AP U.S. History Practice Test 4

Las Casas on Spanish colonization

The Spaniards first assaulted the innocent Sheep, so qualified by the Almighty, as is premention’d, like most cruel Tygers, Wolves and Lions hunger-starv’d, studying nothing, for the space of Forty Years, after their first landing, but the Massacre of these Wretches, whom they have so inhumanely and barbarously butcher’d and harass’d with several kinds of Torments, never before known, or heard . . . that of Three Millions of Persons, which lived in Hispaniola itself, there is at present but the inconsiderable remnant of scarce Three Hundred. . . .

The Lucayan Islands on the North Side, adjacent to Hispaniola and Cuba, . . . is now laid waste and uninhabited; and whereas, when the Spaniards first arriv’d here, about Five Hundred Thousand Men dwelt in it, they are now cut off, some by slaughter, and others ravished away by Force and Violence, to work in the Mines . . . .

Bartolomé de las Casas, Spanish priest, Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, published in Spain in 1552; from an English translation printed in London in 1689