Volume 15, Number 8 · November 5, 1970
Spanish Holocaust
By J.H. Elliott
The Tears of the Indians
by Bartolomé de Las Casas, translated by John Philips
The Life of Las Casas
by Sir Arthur Helps
John Lilburne, 292 pp., $12.50
The Chronicles of Michoacán
translated and edited by Eugene R. Craine, by Reginald C. Reindorp
University of Oklahoma, 259 pp., $7.95
Gold, Glory, and the Gospel
by Louis B. Wright
Atheneum, 362 pp., $10.00
The Conquest of the Incas
by John Hemming
Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 641 pp., $12.50
'If I had decreed to reckon up the impieties, slaughters, cruelties, violences, rapines, murders and iniquities, and other crimes committed by the Spaniards against God, the King, and these innocent Nations, I should make too large a volume: yet I shall do my endeavour, if God grant me life.' So wrote that indomitable cleric, Bartolomé de Las Casas, the 'apostle of the Indians.' God did grant him life—ninety-two years of it—and he more than fulfilled his promise. No man has ever denounced the crimes of his own compatriots at greater length, or more unequivocally, than this sixteenth-century Spanish Dominican, horrified by what he had seen and heard of his country's methods of conquest and colonization in America.
Review, 2748 words
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