Contradictions in a Controversy

Las Casas has always been surrounded by controversy. Not only clid he play a highly important role in what is known as the ‘Indian Controversy’, but he himself has been the object of violent and protracted dispute. He has been regarded as the glory, and at the same time as the disgrace of Spain; as a fanatic, and a man of enlightenment. He has been used as an example for all kinds of people, for Christians as well as atheists, for Protestants and Catholics, for those on the left as well as those on the right; for people who love Spain, and those who hate the country.

This article does not seek to cast new light on that problem, which is sufficiently vast and complicated to inspire a book and much more. The present task is more modest; it is to look again at one or two important points in the interpretation of Las Casas, and to arrive at a picture which fits better with the man, his thoughts, and his deeply-held desires. I am sure that it is impossible to understand him if his life and work are separated from his basic motives; and this separation has been one of the main sources of the controversy surrounding him. It is also at the bottom of the paradoxical criticism and praise for him that spring out of the turning-point in history known as ‘The Indian Controversy’.

Samuel Purchas (1575-7 to 1626) provides us with a very illuminating example of this contradiction, and his attitude to the Spanish conquest is a case in point. His Relations of the World was first published in 1613, that is 61 years after the first edition of Las Casas’ best-known and most polemical work, the Brevisima Historia de las Destruccion de Las Indias. Now the gap between what Las Casas wrote and the motives of Purchas can be seen clearly expressed in the latter’s writing, for his aims were quite different from those of Las Casas.