Response to de las Casas, Tears of the Indians

E. Shaskan Bumas, in an article with the attention-grabbing title "The Cannibal Butcher Shop," calls attention to a peculiar feature of the English-language existence of Bartolome de las Casas's Brevísima relación: in English translation, de las Casas hardly seems to be either Catholic or Spanish. Bumas remarks that de las Casas becomes "something of an honorary Protestant and a posthumous ally to the Protestant cause." (Bumas 2000: 108) Bizarrely, the preface attached by the translator of Tears of the Indians uses the Spanish violence against the aboriginal inhabitants of the Caribbean and of Central America as a defense of the violence perpetrated by the (Protestant) English against the (Catholic) Irish in Ireland and as a call for war with Catholic Spain. However much Spanish cruelty de las Casas witnessed and recorded, it seems doubtful that a subject of the Spanish crown and Catholic priest would have taken that cruelty as cause for an English war against his nation, let alone as an account of why the English needed to fight the Irish. According to Bumas,  the addition of grotesque engravings and woodcuts — some, as we saw in Tears of the Indians, with little connection to the (still-grotesque) activities described in the text — to translations of Brevísima relación was a common enough practice in Protestant countries. I cannot help but wonder how much was added to, or omitted from, the text of the various seventeenth-century English translations of Brevísima relación, from which I have read excerpts (but never the whole) in more contemporary English translations.

Bumas 2000: Bumas, E. Shaskan. "The Cannibal Butcher Shop: Protestant Uses of las Casas's 'Brevísima relación' in Europe and the American Colonies." Early American Literature 35, no. 2 (2000): 107-136.