Francis Augustus MacNutt

“ Everywhere he touched during his first voyage, he and his men were welcomed as gods descended upon earth, their wants anticipated, and such boundless hospitality showered upon them that Columbus was touched by the gentleness and grace of the natives.
“They are a loving uncovetous people, so docile in all things that I do assure your Highness I believe in all the world there is not a better people or a better country; they love their neighbors as themselves, and they have the sweetest and gentlest way of speaking in the world and always with a smile.” ”

“ Wealthy Romans frequently possessed slaves, over whose lives and fortunes the owners were absolute masters.
Christianity first taught the unity and equality of mankind; salvation was for bond and free, for Jew and Gentile; the immortality of each human soul was affirmed; each man's body was defined of the Holy Ghost and a new dignity was conferred by these novel doctrines on universal mankind, which the lowly shared equally with the mighty. The Christian conception of liberty and equality however, referred more to the moral than to the material order. “The truth shall make you free.” ”

“ I thought that the labour of my youth would have procured me repose in my old age, and thus for forty years I have given myself to God's service, deprived of sleep, eating poorly, and even at times not eating at all, with my arms always at my side, myself exposed to dangers and my fortune sacrificed to bring into His fold the sheep of a distant and unknown hemisphere, of which we even had no record, and to magnify the name, and extend the patrimony of my King by conquering and bringing under his royal yoke and sceptre the great kingdoms and dominions of barbarous peoples. ”

“ As literature, the work of Bernal Diaz ranks far below the letters of Cortes, and shows the writer to be without instruction or culture. The narrative is involved, the mass of small details bewildering, while through all pierces the jealous determination of a wounded vanity to assert its claims to recognition. The stamp of perfect sincerity and frankness, however, is upon the whole work, and its value as an historical document, particularly when paralleled with the letters of Cortes, and the chronicles of Gomara, is superlative and unimpeachable. ”

“ To wish to make slaves of the natives of the New World in order to subject them to the Faith and the King's obedience, is undoubtedly iniquitous, and God has forbidden men all abominations, even though the greatest good should result from them. Sacrifice is never acceptable if offered with unclean hands. It were a lesser evil if not a single inhabitant of the New World were ever converted to our Holy Faith, and that the King's sovereignty should be lost forever, than that these people should be brought to the one or the other by slavery" (Fr. Andres Calvo, Apud Bustamante) . ”

“ Nothing inspired more wonder in the Indians than the transmission of news from one place to another by means of writing, and the letters the Spaniards sent to one another excited the greatest awe amongst them. So great had the influence of Las Casas amongst them become, that he had only to send any piece of paper fastened to the end of a stick, carried by a messenger who had been instructed to say what he wanted, for his orders to be scrupulously obeyed; without the paper, the verbal message was shorn of its authority, with the paper it commanded entire obedience. ”

“ They were the children of the generation which had expelled the last Moor from Spain, and had brought centuries of religious and patriotic warfare to a triumphant close, in which their country was finally united under the crown of Castile. From such forebears the generation of Cortes received their heritage of Christian chivalry. The discovery of a new world, peopled by barbarians, opened a new field to Spanish missionary zeal, in which the kingdom of God upon earth was to be extended, and countless souls rescued from the obscene idolatries and debasing cannibalism which enslaved them. ”

“ Nine friars and twenty-three other persons perished in this disaster, the news of which threw a heavy cloud of sadness over the little band of missionaries. Thousands of miles from their native land and in a new world, these men were sustained solely by their faith in their mission and their confidence in the leadership of their venerable Bishop, for they were not only cut off from hope of succour but were exposed to the persecutions of their own countrymen, because of their zeal for justice, in defending the oppressed against cupidity and cruelty. ”

“ Nothing, more than the exercise of great power by a conscientious man, imbued with faith in himself as a chosen instrument for executing divine justice on his fellow men, is surer to produce a very Frankenstein of fanaticism, and all peoples and creeds have furnished the spectacle of men of professing godliness, who slew to save, and whose claim to a great mission was written in the blood of those who were described as God's enemies. ”

