Previous to the successful ventures on the western ocean, the Portuguese had been resolutely pursuing the work of discovery by pushing their daring enterprise farther and farther down the coast of Africa, till they at last turned the Cape.[1013] The deportation of the natives and their sale as slaves at once became first an incidental reward, and then the leading aim of craving adventurers. It was but natural that the Spaniards should turn their success in other regions to the same account. Heathen lands and heathen people belonged by Papal donation to the soldiers of the Cross; they were the heritage of the Church. The plea of conversion answered equally for conquest and subjugation of the natives on their own soil, and for transporting them to the scenes and sharers of a pure and saving faith.
A brief summary of the acts and incidents in the first enslavement of the natives may here be set down. Columbus took with him to Spain, on his first return, nine natives. While on his second voyage he sent to Spain, in January, 1494, by a return vessel, a considerable number, described as Caribs, “from the Cannibal Islands,” for “slaves.” They were to be taught Castilian, to serve as interpreters for the work of “conversion” when restored to their native shores. Columbus pleads that it will benefit them by the saving of their souls, while the capture and enslaving of them will give the Spaniards consequence as evidence of power. Was this even a plausible excuse, and were the victims really cannibals? The sovereigns seemed to approve the act, but intimated that the “cannibals” might be converted at home, without the trouble of transportation. But Columbus enlarged and generalized sweepingly upon his scheme, afterward adding to it a secular advantage, suggesting that as many as possible of these cannibals should be caught for the sake of their souls, and then sold in Spain in payment for cargoes of live stock, provisions, and goods, which were much needed in the islands. The monarchs for a while suspended their decision of this matter. But the abominable traffic was steadily catching new agents and victims, and the slave-trade became a leading motive for advancing the rage for further discoveries. The Portuguese were driving the work eastward, while the Spaniards were keenly following it westward. In February, 1495, Columbus sent back four ships, whose chief lading was slaves. From that time began the horrors attending the crowding of human cargoes with scant food and water, with filth and disease, and the daily throwing over into the sea those who were privileged to die. Yet more victims were taken by Columbus when he was again in Spain in June, 1496, to circumvent his enemies. Being here again in 1498, he had no positive prohibition against continuing the traffic. A distinction was soon recognized, and allowed even by the humane and pious Isabella. Captives taken in war against the Spaniards might be brought to Spain and kept in slavery; but natives who had been seized for the purpose of enslaving them, she indignantly ordered should be restored to freedom. This wrong, as well as that of the repartimiento system, in the distribution of natives to Spanish masters as laborers, was slightly held in check by this lovable lady during her life. She died while Columbus was in Spain, Nov. 26, 1504. Columbus died at Valladolid, May 20, 1506. The ill that he had done lived after him, to qualify the splendor of his nobleness, grandeur, and constancy.
And here we may bring upon the scene that one, the only Spaniard who stands out luminously, in the heroism and glory of true sanctity, amid these gory scenes, himself a true soldier of Christ.
Bartholomew Las Casas was born at Seville in 1474. Llorente—a faithful biographer, and able editor and expositor of his writings, of whom farther on we are to say much more—asserts that the family was French in its origin, the true name being Casuas; which appears, indeed, as an alias on the titlepage of some of his writings published by the apostle in his lifetime.[1014]
Antoine Las Casas, the father of Bartholomew, was a soldier in the marine service of Spain. We find no reference to him as being either in sympathy or otherwise with the absorbing aim which ennobled the career of his son. He accompanied Columbus on his first western voyage in 1492, and returned with him to Spain in 1493.
During the absence of the father on this voyage the son, at the age of eighteen, was completing his studies at Salamanca. In May, 1498,[1015] at the age of about twenty-four, he went to the Indies with his father, in employment under Columbus, and returned to Cadiz, Nov. 25, 1500. In an address to the Emperor in 1542, Bartholomew reminded him that Columbus had given liberty to each of several of his fellow-voyagers to take to Spain a single native of the islands for personal service, and that a youth among those so transported had been intrusted to him. Perhaps under these favoring circumstances this was the occasion of first engaging the sympathies of Las Casas for the race to whose redemption he was to consecrate his life. Isabella, however, was highly indignant at this outrage upon the natives, and under pain of death to the culprits ordered the victims to be restored to their country. It would seem that they were all carried back in 1500 under the Commander Bobadilla, and among them the young Indian who had been in the service of Bartholomew. One loves to imagine that in some of the wide wanderings of the latter, amid the scenes of the New World, he may again have met with this first specimen of a heathen race who had been under intimate relations with himself, and who had undoubtedly been baptized.
