Destruction Of The Indies Summary

A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies is one of the earliest written sources that serves as evidence of interaction between the Europeans and the New World during the Spanish conquest of the 15th century. Not only does the work provide evidence of a historical event but it also illustrates the growing connectivity of the world at this time period. While the expeditions from Spain to the New World were sent with the purpose of spreading Christianity and collecting gold, the Spanish broke the rules they had with the king by killing millions of native peoples and taking most of the gold for themselves. Bartolome de Las Casas, a native Spaniard, traveled to the New World at the age of eighteen. After he witnessed the way the Spanish

Not only were the Spanish motivated by greed, a deadly sin, but they also sinned by breaking one of the Ten Commandments, “thou shalt not kill”. If the natives showed any sign of resistance to the Spanish invaders, they were immediately put to death without hesitation. Bartolome witnessed the Spanish “murdering the native people, burning and roasting them alive, throwing them to wild dogs and then oppressing, tormenting and plaguing them with toil down the mines” (Casas 26). All of these acts were sins in the eyes of the church. Bartolome makes use of this evidence in his work not only to prove the innocence of the natives of the New World, but also to further explain to the king how inappropriate the Spaniards were acting. In addition, by repeatedly referring to the Spanish invaders of the New World as “Christians”, Bartolome demonstrates the irony and corrupt nature of the situation. Although the Spanish were there on a mission to endorse their religion, they were acting against their own

When describing the conquest of Peru, Bartolome mentions that although the Spanish “had consumed everything there was to eat and all that remained were the supplies of maize the people had laid in to feed themselves” the natives of the land still offered the Spanish the food that they originally kept for themselves (Casas 108). These selfless people that Bartolome identifies were still murdered, enslaved and treated “in the most barbaric and cruel fashion” by the Spanish (Casas 108). By including this, Bartolome displays to the king of Spain that these people were pure and innocent and that the Spanish were wrong for oppressing