Columbus and De la Casas

Columbus and de la Casas make two very different observations of the new world. Columbus made many detailed descriptions in his letter to the King Ferdinand, who had financed his journey with the intentions of completing three very clear goals. The first, “to procure riches for the Spanish empire,” the second, “to find a new route to the East Indies,” and lastly, “to convert native peoples to Christianity (Casper et al., 4).” de la Casas had a much different intention than Columbus for why he journeyed to the new world. He traveled as a son of a poor merchant and observed all of the wrong doings that were happening to the native people. He later returned to Spain for the remainder of his life to write about all of the awful things that happened in these overtaking’s. He wrote a book titled, The Very Brief Relation of the Devastation of the Indies. It was written “based on his own testimony advocating a new legal code in 1542 (Casper et al., 9).” Columbus observed so many things about the islands and wrote in such detail. He wrote from a perspective of conquering, and didn’t write to just observe the native people and their habitats. He wrote to the King describing how unarmed and ill prepared the natives were with every intention of conquest. In the first art of the letter Columbus says, “I sent two men upcountry to learn if there were a king or great cities. They traveled for three days and found infinite number of small villages and people without number, but nothing of importance; hence they returned (4).” Just in that small part of the letter, he has already described how weak and insignificant seeming the people of the Indies were and how easily they could be conquered without a King.
Columbus also described the landscape; he detailed many different kinds of fruits, plants, birds, trees, and ecosystems. An important detail that he seemed to elaborate on in his letter was the abundance of mines with metals and rivers flowing with gold. He described the