Juan Gines de Sepúlveda
From the engraving by J. Barcelon, after the drawing of J. Maca.
Las Casas repeatedly challenged his opponents to refute his allegations or to contradict his facts and, in a letter to Carranza de Miranda in 1556, he wrote:
“It is moreover deplorable that, after having denounced this destruction of peoples to our sovereigns and their councils a thousand times during forty years, nobody has yet dreamed of proving the contrary and, after having done so, of punishing me by the shame of a retraction. The royal archives are filled with records of trials, reports, denunciations, and a quantity of other proofs of the assassinations…There exists also positive evidence of the immense population of Hispaniola—greater than that of all Spain—and of the islands of Cuba, Jamaica, and more than forty other islands, where neither animals nor vegetation survive. These countries are larger than the space that separates us from Persia, and the terra-firma is twice as considerable…I defy any living man, if he be not a fool, to dare deny what I allege, and to prove the contrary.”
His enemies were devoid of scruples, and unsparingly used every means to nullify his influence and destroy his credit. He was ridiculed as a madman—a monomaniac on the subject of Indians and their rights; his plainly stated facts were branded as exaggerations, though nobody accepted his challenge to contradict them. Such tactics alternated with others, for he was also described as a heretic, as disloyal and unpatriotic, seeking to impeach the validity of Spanish sovereignty in [pg xxiii] the Indies and to bring ruin on the national interests.
The missionary period of the life of Las Casas in America ended with his return to Spain in 1549 and the resignation of his episcopal see that followed in 1552. From that time may be dated the third and last period of his life, which was marked by his literary activity, for, though he never again visited America, his vigilance and energy in defending the interests of the Indians underwent no diminution. His writings were extraordinarily luminous; and all he wrote treated of but one subject. He himself declared that his sole reason for writing more than two thousand pages in Latin was to proclaim the truth concerning Indians, who were defamed by being represented as devoid of human understanding and brutes. This defamation of an entire race outraged his sense of justice, and the very excesses of the colonists provoked the reaction that was destined to ultimately check them.
Of all his numerous works the two that are of great and permanent interest to students of American history, the Historia General and the Historia Apologetica de las Indias, were originally designed to form a single work. The writer informs us he began this work in 1527 while he resided in the Dominican monastery near Puerto de Plata.
Fabié writes that his examination of the original manuscripts of the two works preserved in the library of the Spanish Academy of History in Madrid, shows that the first chapter of the Apologetica [pg xxiv] was originally the fifty-eighth of the Historia General. Prescott possessed a copy of these manuscripts, which is believed to have been burned in Boston in 1872, and other copies still exist in America in the Congressional and Lenox Libraries, and in the Hubert Howe Bancroft collection.
During his constant journeying to and fro, much of the material Las Casas had collected for the Historia General was lost and when he began to put that work into its actual form—probably in 1552 or 1553—he was obliged to rely on his memory for many of his facts, while others were drawn from the Historia del Almirante, Don Cristobal Colon, written by the son of Christopher Columbus, Fernando.