Part 5 (2/2)
The truth plainly appears in the chronicles of the times and establishes beyond cavil exactly what Las Casas did, and under what circ.u.mstances and for what purposes he made the recommendation which he never afterwards ceased to deplore. Retributive justice has followed these attempts of several lesser contemporaries of Robertson to asperse the character of one of the purest, n.o.blest, and most humane of men, and while discredit has overtaken the inventors and publishers of these falsehoods, the investigations of impartial historians, provoked by their enormity, have resulted in banis.h.i.+ng such fables from historical controversy.
The original basis of the charge that Las Casas favoured the introduction of negro slavery into America is a pa.s.sage in Herrera's _Historia de las Indias Occidentals_, written in 1598, thirty-two years after the death of Las Casas, and which reads as follows:
”As the licentiate Las Casas encountered much opposition to the plan he had formed for helping the Indians and seeing that the opinions he had published had produced no result, in spite of the extraordinary credit he enjoyed with the Flemish chancellor, Juan Selvagio, he had recourse to other means to attain the same ends. He asked in 1517 that the importation of Africans be permitted to the Spaniards settled in the Indies, in order to diminish the labour and sufferings of the Indians in the mines and on the plantations, and that a good number of labourers be enrolled in Spain who would emigrate to the Indies upon the conditions and with the advantages which he proposed. This new proposition was approved by the Cardinal of Tortosa, Adrian, by the Grand Chancellor, and the Flemish ministers. The Chamber of Commerce at Seville was consulted to learn what number of Africans, Cuba, Santo Domingo, San Juan [Puerto Rico], and Jamaica would require. It was replied that it would be sufficient to send four thousand. This answer being almost immediately made known by some intriguer to the Flemish governor of Bressa, this courtier obtained the monopoly of the trade from the sovereign and sold it to some Genoese for twenty-five thousand ducats on condition that during eight years no other license should be granted by the King. This arrangement was extremely harmful to the Population of the islands, especially to the Indians for whose benefit it had been granted; in fact had the trade been free, all the Spaniards might have engaged in it, but as the Genoese sold their right at a very high price few Spaniards were able to pay, and the importation of blacks was almost nil. The King was counselled to pay back the twenty-five thousand ducats from his treasury to the governor and recover his rights, which would pay him well and be of great advantage to his subjects. Unfortunately the King had little money then and, as he was left in ignorance of much concerning the affairs of the Indies, nothing of what was most important was done.”
There is not a word in this pa.s.sage which even refers to the _introduction_ of negro slavery and Herrera in another pa.s.sage (tom. i., dec. i., lib. iv., cap. xii.) states that a royal ordinance given on September 3, 1500, to Don Nicholas de Ovando, the Governor of Hispaniola, permitted the importation of negro slaves. This was two years before Las Casas made his first voyage as a young man of twenty-eight to America, and in 1503, the same Ovando asked that no more negro slaves be sent to Hispaniola because they escaped and lived amongst the natives whom they corrupted. (32) The number of negroes continued, nevertheless, to increase and repeated mention of their presence in the colonies is found in different pa.s.sages throughout the history of Herrera and in other early writers.