“ It is indeed a great weight on my conscience to leave the Indians in this country, because, as they only mix with servants and other unmanageable and vicious persons and see the taverns full of loose people, without order or restraint, and other public places full of bad examples, it must happen that they, being human, will follow the example of their companions. In their own country, on the contrary, they live much better than here, even if there are not so many Christians. I beseech Your Highness to issue such orders that not one man of them may remain here. ”

“ And that captain who was with me, called Antonio de Quinomes, said to me, "Let us go away from here and save yourself, as you know that without you none of us can escape"; but seeing that he could not prevail upon me to go, he grasped me by the arms, to force me to retire. Although I would have rejoiced more in death than in life, by the importunity of that and of my other companions, we began to withdraw, fighting with our swords and bucklers against the enemy, who surrounded us. ”

“ Las Casas penetrated the flimsy disguise they sought to throw over their real purpose, to smother the truth the better to consolidate and extend their interests, and realising that his only hope of success lay in keeping the subject always to the front, he pursued his inexorable course of teaching, writing, journeying to America to impeach judges and excommunicate refractory colonists, and thence back again to Spain to publish his accusations broadcast and petition redress from the King and his Councils. ”

“ A respectable woman whose husband had accompanied Cortes, having declared in her grief that the news was false, and that all were well, was ordered by Salazar to receive twenty lashes in public, as a sorceress. He was absolute master of the country, which he governed like a tyrant, and he had enriched his partisans with the Indians and spoils of Fernando Cortes and his companions: for he counted upon their self-interest to defend and support him should the latter reappear; all of which the former friends of Diego Velasquez who had joined his party were quite ready to do. ”

“ Las Casas voiced this condemnation and organised a masterly campaign of education on the subject of the proper method of dealing with the Indians. He suffered and endured for their sakes, while the men whose selfish and inhuman undertakings he thwarted poured the vilest abuse and calumny upon him. Nature had mercifully endowed him with no sensitiveness save for the sufferings of the oppressed, and he was as much a born fighter as the fiercest conqueror who ever landed in Spanish America. ”

“ Cortes daily renewed his offers of honourable terms for the Emperor and his people if the city would surrender. Day after day, with infinite patience, he made appointments which Quauhtemotzin never kept; time after time, he wasted hours in waiting for better counsels to prevail; but nothing he could say or do sufficed to allay the distrust of Quauhtemotzin, or bring the Mexicans to terms. Their choice was made; they had had enough of the Spaniards, whose semi-divine character was an exploded myth, and whose presence in the land was felt to be incompatible with the Aztec sovereignty. ”

“ Throughout these massacres Las Casas, young, enthusiastic, generous-hearted, noble-minded, and with his naturally keen sensibilities refined and sharpened by the best education of his times, appears to have played his part with the others, neither better nor worse than they, equally blind to the injustice and tyranny practised upon the inoffensive and defenceless Indians and only eager for his share of the profits derived from their sufferings. ”

“ Our friends accompanied us, armed with swords and shields, and such was the slaughter done that day on water and on land, that with prisoners taken they numbered in all more than forty thousand men; and such were the shrieks and the weeping of the women and children that there was none whose heart did not break; and we had more trouble in preventing our allies from killing and inflicting tortures than we had in fighting with the Indians, for no such inhuman cruelty as the natives of these parts practice was ever seen amongst any people. ”

“ So great was the fury of the Indians that they even killed a horse with which the monks worked in their garden.
The news of this massacre reaching Hispaniola from the Spaniards at Cubagua, the royal Audiencia at once despatched a small force under Gonzalo de Ocampo to punish the Indians, and the disheartening news of these turbulent events was the greeting that met Las Casas on his arrival at Puerto Rico. Knowing that Ocampo's armada would touch there on its way to the Pearl Coast, he determined to await its arrival, where in fact Ocampo appeared within a few days. ”

“ Seeing that the people of the city were so rebellious, and displayed such determination to die as no race had ever shown, I knew not what means to adopt to relieve our dangers and hardships, and to avoid utterly destroying them and their city, which was the most beautiful thing in the world. ”

“ I have laboured at the Court of the Castilian sovereigns, coming and going between the Indies and Spain many times during the fifty years since 1514, animated only by God and by compassion at beholding the destruction of such multitudes of rational, humble, most kind, and most simple men, all well adapted to accept our Holy Catholic Faith and moral doctrine, and to live honestly. God is witness that I have advanced no other reason. ”