[Mrs. Don-o]

I just read how, at the impressionable age of nine or ten, Bartolome de Las Casas would have witnessed from the window of his childhood home, alongside Seville’s Guadalquiver River, Columbus' 1493 return from his first voyage . After accompanying Columbus on his second voyage, Las Casas' father Pedro made a very personal gift of his spoils to young Bartolomé: the service of a young Arawak slave, native of Hispañola. The young Indian served Las Casas for nearly two years before being emancipated by decree of the very Catholic and conscientious Queen Isabel, who determined that there was no just cause for any Indian to be enslaved.

I didn't get the details of whether they had to take him back to the Caribbean or what. We all know, from Las Casas' later writings, how horribly the Spanish devastated the native people of the Caribbean.

But it appears the Spanish Royal policies--- or so I read --- were, in themselves, the most enlightened of all the European powers. As early as 1512, the Laws of Burgos regulated the behavior of Europeans in the New World forbidding the ill-treatment of indigenous people and limiting the power of encomenderos or landowners. In 1542 the New Laws expanded and corrected this human rights legislation.

Although these laws were not always followed across all American territories, they reflected the will of the Spanish colonial government of the time to protect the rights of the native population. They failed mostly from gross insubordination by colonial governors: lack of enforcement.

But I am just a beginner in reading this history.

What's the scoop on Queen Isabella? Slaver or anti-slaver?

[Cicero]

Actually, the various Indian tribes enslaved one another, and the dominant tribes on the mainland indulged in human sacrifice and slaughter on a massive scale. The Indians on the island where Columbus first landed were threatened with invasion and enslavement, and Columbus and his followers pretty much freed them from that threat.

Some of the Conquistadores practiced slavery, but the Pope decreed that slavery should not be permitted. For the most part the Spaniards obeyed, especially after many of the Indians converted to Christianity.

It was standard propaganda for English speaking Protestants to accuse the Spaniards of being cruel, inhuman, and horrible to the natives. Then how come most of the South American Indians survived the conquest, and intermarried with the Spaniards, whereas most of the Indians in North America were either killed off or transferred to reservations? We refer to the inhabitants of Latin America as Hispanics, but most of the common people there are more Indian than Hispanic.