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needs. In practice, this meant that the settlers were free to implement the paternalistic system of the government as they pleased. Three thousand miles from Spain, Spanish settlers largely ignored their government and brutally used the Indians to pursue their own economic interests. Indians were put to work on plantations and in the lucrative gold and silver mines. In Peru, the Spanish made use of the mita, a system that allowed authorities to draft native labor to work in the silver mines.

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CHRONOLOGY The Portuguese and Spanish Empires in the Sixteenth Century

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Bartholomeu Dias sails around the tip of Africa

1488

The voyages of Columbus

1492–1502

Treaty of Tordesillas

1494

Vasco da Gama lands at Calicut in India

1498

Portuguese seize Malacca

1511

Landing of Portuguese ships in southern China

1514

Magellan’s voyage around the world

1519–1522

Spanish conquest of Mexico

1519–1522

Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca

1530–1535

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Forced labor, starvation, and especially disease took a fearful toll of Indian lives. With no natural resistance to European diseases, the Indians of America were ravaged not only by smallpox but also by the measles and typhus that came with the explorers and the conquistadors. Although scholarly estimates of native populations vary drastically, a reasonable guess is that 30 to 40 percent of the natives died. On Hispaniola alone, out of an initial population of 100,000 natives when Columbus arrived in 1493, only 300 Indians survived by 1570. The population of central Mexico, estimated at roughly 11 million in 1519, had declined to 6.5 million by 1540 and 2.5 million by the end of the sixteenth century.

Voices were raised to protest the harsh treatment of the Indians, especially by Dominican friars. In a 1510 sermon, Ant on Montecino startled churchgoers in Santo Domingo by saying:

And you are heading for damnation… for you are destroying an innocent people. For they are God’s people, these innocents, whom you destroyed. By what right do you make them die? Mining gold for you in your mines or working for you in your fields, by what right do you unleash enslaving wars upon them? They lived in peace in this land before you came, in peace in their own homes. They did nothing to harm you to cause you to slaughter them wholesale.7

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Las Casas and the Spanish Treatment of the American Natives

Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566) participated in the conquest of Cuba and received land and Indians in return for his efforts. But in 1514 he underwent a radical transformation and came to believe that the Indians had been cruelly mistreated by his fellow Spaniards. He became a Dominican friar and spent the remaining years of his life (he lived to the age of ninety-two) fighting for the Indians. This selection is taken from his most influential work, which is known to English readers as The Tears of the Indians. This work was largely responsible for the “black legend” of the Spanish as inherently “cruel and murderous fanatics.” Most scholars feel that Las Casas may have exaggerated his account in order to shock his contemporaries into action.

Bartolomé de Las Casas, The Tears of the Indians

There is nothing more detestable or more cruel, than the tyranny which the Spaniards use toward the Indians for the getting of pearl. Surely the infernal torments cannot much exceed the anguish that they endure, by reason of that way of cruelty; for they put them under water some four or five ells [15 to 18 feet] deep, where they are forced without any liberty of respiration, to gather up the shells wherein the pearls are; sometimes they come up again with nets full of shells to take breath, but if they stay any while to rest themselves, immediately comes a hangman row’d in a little boat, who as soon as he has well beaten them, drags them again to their labor. Their food is nothing but filth, and the very same that contains the pearl, with a small portion of that bread which that country affords; in the first whereof there is little nourishment;