Bartolomé de las Casas wrote this account in the dying years of his life, after decades of witnessing and documenting the destruction of entire civilizations. As a young priest who arrived in the Americas full of missionary zeal, he watched the conquest transform from opportunity into atrocity, and his transformation from colonizer to advocate is the book's beating heart. This is not history written from a safe distance. Las Casas was there. He saw Columbus arrive. He walked through villages emptied by violence and disease. He argued with conquistadors, pleaded with emperors, and spent his considerable intellect building the first sustained moral argument against colonialism in Western literature. His prose sometimes falters, his eyewitness details sometimes conflict with other records, but his horror is undeniable and his purpose unflinching. This is the document that first told Europe the truth about what was being done in its name.
