The Spanish Polemic on Colonisation
Part two: Bartolomé de Las Casas as colonial reformer (2)
Christopher Columbus and Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa discover America
The discovery of America “gave a new world to European curiosity”, Samuel Johnson said. And especially to Spanish curiosity. Sixteenth-century Spain produced many equivalents of Welsh Gerald, and some of them might have scorned the original Gerald as a lazy incompetent who had left his work half-done. For example, he had virtually ignored the history of Ireland in its Christian period, though surely this ought to be of interest. By contrast, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, less than 40 years after the conquest of Peru, produced a detailed history of the Incas from the year 565 to 1533. He knew that the Indians kept detailed historical records and, through interpreters, set about collecting them. “By examining the oldest and most prudent among them, in all ranks of life, who had most credit, I collected and compiled the present history, referring the sayings and declarations of one party to their antagonists of another party, for they are divided into parties, and seeking from each one a memorial of its lineage and of that of the opposite party. These memorials, which are all in my possession, were compiled and corrected, and ultimately verified in public, in presence of representatives of all the parties and lineages, under oaths in the presence of a judge, and with expert and very faithful interpreters also on oath, and I thus finished what is now written.” (5)
The 41 witnesses, representing the 12 ayllus or clans of the Incas, unanimously approved Sarmiento’s history, which the author believed “will make all the nations of the world understand the judicial and more than legitimate right that the king of Castille has... to these kingdoms of Peru”. (6) We are told how the first Inca introduced a fabricated religion of which he himself was the prophet, and how all his successors were tyrants – the Incas, says the Spaniard Sarmiento with no trace of irony, always established their rule by violence, “not by the election of the people”. (7) The history was read out over a number of days to the 41 witnesses, who made only minor corrections regarding place names and personal names. “They expressed their belief that no other history that might be written could be so authentic and true as this one...” (8) Maybe they didn’t know what would happen to them if they expressed any other belief, or if they tried to make major amendments. Or maybe they did know.
Nevertheless, this elaborate process shows how much the Spaniards – the king, his ministers and his bureaucrats; the Catholic Church and its relevant branches – wanted detailed knowledge. Mainly they wanted to know what kind of people lived in the Indies; whether and how they could be made Christian; whether they could be enslaved or should be free, and if they were to be free, then to what degree, having regard to the legitimate interests of the king of Spain and his colonists. Behind these questions was another which was less often asked: whether the conquest, or conquests, could be justified at all.
Columbus had instant answers for such questions, which we find in his first letter to the king of Spain (February 1493). The Admiral imposed his own inspirations on everything. To the end of his life he insisted he had found a way to India (and we have all inherited his fixed idea in the common terms “West Indies”, “American Indians”). Landing on the Caribbean islands, he first of all claimed them for the king of Spain with a ceremonial raising of the flag, “and no one contradicted me”. Then he named them – though the locals gave them other names, he adds as a point of interest. (9)
As for the Indians, the most important thing was that they did not have iron and they had lots of gold. They possessed neither fighting capacity nor fighting spirit, being extremely timid. They went around naked. Though ruled by kings, they had no developed state forms or cities. However, they did have a structured family life. Most adults were monogamous, while kings and nobles were allowed up to twenty wives each. I was unable to establish, Columbus says uncharacteristically, whether they have some form of private property. (The pioneering sociologist can’t discover everything at once.)
The Indians thought that Columbus and his men, too exotic to be human, must have come from the sky. However, they did not have any system of idolatrous religion; Christianity appeared not to present them with any great difficulties and they showed interest in it. They seemed to be highly intelligent and perceptive, and yet because of their timidity they could easily be controlled by a handful of Spaniards. They would have to be converted to Christianity, and they would need to be taught that they must exert themselves to provide for the king of Spain and the Spaniards those things which they had in abundance and which the Spaniards urgently needed. Apart from that, the king of Spain could have as many heathen slaves as he liked. (Here Columbus may have been thinking of the fierce cannibal Caribs whom the friendly Indians had told him about, and their Amazon girlfriends who lived on a special island of women.)
Columbus had raised all the issues, at least implicitly. One of his first critics was Queen Isabella, who demanded to know what right the Admiral had to make slaves of some of her vassals and bring them from their native countries to Spain. The Spanish state did not intend to leave Columbus, or any colonist, to his own devices. That was made very clear after the Admiral’s third voyage, when he was arrested in Hispaniola and brought back to Spain in chains.
Prior to that, in 1499 Columbus had established the institution which Bartolomé de las Casas spent half a century fighting to abolish: the encomienda, which assigned particular Indians to particular colonists for forced labour. It was not the Admiral’s first choice. He had tried to establish a system whereby the Indians paid tribute, either collectively or individually, but that didn’t work, so he went two-thirds of the way to slavery. Maybe he would have gone the whole way if Queen Isabella had not freed the slaves he had taken to Spain. (10)
Las Casas was a friend of the Columbus family, and he is the main source for the details of the first voyage. Late in life, in his History of the Indies, he praised the Admiral for his incredible industry, ability and courage. But he also denounced him for “the injuries, wars and injustices, captivities and oppressions, seizures of lordships and states and lands, and deprivation of liberty and countless lives inflicted upon the kings and natural lords, and on young and old”. (11) Columbus had never had “any jurisdiction whatever over them, or any just cause; he was closer to being himself a subject of theirs, since he was in their lands, kingdoms and lordships”. (12)