larger than Portugal, although a good deal more fertile”(20). Marien was where the “old Admiral” Columbus first landed. Here he was received graciously by Guacanagarí, the king of this region, who eventually died destitute in the mountains after fleeing the massacre of his people.
The third kingdom, known as Maguana, “produces the best sugar on the whole island” (21). Its king Caonabo died in the same shipwreck as Guarionex. His brothers subsequently mounted an uprising that was brutally quelled by the Spanish.
Las Casas describes the central fourth kingdom, Xaragua, as courtly and civilized. It was ruled by a king named Behechio and his sister, Anacaona. The leadership of this kingdom was also massacred by the Spanish, who summoned them, herded them into a straw hut, and then burned it. Massacres of the village people included children, who were sometimes brutally dismembered. The queen Anacaona was hanged.
In the fifth kingdom, Higuey, the Spanish “invented so many new methods of murder that it would be quite impossible to set them all down on paper” (23).
None of these Spaniards broke any laws or were even guilty of hatred, anger, or thoughts of retribution. Following the slayings, many women and children were enslaved by the colonists. This was done under the pretext that their new masters would teach them the Christian faith (part of the assumptions of the encomienda system). In fact, they were used as field and mine laborers, with many dying in these roles or due to malnutrition.
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
Las Casas’s account of the conquest of Hispaniola is one of the text’s more historically and geographically detailed narratives, likely due to his long-term presence on the island. As Las Casas notes, it was the first area colonized by the Spanish, shortly after Columbus landed in 1502. Unlike most other chapters, here we receive the names of rulers and the meaning of the names of their kingdoms.
The recurring modes of atrocity and conquest detailed in these chapters include the deceptive summoning of island leadership and subsequent murder of these leaders to destabilize the larger communities, the corralling and burning alive of islanders, and the enslavement of islanders for labor as part of the encomienda system. Unlike the events on most islands, the captured kings of Hispaniola were sent to Spain—though the ship was lost at sea and never arrived in Europe. Soon the Spanish developed a policy of capturing and keeping island kings alive, both to force island populations into subservience and to torture the kings for knowledge of the whereabouts of the islands’ precious metals—which in most cases the kings were already giving over freely.
There are several trademark moments of Las Casas’s rhetorical intervention in these chapters. Las Casas consistently describes the natural beauty and bountiful resources of the island kingdoms, often comparing them to areas of Spain. More than simply providing powerful natural imagery, these passages participate in a colonial gaze that alerts Las Casas’s royal readership to the resource wealth that could be lost if not properly preserved.
In another trademark moment, Las Casas asserts that the ship carrying captured indigenous kings and an incredible wealth of their gold back to Spain was lost at sea as a punishment from God. Las Casas will continue to cast Spanish losses in the New World as divine retributions for colonial atrocities, priming Spanish rulership to view them as the same. Las Casas closes the chapters by reiterating the innocence of the island people, invoking the pity of his readership.
At the end of Chapter 2, Las Casas gives his royal readership a real-world view of the encomienda system, which Las Casas spent most of his political life working to abolish. During the early years of Spanish colonization, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain established this system to prevent colonists from creating feudal fiefdoms. Under the rules of the system, the land remained the possession of the Crown while the natives worked the land on behalf of the colonists, who divvied them up by household. In exchange, the Indians were to receive a small wage, tutelage in Christianity, and rights under the Crown. None of these benefits ever presented themselves to the natives, who became slaves under the system.
