The Spanish Polemic on Colonisation
Part two: Bartolomé de Las Casas as colonial reformer (4)
What was to be done?
Las Casas tried to work out practical alternatives for carrying out colonisation and spreading Christianity. His first idea was cooperativism. The Spanish colonists should be made to form communities, with the community being responsible for all the assigned Indians. If no one had individual control of Indians and each colonist received a share of the community proceeds, he thought the irresponsible and destructive employment of Indians would stop. Negro slaves should be imported to do the heavy work for which Indians weren’t sufficiently robust, for example in the mines. (In his old age Las Casas bitterly regretted this proposal, but for most of his life he held the conventional Spanish attitude that the negro slave trade was legitimate.)
Another idea was for family associations. Each Spaniard would be given five Indians, with their families, to live under his direction. The Indians would pick up the habit of working from Spanish example, the sons and daughters of the two races would intermarry, and the land would flourish.
These ideas were variants on the encomienda system. But Las Casas soon went on to propose something like the colonisation schemes that were carried out in Ireland seventy years later, though in a different spirit. Groups of actually working Spanish peasants would form independent communities, living side by side with the Indians and inspiring them by example to imitate the Spanish way of life. This idea, or something like it, was already in the air in Spain.
In the meantime, Las Casas kept demanding that something be done about the system that existed. He made a strong impression on the Regent of Spain, who gave him the grand title of Protector of the Indies. But since there were sharp conflicts of opinion, the Regent also appointed a commission of Jeronymite monks (believed to be more impartial, the Franciscans being pro-colonist and the Dominicans pro-Indian), who had powers to free the Indians from the encomienda system, if appropriate, but first they were supposed to discover what the true situation was. In Hispaniola they duly interviewed the twelve oldest Spanish inhabitants and the clerics.
“Those who have been accustomed to think that the questionnaire system is a post-war scourge invented by American sociologists and educationists to annoy their colleagues will be interested to know that Spanish colonial government frequently used this method in the sixteenth century. Of the seven questions put to each witness, the third one struck at the heart of the matter: 'Does the witness know, believe, or has he heard it said, that these Indians, especially of Hispaniola and women as well as men, are all of such knowledge and capacity that they should be given complete liberty? Would they be able to live políticamente as do the Spaaniards? Would they know how to support themselves by their own efforts, each Indian mining gold or tilling the soil, or maintaining himself by other daily labor? Do they know how to care for what they may acquire by this labor, spending only for necessities, as a Castilian laborer would?' ” (19)
The findings of the survey showed that none of the colonists believed that the Indians were capable of being Spanish peasants, if left to their own devices. They were idle, they were vicious, they didn’t want to see Spaniards, they had no sense of value, they didn’t like digging gold, they didn’t learn, and so on. One cleric observed that “inasmuch as Indians showed no greediness or desire for wealth (these being the principal motives impelling men to labor and acquire possessions) they would inevitably lack the necessities of life if not supervised by the Spaniards”. (20) (Several respondents mentioned the unsuccessful experiments made by Ovando. Indians seemed to be able to live satisfactorily as Indians, but not as Spaniards. The Franciscan provincial said that (1) very few Indians knew how to earn their keep and raise crops; (2) if the Indians were allowed to live independently their numbers would increase sharply; and (3) if they were kept in the encomiendas only about ten per cent of them would be left within twenty years. There was a single white blackbird, a Dominican, who said that the Indians were ready to live the good life in liberty.
The Jeronymites eventually freed one single solitary Indian, and went home.
From the mental atmosphere of the highly colonised world of 1935, Lewis Hanke commented: “Probably this wholesale indictment of Indian character was substantially true – a tragic example of that hopeless disorganisation which usually results when a civilised nation tries to impose its customs upon a primitive people... Sixteenth century Spaniards suffered from none of the doubts which afflict modern colonial administrators as to how far it is desirable to Europeanize natives. The problem has not yet been resolved and while present day anthropologists sympathetically study the complexities of primitive peoples, governments have not yet been convinced that the system and standards and values of the West should not be urged upon 'backward' natives instead of allowing them to develop within their own culture stream.” (21) (Fifty years later Anthony Pagden of Cambridge, writing The Fall of Natural Man, thought the significance of Las Casas was as a pioneering anthropologist.)
The view from the other side is expressed in a history of Cortes’s conquest of Mexico, originally written in the Indian language Nahuatl. The author describes the reaction of the Spanish invaders when Montezuama, through his envoys, sent them presents. “They gave the Spaniards banners of gold, banners of quetzal feathers, and collars of gold. And when they had given these, the Spaniards had smiles on their faces, they were very happy, they were delighted. Like monkeys they held up the gold, as if they had a sensation of pleasure, as if their hearts had been renewed and lighted up. They thirst mightily for gold, their bodies stretch out for it, they are wild with hunger for it. Like ravenous pigs they crave gold.” (22) With a bit more sophistication, that’s how the world was going to be.