A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies: Or, a Faithful NARRATIVE OF THE Horrid and Unexampled Massacres, Butcheries, and All Manner of Cruelties, That Hell and Malice Could Invent, Committed by the Popish Spanish Party on the Inhabitants of West-India, TOGETHER with the Devastations of Several Kingdoms in America by Fire and Sword, for the Space of Forty and Two Years, from the Time of Its First Discovery by Them.

One of the most urgent documents ever written. In 1542, a Spanish Dominican friar sat down to record what he had seen: the systematic annihilation of entire civilizations across the Atlantic. Bartolomé de las Casas had arrived in the Americas as a young man hungry for adventure and profit. What he witnessed instead was so horrifying that he abandoned everything, surrendered his own indigenous slaves, and dedicated the rest of his life to pleading for a people being wiped from the earth. His account reads not as history but as testimony from a man who watched innocents butchered, communities burned, and entire kingdoms silenced, all in the name of gold and the cross. He wrote to Philip II with a single demand: recognize the Indians as fully human, or bear the weight of their blood forever. This is the book that shifted the moral imagination of Europe, that birthed the myth of Spanish cruelty, and that remains, five centuries later, an unbearable reckoning with the cost of empire.