Since the first half of the fifteenth century (about 1440) (33) the Portuguese had been engaged in bringing negroes from the west coast of Africa and selling them in Lisbon and Seville, so that during half a century before Las Casas appeared on the scene where he was destined to play so distinguished a part, Andalusia and the southern provinces of Spain were well provided with slaves and a flouris.h.i.+ng trade was carried on. The condition of such slaves was not a particularly hard one and the children born in Spain of slave parents were Christians. Since this system was recognised by the laws of the kingdom, and indeed by those of all Christendom at that time, no additional injury would be done to the negroes by permitting Spaniards who might own them in Spain, to take them also to the colonies. Las Casas was a man of such humane temperament that oppression and injustice everywhere of whatever kind revolted him, but it can hardly be required, even of him, to be several centuries in advance of his times in denouncing a commonly accepted usage which presented, as far as we know, few crying abuses. Toleration of an established order, even though an essentially evil one, is a very different thing from the extension of its worst features in regions where it is unknown and amongst people ill-fitted to support its burdens. A small group of men, chiefly Dominican monks, with Las Casas at their head, courageously championed the cause of freedom and humanity in a century and amongst a people hardened to oppression and cruelty; they braved popular fury, suffered calumny, detraction, and abuse; they faced kings, high ecclesiastics, and all the rich and great ones of their day, incessantly and courageously reprimanding their injustice and demanding reform. Since the memorable day when Fray Antonio de Montesinos proclaimed himself ”vox clamantis in deserto” before the astonished and incensed colonists of Hispaniola, the chorus of rebuke had swelled until it made itself heard, sparing none amongst the offenders against equity and humanity. The development of the collective moral sense of a people is only slowly progressive, and the betterment of racial conditions is more safely accomplished by evolution than revolution, hence if the moral vision of Las Casas did not detect the injustice practised on the negroes, simultaneously with his keen perception of that which was being perpetrated on the Indians, his failure cannot be justly attributed either to indifference to the lot of one race of people or to wilful inconsistency in seeking to benefit another at its expense. That his action was not understood in any such sense at the time, is conclusively proven by the fact that inconsistency was never alleged against him, nor employed as a polemical weapon in the heated controversies in which he was engaged during all his life with the keenest and most determined opponents to his views. Far afield indeed did his enemies wander, seeking for weapons both of attack and defence, and nothing that could be twisted into an offence against the public conscience or national interests escaped the keen eyes of the searchers.
He was himself the first to perceive the error and contradiction into which he had inadvertently fallen, and forty years before Herrera's work was published, he had expressed his contrition for his failure to appreciate the conditions of African slavery, in the following pa.s.sage, which occurs in the fourth volume (page 380) of his _Historia General_:
”The cleric Las Casas first gave this opinion that license should be granted to bring negro slaves to these countries [the Indies] without realising with what injustice the Portuguese captured and enslaved them, and afterwards, not for everything in the world would he have offered it, for he always held that they were made slaves by injustice and tyranny, the same reasoning applying to them as to the Indians.”
Fuller and more mature consideration of the entire question of slavery in all its aspects, of the right of one man or of nations to hold property in the flesh and blood of their fellow-men, conducted Las Casas directly to the necessary and generous conviction that the whole system must be everywhere condemned; for again in Chapter 128 he says of this advice which the cleric gave,
”that he very shortly after repented, judging himself guilty of inadvertence; and as he saw-which will be later perceived-that the captivity of the negroes was quite as unjust as that of the Indians, the remedy he had counselled, that negroes should be brought so that the Indians might be freed, was no better, even though he believed they had been rightfully procured; although he was not positive that his ignorance in this matter and his good intention would exculpate him before the divine justice.”
As has been noted, the transfer of his monopoly by the Governor of Bressa to Genoese merchants, instead of increasing the exportation of negroes to America, resulted in almost stopping the nefarious trade, hence no considerable amount of mischief is traceable to the adoption of Las Casas's suggestion, which was only one of many enumerated in his scheme.
Had the project as he framed it been accepted in its entirety and loyally carried out, no increased injustice would have been done to the negroes, for it was the frightful mortality amongst the cruelly driven Indians that rapidly reduced the numbers of labourers and made gaps which could only be filled by the importation of others from elsewhere. Under a more humane system, the Indians might still have laboured, but not in excess of their powers; their lives would not have been sacrificed or rendered unendurable, while the colonists would have become rich less rapidly; there would have been no shortage of workmen and little need for the importation of Africans at a high price, even though one negro did the work of four Indians, according to the popular estimate. While many admirable suggestions of Las Casas were rejected, this blamable one concerning the permission to import negroes was accepted, and thus by a singular irony of fate, this good man, whose whole life was a self-sacrificing apostolate in favour of freedom, actually came to be aspersed as a promoter of slavery.
