Summary Of Bartolome De Las Casas

In A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, Bartolome De Las Casas writes to the King of Spain about the treatment of indigenous peoples by the Spanish conquistadors. Being a Spanish Dominican priest, he was appalled by how Christians were treating these people. He writes, “The Christians seized all the maize the locals had grown for themselves and their own families and, as a consequence, some twenty or thirty thousand natives died of hunger, some mothers even killing their own children and eating them” (Las Casas, 1992, p. 39). Las Casas has great compassion for the indigenous people, but still refers to them as sheep throughout the book. There is a sense of innocence about them. He states that the indigenous were “poor, not arrogant