A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies is Bartolomé de las Casas’s 1542 attack on Spanish colonial rule and one of the earliest critiques of its treatment of Indigenous peoples. Its account of the encomienda and of conquest in Nicaragua, New Granada, and Peru presents dispossession and forced labor not as isolated abuses but as recurring features of a system organized around Spanish demands for tribute, labor, and gold.

Background and purpose

De las Casas arrived on Hispaniola in 1502 with a fleet led by the new governor, Nicolás de Ovando. He became increasingly disturbed by the exploitation he witnessed. In 1513, he took part as a chaplain in the Spanish conquest of Cuba and received an encomienda himself. He later renounced that grant and began a sustained campaign to reform colonial institutions. The book, written in 1542, was the culmination of that campaign and a forceful indictment of Spanish rule.

The work addresses the encomienda, an institution that originated in fifteenth-century Spain during the reconquest of the south. In the Americas, a grant assigned Indigenous people to a Spanish settler, or encomendero, who was entitled to their tribute and labor and was charged with converting them to Christianity. De las Casas’s account emphasizes the gulf between that stated religious obligation and the material demands imposed on the people assigned to settlers.

The encomienda in practice

In the example from Nicaragua, settlers took up residence in towns assigned to them, put the inhabitants to work, appropriated scarce food, and took over land that Indigenous communities had traditionally owned and cultivated. The account describes labor extending across the population, including elders, women, and children, for the settlers’ benefit and without rest. The particular force of the example lies in its range: exploitation reaches beyond labor to food, land, and the everyday means of sustaining a community.

The New Granada account shows the same extractive logic operating through military command and political captivity. Spaniards apportioned towns and their inhabitants among themselves, treating Indigenous people as slaves. The expedition’s commander captured the territory’s king and held him prisoner for six or seven months while demanding gold and emeralds. The king agreed to fill a house with gold in hopes of securing his release; when the demand was not met to the Spaniards’ satisfaction, they accused him of breaking the bargain and subjected him to torture. De las Casas’s account thus links the seizure of a ruler to the wider appropriation of towns and their inhabitants: coercion at the top served the same pursuit of wealth that structured colonial control more broadly.

Conquest as a repeatable strategy

De las Casas presents the conquest of Peru as an extension of methods already used elsewhere in the New World. In his account, Pizarro set out in 1531 intending to imitate the strategies and tactics of fellow Spanish adventurers. He reached Cajamarca on November 15, 1532, where the Inca emperor Atahualpa was encamped with his army. The following day, Atahualpa came to the Spanish camp with his retinue. The Spanish sprang a trap, killed his guards and attendants—possibly as many as two thousand people—and captured him.

Atahualpa promised to fill one room with gold and two rooms of the same size with silver in exchange for his freedom. The Spanish broke their promise and strangled him in July 1533. In November, they captured Cusco, where members of the Inca aristocracy were imprisoned until they produced gold and silver; those who failed to satisfy Spanish demands were burned alive. The city’s artistic treasures, including the Temple of the Sun, were stripped of gold and melted into ingots. The sequence, from capture and demanded ransom to the removal of the city’s wealth, makes conquest legible as an organized process of extraction rather than a single battle or isolated act.

Scope and significance

The examples move across regions and circumstances while returning to a common pattern. In Nicaragua, settlers appropriated labor, food, and cultivated land. In New Granada, captivity and escalating demands for precious metals served the expedition’s commander. In Peru, the capture of Atahualpa was followed by the imprisonment of the Cusco aristocracy and the stripping of religious and artistic treasures. The variation in method does not obscure the continuity in purpose: colonial power converted control over people and places into tribute, labor, and portable wealth.

The book’s evidentiary force comes from placing these episodes alongside one another. De las Casas had participated in conquest and briefly held an encomienda before renouncing it; his critique therefore emerged from direct involvement as well as observation. The account portrays Christianity as the encomendero’s assigned charge while showing how colonial practice subordinated that obligation to the appropriation of land and provisions, compulsory labor, and the pursuit of gold. In the book’s presentation, the encomienda and the military campaigns that extended Spanish rule belong to the same larger history of exploitation.