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.
Symbols & Motifs
Gold
The Spanish kill, torture, ransom, and enslave thousands of native people to drain the American continent of its precious metals, particularly gold. Throughout the text gold symbolizes Spanish greed as well as of the perversion of Christian ideals encapsulated by the Spanish colonial project. The symbol is particularly well served in the story of a Spanish visitador who steals the natives’ religious idols and ransoms them back to the populace for gold (67). This recalls the Old Testament story of the golden calf and God’s decree to worship no other gods save him. This allusion introduces an irony to the text: The Spanish believe the natives to be godless people who worship false idols, and so they steal these idols hoping they are made of gold. However, Las Casas presents the Spanish as the true worshippers of these golden idols; the commander Guzmán committed several atrocities in the province, “acknowledging no limits to his frenzied quest for his great God, gold” (68).
The irony that Las Casas conveys through the symbolism of gold also appears in the story of the Yucatan province, in which the Spanish actually distribute these idols to the population, who have already been converted to Christianity, in forced exchange for slaves. Las Casas is highly self-aware of the inversion of the Christian paradigm this activity represents, and he references it directly:
“we can judge whether the sins of the Spanish are any less grave than that of Jeroboam who made Israel to sin when he struck the two golden calves for gods, or whether they are any less grave than that of Judas Iscariot, or their consequences any the less terrible; for time and again the Spaniard in the New World, overcome by his lust for gold, has betrayed the Lord, and time and again he has denied Him, the betrayals and the denials continuing down to the present day” (77).
Lambs
Throughout A Short Account, Las Casas depicts the indigenous people of the Americas as “docile sheep” (121) and “so many sheep herded into a pen” (15). He calls slaves “little flocks” (92), “gentle [as] lambs” (11). The lamb is an important sacrifice animal in the Judeo-Christian tradition and an important symbol of the community of believers in Christianity. Christ is the “Good Shepherd” while his followers are his flock. The word “pastor” emerges from this pastoral tradition, and today “flock” is still a common term used to refer to the congregation associated with a specific church or preacher.
As such, depicting indigenous people as a flock highlights their innocence as well as their amenability toward the Christian faith. At many times Las Casas mentions how excited these people become about the gospels, in the rare occasion that Spanish missionaries have the opportunity to preach.
However, the symbolism of the indigenous peoples as lambs also has a sacrificial connotation. They are not just lambs but “lambs to the slaughter” (101). This terminology communicates their butchery by the Spanish while simultaneously communicating their innocence. It also reveals the disrespect the Spanish have for the lives of these people, treating them as poorly as one would treat a beast of burden.
This is not the only time the language of sacrifice has been associated with genocide. The term “holocaust” comes from a Greek religious term for the complete burning of a sacrifice animal instead of cooking its meat and sharing among worshippers.
Hell and Demons
Las Casas often introduces New World provinces by describing their bountiful and paradisiacal landscapes then, after colonial terrors, consistently calls these regions hells—for instance, “the hell that is Peru” (99). Las Casas also uses “hell” to describe the lives of natives under enslavement and encomienda more broadly: a “living Hell” (94) or “Hell of slavery” (61). Natives who die unbaptized have their “souls dispatched to Hell” (6) despite their innocence, and similarly, the Christian colonists who die are sent to “the everlasting torment of Hell” (77) for their sins against God.
Las Casas uses such consistent imagery of hell to conjure a metaphorical picture of the New World that more tellingly describes its reality than bare fact. Due to Spanish action, the Indies have become a hell on Earth: devastated by the Spanish slash-and-burn colonial style, littered with charred remnants of villages and slaughtered civilians. While the weight of the individual narratives become unbearable, blending into each other through their oft-shared modes of atrocity and carnage, this image of hell on Earth lasts in the reader’s mind.
The demons that inhabit this hell are, of course, the Spanish. They are “hellhounds” (75), “devils” (53) driven by greed, neither Christians nor rational human beings (82). Las Casas mentions that Santa Marta’s native people call Christians by a word that means demons (80). In sum, Las Casas presents a paradise destroyed and a people who came to this land and planted the evil in their hearts directly into the landscape, changing it into the hellscape that is their rightful habitat.
