As in the first half of the book, it is clear that de las Casas feels genuinely and deeply saddened, also angered and sickened, by the destruction he witnesses in the Americas. He drives this point home by using multiple adjectives to create a stark contrast between the diabolic Spaniards and the virtuous indigenous people, and between the plentiful lands before the Spaniards arrive and after they lay waste to them. He also effectively switches between surmising the actions of the Spaniards in a particular territory, giving a sense of the scale of their cruelty, and giving specific examples, which show the intensity of their cruelty. Some of these specific examples are truly horrific. One image that struck me in particular was in this sentence: “fuera un navio sin aguja y sin carta de marear, guiandose solamente por el rastro de los indios que quedaban en la mar echados del navio muertos” (60).
However, given that de las Casas was a friar, there are many times when he is much more concerned with the spiritual implications of the murder of indigenous people than the worldly suffering it causes. For example, de las Casas clearly disapproves of the Spaniards forcing the indigenous people to dive for pearls, whereby they die from shark bites and the cold, but what really upsets him is that “mueren sin fe y sin sacramentos” and that the Spaniards ignore “los preceptos divinos del amor de Dios y del projimo” (61). Between the unevangelized indigenous people and the diabolic Spaniards the New World is turning out to be one unholy mess.
In fact, what arguably irritates de las Casas the most is that his non-friar countrymen are interfering with his job, which is to go to the New World and collect the souls of indigenous people for God before their mortal bodies perish and their souls are lost forever to Lucifer. You can tell how deeply irked de las Casas is when he describes how the indigenous people want to embrace God, but get angry at the friars when they discover the duplicitous nature of the other Spaniards, who are supposedly Christians (51-52). Another time the Spaniards enslave a group of indigenous people by exploiting the trust that the friars had developed with them, which causes the remaining indigenous people to want to kill the friars (57-58). This book is an appeal to the Spanish king to set things straight in his American colonies; as well as wanting the suffering of indigenous people to end, de las Casas is essentially saying: “Get these incompetent military men out of here and let me get on with my job!”