A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

This short chapter provides gruesome detail of the atrocities committed on the island of Hispaniola, which was “the first to witness the arrival of the Europeans and the first to suffer the wholesale slaughter of its people” (14). Once on the island, Europeans quickly set about “taking native women and children both as servants and to satisfy their own base appetites” (14) and taking all food “natives contrived to produce by the sweat of their brows” (14). This led the natives to hide food, as well as women and children, or escape to the hills.

The wife of an island chief—identified in a footnote as Guarionex, one of the five kings of Hispaniola—was raped by a European commander. This led to a native revolt that was easily stifled by superior Spanish military technology. In these events the Spaniards massacred villages “as though they were so many sheep herded into a pen” (15). This massacre included women and infants: “they grabbed suckling infants by the feet and, ripping them from their mothers’ breasts, dashed them headlong against the rocks… [or] threw them over their shoulders into a river” (15). Manners of murder included disembowelment, hanging by the neck over fire, and hunting with dogs.