Las Casas, BARTOLOMÉ DE,

Las Casas, BARTOLOMÉ DE, Bishop of Chiapa, in Mexico, surnamed the Apostle of the Indians, was born in Seville in 1474. He studied at Salamanca, sailed with his father in the third voyage of Columbus, and again in 1502 accompanied Nicolas de Ovando, the new governor, to Hispaniola. Eight years later he was ordained to the priesthood. In 1511 he was summoned to accompany Diego Velasquez to Cuba, and he assisted in the pacification of the island, and its division into repartimientos or allotments of natives, and was rewarded in the usual way by an encomienda or commandery of Indians, held together with his friend Pedro de Renteria. But ere long a burning love for the unhappy natives and indignation at their sufferings filled his heart; and he gave up his own slaves, and went to Spain, where he prevailed on Cardinal Ximenes to send a commission of inquiry to the West Indies. Its proceedings by no means satisfying his zeal, he revisited Spain to procure the adoption of stronger measures for the protection of the natives. Finally, to prevent the entire extirpation of the native race by the toils to which they were subjected, he proposed that the colonists should be permitted to import negro slaves for the more severe labours of the mines and sugar-plantations; and the proposal was adopted. Las Casas has on this account been represented as the author of the slave-trade, although it has been proved to have existed before this proposal was made, and it should be remembered that afterwards he bitterly repented the advice that he had given. He also attempted to carry out Castilian peasants as colonists to the West Indies, but failed in his scheme, and spent eight years (1522-30) of mortification in austere seclusion and devoted study within the walls of a Dominican convent in Hispaniola. In 1530 he again visited Spain, and, after missionary travels in Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, and Guatemala, returned to devote four years to advocate the cause that lay closest to his heart. During this period he wrote his Veynte Razones and his Brevissima Relacion de la Destruccion de las Indias, which was soon translated into the other languages of Europe. The rich bishopric of Cuzco was offered to him, but he preferred the poor one of Chiapa, and reached its chief city, Ciudad Real, in 1544. He was received with the most active hostility by the colonists, and was soon mortified to the heart by Charles V.'s time-serving revocation of the New Laws, which his own devoted energy had extorted. He maintained his ground that the granting of encomiendas to private persons was flagrant injustice, but bowed his head to the storm, returned to Spain, and resigned his see (1547). Three years later he argued before a Junta at Valladolid with splendid force and eloquence against Sepulveda, who defended the right of carrying on war against the Indians. In 1555 he appealed in terms of marvellous boldness to Philip II. not to sell the claims of the crown to the reversion of the encomiendas, and was successful in thus averting a measure which would have brought final and hopeless slavery upon the Indians. His last work was to get the audiencia or court of justice restored to the oppressed natives of Guatemala. He ended his life in a convent in Madrid, July 1566, at the age of ninety-two. His most important work, the unfinished Historia de las Indias, was printed in 1875-76. See the admirable Life by Helps (1868).