The controversy on this pa.s.sage in the life of Las Casas has been touched upon here because it furnished at one time material for much discussion, (34) but the light of historical research has long since dispersed the artificial clouds which misrepresentation caused to gather about the fame of the Protector of the Indians, and there now neither is, nor can be, any doubt concerning the sentiments and intentions of one whose n.o.ble figure is too clearly defined on the horizon of history ever again to be blurred or obscured.
Another part of the plan for colonisation on the moral basis of benefiting the Indians as well as the Spaniards, was the foundation of fortified places at intervals along the coast of the territory to be granted. In each of these settlements, some thirty men should be stationed with a provision of various articles, such as the Indians prized, for trading purposes; also several missionary priests, whose occupation would be teaching and converting the Indians. It was maintained that by kind treatment the Indians could be attracted to the Spaniards and thus, little by little, become civilised, profitable, and voluntary subjects of the King.
Unfortunately for the prosperous development of these benevolent projects, the mischievous Bishop of Burgos and his brother, who, since the latter part of Cardinal Ximenez's regency, had been excluded from active partic.i.p.ation in Indian affairs, began once more to exercise an influence, partly, perhaps because long experience had equipped them with a practical knowledge of details which the Grand Chancellor found useful, and partly, so Las Casas hints, because they had succeeded, by spending important sums of money, in recovering their former offices. At first the Bishop's opposition was mild enough, and he contented himself with pointing out that he had never been able to induce emigrants to go to the Indies and that Las Casas's scheme was unworkable. Las Casas, however, affirmed that he could easily find three thousand workmen as soon as he was authorised to a.s.sure them of the King's conditions, and that the Bishop had not succeeded in finding men because he had treated the islands as a penal colony, whereas now, on the contrary, the severest punishment, after the death penalty, with which a colonist in the Indies could be threatened, was that of being s.h.i.+pped back to Spain.
The King had left Valladolid(35) on his way to take formal possession of the kingdom of Aragon and these negotiations were being carried on at Aranda de Duero, where a halt had been made. Las Casas fell ill and the court moved on without him, but it is indicative of the favour he had already acquired with the King that frequently the monarch exclaimed: ”Oh, I wonder how Micer Bartolome is getting on!” Micer was the t.i.tle the Flemings gave to ecclesiastics, and Charles V., who was the reverse of demonstrative, commonly used this familiar appellation in speaking of Las Casas. Before the court reached Zaragoza, the invalid was on his legs again and had rejoined the others, being received with great joy by the Grand Chancellor, (36) who was almost as enthusiastic as Las Casas himself in pus.h.i.+ng forward the Indian reforms. Delay, however, was again caused at Zaragoza, where the King and court were established, by the illness of the ever-contrary Bishop of Burgos; while waiting there to resume business, a letter was sent to Las Casas from Seville by his friend Fray Reginaldo, containing a full account of the ruthless cruelties of one of the captains of Pedro Arias, named Espinosa, which cost the lives of forty thousand Indians. This ghastly chronicle, which was supplied by a Franciscan, Fray Francisco Roman, who wrote as an eye-witness of the atrocities, was immediately laid before the Chancellor by Las Casas; the former was much impressed by the report and directed Las Casas to go to the Bishop on his behalf and read him the letter.
The Bishop took the news coolly enough and merely observed that he had long since advised the recall of Pedro Arias.(37)
With the recovery of the Bishop, everything seemed ready for the resumption of business, when fate dealt Las Casas one of the hardest blows he had had to sustain. The Grand Chancellor, who owned to feeling indisposed on a Friday, became worse on Sat.u.r.day, so that he had to keep his room; his illness persisted on Sunday with signs of fever and, as Las Casas tersely puts it, ”they buried him on Wednesday.”