We shall find farther on that the grievous charge was brought against Las Casas, when he had drawn upon himself bitter animosities, that he was the first to propose the transportation of negro slaves to the islands, in 1517. It is enough to say here, in anticipation, that Governor Ovando, in 1500, received permission to carry thither negro slaves “who had been born under Christian Powers.” The first so carried were born in Seville of parents brought from Africa, and obtained through the Portuguese traffickers.
On May 9, 1502, Las Casas embarked for the second time with Columbus, reaching San Domingo on June 29. In 1510 he was ordained priest by the first Bishop of Hispaniola, and was the first ecclesiastic ordained in the so-called Indies to say there his virgin Mass. This was regarded as a great occasion, and was attended by crowds; though a story is told, hardly credible, that there was then not a drop of wine to be obtained in the colony. The first Dominican monks, under their Bishop, Cordova, reached the islands in 1510. As we shall find, the Dominicans were from the first, and always, firm friends, approvers, and helpers of Las Casas in his hard conflict for asserting the rights of humanity for the outraged natives. The fact presents us with one of the strange anomalies in history,—that the founders and prime agents of the Inquisition in Europe should be the champions of the heathen in the New World.
The monks in sympathy with the ardent zeal of Las Casas began to preach vehemently against the atrocious wrongs which were inflicted upon the wretched natives, and he was sent as curate to a village in Cuba. The Franciscans, who had preceded the Dominicans, had since 1502 effected nothing in opposition to these wrongs. Utterly futile were the orders which came continually from the monarchs against overworking and oppressing the natives, as their delicate constitutions, unused to bodily toil, easily sank under its exactions. The injunctions against enslaving them were positive. Exception was made only in the case of the Caribs, as reputed cannibals, and the then increasing number of imported negro slaves, who were supposed to be better capable of hard endurance. Las Casas was a witness and a most keen and sensitive observer of the inflictions—lashings and other torturing atrocities—by which his fellow-countrymen, as if goaded by a demoniac spirit, treated these simple and quailing children of Nature, as if they were organized without sensitiveness of nerve, fibre, or understanding, requiring of them tasks utterly beyond their strength, bending them to the earth with crushing burdens, harnessing them to loads which they could not drag, and with fiendish sport and malice hacking off their hands and feet, and mutilating their bodies in ways which will not bear a description. It was when he accompanied the expedition under Velasquez for the occupation of Cuba, that he first drew the most jealous and antagonistic opposition and animosity upon himself, as standing between the natives and his own countrymen, who in their sordidness, rapacity, and cruelty seemed to have extinguished in themselves every instinct of humanity and every sentiment of religion. Here too was first brought into marked observation his wonderful power over the natives winning their confidence and attachment, as they were ever after docile under his advice, and learned to look to him as their true friend. We pause to contemplate this wonderful and most engaging character, as, after filling his eye and thought with the shocking scenes in which his countrymen—in name the disciples of Jesus and loyal members of his Church—perpetrated such enormities against beings in their own likeness, he began his incessant tracking of the ocean pathways in his voyages to lay his remonstrances and appeals before successive monarchs. Beginning this service in his earliest manhood, he was to labor in it with unabated zeal till his death, with unimpaired faculties, at the age of ninety-two. He calls himself “the Clerigo.” He was soon to win and worthily to bear the title of “Universal Protector of the Indians.” Truly was he a remarkable and conspicuous personage,—unique, as rather the anomaly than the product of his age and land, his race and fellowship. His character impresses us alike by its loveliness and its ruggedness, its tenderness and its vigor, its melting sympathy and its robust energies. His mental and moral endowments were of the strongest and the richest, and his spiritual insight and fervor well-nigh etherealized him. His gifts and abilities gave him a rich versatility in capacity and resource. He was immensely in advance of his age, so as to be actually in antagonism with it. He was free alike from its prejudices, its limitations, and many of its superstitions, as well as from its barbarities. He was single-hearted, courageous, fervent, and persistent, bold and daring as a venturesome voyager over new seas and mysterious depths of virgin wildernesses, missionary, scholar, theologian, acute logician, historian, curious observer of Nature, the peer of Saint Paul in wisdom and zeal. Charles V. coming to the throne at the age of sixteen, when Las Casas was about forty, was at once won to him by profound respect and strong attachment, as had been the case with Charles’s grandfather Ferdinand, whom Las Casas survived fifty years, while he outlived Columbus sixty years.