This was the first land in the New
World to be destroyed and depopulated by the Christians, and here they begun
their subjection of the women and children, taking them away from the Indians
to use them and ill use them, eating the food they provided with their sweat
and toil. The Spaniards did not content themselves with what the Indians had
gave them of their own free will, according to their ability, which was always
too little to satisfy enormous appetites, for a Christian eats and consumes in
one day an amount of food that would suffice to feed three houses inhabited by
ten Indians for one month. And they committed other acts of force and violence
and oppression that made the Indians realize that these men had not come from
Heaven. And some of the Indians concealed their food while others concealed
their wives and children and still others fled to the mountains to avoid the
terrible transactions of the Christians.
And the Christians attacked them with buffets and
beatings, until finally they laid hands on the nobles of the villages. Then
they behaved with such temerity and shamelessness that the most powerful ruler
of the islands had to see his own wife raped by a Christian officer.
From that time onward the Indians began to seek
ways to throw the Christians out of their lands. They took up arms, but their
weapons were very weak and of little service in offense and still less in
defense. (Because of this, the wars of Indians against each other are little
more than games played by children.) And the Christians, with their horses and
swords and pikes began to carry out massacres and strange cruelties against
them. They attacked the towns and spared neither children nor the aged nor
pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering
them but cutting them into pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter
house. They laid bets as to who, with lone stroke of the sword, could split a
man in two or cut off his head or spill out his entrails with a single stroke
of the pike. They took infants from their mothers' breasts, Snatching
them by the legs and pitching them headfirst against the crags or snatched them
by the arms and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter and saying as
the babies fell into the water, “Boil there, you offspring of the devil!” Other
infants they put to the sword along with their mothers and anyone else who
happened to be nearby. They made some low wide gallows on which the hanged
victim's feet almost touched the ground, stringing up their victims in lots of
thirteen, in memory of Our Redeemer and His Twelve Apostles, then
set burning wood at their feet and thus burned them alive. To others they
attached straw or wrapped their whole bodies in straw and set them afire. With
still others, all those they wanted to capture alive, they cut off their hands
and hung them around the victim's neck, saying “Go now, carry the message,”
meaning, Take the news to the Indians who have fled to the mountains. They
usually dealt with the chieftains and nobles in the following way: they made a
grid of rods which they placed on fork sticks, then lashed the victims to the
grid and lighted a smoldering fire underneath, so that little by little as
those captives screamed in despair and torment, their souls would leave them.
I once saw this, when there were four or five nobles lashes on grids and burning; I seem to recall that
there were two or three pairs of grids where others were burning, and because
they uttered such loud screams that they disturbed the captains sleep, he
ordered then to be strangled. And the constable, who was worse than the
executioner, did not want to obey that order (and I know the name of the
constable, and know his relatives in Seville), but instead put a stick over the
victim's tongues, so they could not make a sound, and he stirred up the fire,
but not too much, so that they roasted slowly, as he liked. I saw all these things
I have described, and countless others.
And because all the people who could do so fled to
the mountains to escape these inhuman, ruthless, and ferocious acts, the
Spanish captains, enemies of the human race, pursued them with the fierce dogs
they kept which attacked the Indians, tearing them to pieces and devouring
them. And because on few and far between occasions, the Indians justifiably
killed some Christians, the Spaniards made a rule among themselves that for
every Christian slain by the Indians, they would slay a hundred Indians.
[The Spaniards] have brought to
the
This is the truth that can be verified, for no
more do they bring ships loaded with Indians that have been thus attacked and
captured as I have related. No more do they cast overboard onto the sea the
third part of the numerous Indians they stow on their vessels, these dead being
added to those they have killed in their own native lands, the captives crowded
into the holds of their ships, without food or water, or with very little, so
as not to deprive the Spanish tyrants who call themselves ship owners and who
carry enough food for themselves on their voyages of attack. And for the
pitiful Indians who died of hunger and of thirst, there is no remedy but to
cast them into the sea. And verily, as a Spaniard told me, their ships in these
regions could voyage without compass or chart, merely by following fro the
distance between the
Afterward, when they disembark on the
Then, like sheep, they are sorted out into flocks
of ten or twenty persons, separating fathers from sons, wives from husbands,
and the Spaniards draw lots, the ship owners carrying off their share, the best
flock, to compensate them for the moneys they have invested in their fleet of
two or three ships, the ruffian tyrants getting their share of captives who
will be house slaves, and when in this “repartimiento”
a tyrant gets an old person or an invalid, he says, “Why do you give me this
one? To bury him? And this sick one, do you give him
to me to make him well?” See by such remarks in what esteem the Spaniards hold
the Indians and judge if they are accomplishing the divine concepts of love for
our fellow man, as laid down by the prophets.
The tyranny exercised by the Spaniards against the
Indians in the work of pearl fishing is one of the most cruel that can be
imagined. There is no life as infernal and desperate in this century that can
be compared with it, although the mining of gold is a dangerous and burdensome
way of life. The pearl fishers dive into the sea at a depth of five fathoms,
and do this from sunrise to sunset, and remain for many minutes without
breathing, tearing the oysters out of their rocky beds where the pearls are
formed. They come to the surface with a netted bag of these oysters where a
Spanish torturer is waiting in a canoe or skiff, and if the pearl diver shows
signs of wanting to rest, he is showered with blows, his hair is pulled, and he
is thrown back into the water, obliged to continue the hard work of tearing out
the oysters and bringing them again to the surface.
The food given the pearl divers is codfish, not
very nourishing, and the bread made of maize, the bread of the
Often a pearl diver does not return to the
surface, for these waters are infested with man eating sharks of two kinds,
both vicious marine animals that can kill, eat, and swallow a whole man.
In this harvesting of pearls let us again consider
the Spaniards preserve the divine concepts of love for their fellow men, when
they place the bodies of the Indians in such mortal danger, and their souls,
too, for these pearl divers perish without the holy sacraments. And it is
solely because of the Spaniards' greed for gold that they force the Indians to
lead such a life, often a brief life, for it is impossible to continue long for
long diving into the water and holding the breath for minutes at a time,
repeating this for hour after hour, day after day; the continual cold
penetrates them, constricts the chest, and they die spitting blood, or weakened
by diarrhea.
The hair of these pearl divers, naturally black,
is as if burnished by the saltpeter in the water, and hangs down their backs
making them look like sea dogs or monsters of another species. And in this
extraordinary labor, or, better put, in this infernal labor, the Lucayan Indians are finally consumed, as are captive
Indians from other provinces. And all of them were publicly sold for one
hundred and fifty castellanos, these Indians who had
lived happily on their islands until the Spaniards came, although such a thing
was against the law. But the unjust judges did nothing to stop it. For all the
Indians of the islands are known to be great swimmers.