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The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account

Condition: BRAND NEW ISBN: 9780801844300 Author(s): Bartolome De Las Casas Format: Paperback Year: 1992 Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press Dimensions: 137 x 203 x 12 (w x l x h) Pages: 152 Pages: 17

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Description: Five hundred years after Columbus's first voyage to the New World, the debate over the European impact on Native American civilization has grown more heated than ever. Among the first--and most insistent--voices raised in that debate was that of a Spanish priest, Bartolome de Las Casas, acquaintance of Cortes and Pizarro and shipmate of Velasquez on the voyage to conquer Cuba. In 1552, after forty years of witnessing--and opposing--countless acts of brutality in the new Spanish colonies, Las Casas returned to Seville, where he published a book that caused a storm of controversy that persists to the present day. The Devastation of the Indies is an eyewitness account of the first modern genocide, a story of greed, hypocrisy, and cruelties so grotesque as to rival the worst of our own century. Las Casas writes of men, women, and children burned alive 'thirteen at a time in memory of Our Redeemer and his twelve apostles.' He describes butcher shops that sold human flesh for dog food ('Give me a quarter of that rascal there, ' one customer says, 'until I can kill some more of my own'). Slave ship captains navigate 'without need of compass or charts, ' following instead the trail of floating corpses tossed overboard by the ship before them. Native kings are promised peace, then slaughtered. Whole families hang themselves in despair. Once-fertile islands are turned to desert, the wealth of nations