With the death of the Fleming died all hope of any immediate action in behalf of the Indians; in the absence of any other as familiar with the business of the Indian department as himself, the Bishop of Burgos found himself once more omnipotent, or as Las Casas puts it, ”he seemed to rise to the heavens while the cleric [himself] sank to the depths.” The Chancellor's successor, named by the King pro tempore, was the Dean of Bisancio, a heavy, phlegmatic man who slept peacefully all through the sessions of the Council and only had sufficient perception to commend Las Casas for the zeal with which he pestered him day and night, remarking on one occasion with a dull smile: Commendamus in Domino, domine Bartholomeo, vestram diligentiam. Two such ill-a.s.sorted characters as this bovine dean and the fiery Las Casas only succeeded in tormenting one another to no purpose, though, as the latter observes, in this case ”it did not kill the Dean for all that.”
The India Council, over which the Bishop of Burgos presided, was composed at that time of Hernando de la Vega, Grand Commander of Castile, Don Garcia de Padilla, the licentiate Zapata, Pedro Martyr de Angleria, and Francisco de los Cobos who was then just rising into prominence. Las Casas was excluded, and though he was as busy as ever in laying pet.i.tions and memorials before the Council, he had no friends or protectors inside and consequently obtained nothing, save what they were obliged for very shame's sake to concede him. Discouragement was too alien to his sanguine temperament, else he might, with some show of reason, have abandoned all hope of struggling successfully against such odds. The first decisive measure of the Bishop was to recall the Jeronymite fathers from their mission in the Indies, of which he had from the outset been the determined opponent. It has often been justly observed that the vicissitudes of politics make strange bed-fellows, and it was certainly a singular regrouping of the persons in this historical situation, to find the Jeronymites now reduced to seeking out Las Casas to whom to pour out their woes against the mutual enemy, the Bishop of Burgos.
CHAPTER VIII. - MONSIEUR DE LAXAO. COLONISATION PROJECTS. RECRUITING EMIGRANTS.
While matters were at the low ebb described in the preceding chapter, the appearance of a new and unexpected character on the scene brought Las Casas some welcome a.s.sistance. Although his chief support had been his good friend, the deceased Chancellor, the other Flemings in the royal household were, on that account first of all, interested in him and the cause he so ardently pleaded. Amongst these unpopular foreigners was Monsieur de la Mure, who, being attracted to Las Casas by what he heard of him, expressed a desire to several of his friends to make the clerigo's acquaintance. This wish was soon gratified, and the young courtier's interest in all that concerned the Indians and the proposed measures for the reform of the colonies was quickly satisfied by Las Casas, who furnished him with a full history of the business he had in hand. The least impressionable of men could not listen to such an advocate unmoved, and M. de la Mure, profoundly affected by what he heard, offered to help his new friend by every means he could command. He was an ally worth having, for, being a nephew of Monsieur de Laxao, sommeiller du corps to the King, he was able to introduce Las Casas to his powerful uncle, who stood in closer relation to the monarch than any other officer of the court, for he slept in the royal bedchamber.
Monsieur de Laxao was as quickly won over to the good cause as his nephew had been, so Las Casas, finding himself once more with powerful supporters, renewed his efforts to press his business to a conclusion.
Some wholesome activity was displayed in dispatching various officials to take the residencia, of the several governors of the islands, Rodrigo de Figueroa being sent to Hispaniola, Doctor de la Gama to Puerto Rico and Cuba, and Lope de Sosa to Darien, where he was also to succeed the actual Governor, Pedro Arias de Avila. The Council, acting upon reports which described the natives of Trinidad as cannibals, ordered that war should be made upon them, but Las Casas denied this charge, and contrived that Figueroa should be authorised to first investigate and report on this matter before hostilities began; Figueroa's report was entirely favourable to the natives, amongst whom he found no cannibalism.
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