154 • 'T^^ Atlantic 



value of the dififerent announced purposes became inverted. The 

 advantages of sending slaves back to Europe outran the desire to edu- 

 cate and convert the Africans and the Indians. Once it was discovered 

 that the Indians in Central and South America possessed great stores 

 of gold and silver without appreciating their economic value, the 

 fever for riches speedily outran the desire to establish normal trade or 

 a healthy and successful agriculture and industry. 



In part this was due to the way in which expeditions were made 

 up. The exploring and colonizing voyages were all desperate ven- 

 tures. They were organized in an atmosphere of competition and of 

 desperate haste. They were the ultimate gamble with life and death, 

 fate and fortune hanging in the balance. They attracted leadership 

 that was determined and desperate and the crews were usually made 

 up of adventurers and vagabonds, men who had not succeeded in 

 regular employment and fugitives from justice. Of course, these 

 were not the only types represented on the expeditions, nearly every 

 one of which included priests and missionaries and sometimes other 

 men of education and learning. It was their responsibility not only to 

 look after the religious life of the expedition but also to educate and 

 baptize the natives and in most cases to furnish written reports of 

 the whole transaction. They represented the Church and sometimes 

 also functions of the government. Not infrequently, they were per- 

 sons of importance and power at home. The difficulty was that on an 

 expedition they were always remote from their source of authority 

 and subordinate to the admirals, the captains, the pilots. What influ- 

 ence they might have exercised came after the fact. 



The fact was that most expeditions in the New World were car- 

 ried out with incredible barbarity, torture and destruction to native 

 societies. They left burned villages and tortured and broken people. 

 It is one of the ironies of history that people who set out to preach a 

 doctrine of love, redemption and salvation should have rivaled or 

 exceeded the barbarity of the savages themselves. 



To trace out the details of the contacts between the Iberian con- 

 querors and the people they encountered in the Far East and the 

 New World would produce a chapter of horrors. There is no profit in 

 and no necessity for such an undertaking. Anyone interested in this 

 matter can easily learn the record for themselves by sampling the ac- 

 counts of the major expeditions. The whole situation in the west is 

 summarized in Bartolome de Las Casas' Relation. 



The results, which were bad from a moral point of view, were al- 

 most equally bad from an economic point of view. What happened 



