Bartolomé de las Casas

First Latin translation and first illustrated edition of Las Casas' Brevissima relación and three other tracts, with the series of 17 plates illustrating the cruelties practised upon the Indians by the Spaniards, as related by Las Casas.

Chiefly covers the period 1857 to 1977.

"Bartolome de las Casas (1484-1566) is the key to the quincentenary debate--should we celebrate or should we weep? His was the main cry against the tragic fate of the Indians, the main cry for reform. Until now, he has been known only from incomplete sources. This book begins his rediscovery in 1992." "Parish's introduction shows that Las Casas was barely 18 when he came to America in 1502, spending the next decade as a planter in the West Indies. He befriended the natives, but saw them cruelly massacred and exploited by conquistadors. In 1514 the mounting shock turned him into a defender of the Indians from then until his death at 82. As a priest-colonist, a Dominican friar, a bishop, he fought at court in the New World for their full human rights, using his first book, The Only Way, to great effect. The earliest version produced a papal encyclical on behalf of the Indians, the second motivated an emperor to issue laws protecting them, the third taught a generation of Spanish scholars." "Sullivan's translation of The Only Way to Draw All People to a Living Faith lets us hear Las Casas in full at last. The familiar horrors and denunciations are all there, but so is a gentle voice filled with compassion and yearning for peace. For centuries, the treatise influenced mission theory and practice in many lands; modern writers studied its misiology and its relation to his own mission experiment. But this new version--the lost opening reconstructed, the massive proof texts banished, the original form restored--reveals the doctrine that guided Las Casas' career. In it, he pleads for the way of Christ: evangelization by peaceful charity and respect not by "fire and the sword." Sullivan has given us a brilliant rendering of the powerful central version Fray Bartolome composed at Oaxaca in 1539 to change the conscience of Christendom. The work makes the same appeal to conscience today."--BOOK JACKET.

"Five hundred years after Columbus's first voyage to the New World, the debate over the European impact on Native American civilization has grown more heated than ever. Among the first--and most insistent--voices raised in that debate was that of a Spanish priest, Bartolome de Las Casas, acquaintance of Cortes and Pizarro and shipmate of Velasquez on the voyage to conquer Cuba. In 1552, after forty years of witnessing--and opposing--countless acts of brutality in the new Spanish colonies, Las Casas returned to Seville, where he published a book that caused a storm of controversy that persists to the present day." "The Devastation of the Indies is an eyewitness account of the first modern genocide, a story of greed, hypocrisy, and cruelties so grotesque as to rival the worst of our own century. Las Casas writes of men, women, and children burned alive "thirteen at a time in memory of Our Redeemer and his twelve apostles." He describes butcher shops that sold human flesh for dog food ("Give me a quarter of that rascal there," one customer says, "until I can kill some more of my own"). Slave ship captains navigate "without need of compass or charts," following instead the trail of floating corpses tossed overboard by the ship before them. Native kings are promised peace, then slaughtered. Whole families hang themselves in despair. Once-fertile islands are turned to desert, the wealth of nations plundered, millions killed outright, whole peoples annihilated." "In an introduction, historian Bill M. Donovan provides a brief biography of Las Casas and reviews the controversy his work produced among Europeans, whose indignation--and denials--lasted centuries. But the book itself is short. "Were I to describe all this," writes Las Casas of the four decades of suffering he witnessed, "no amount of time and paper could encompass this task.""--BOOK JACKET.

Bartolomé de Las Casas' reasoning behind believing Indians both to be free and unbound to the Spanish Crown.