Fifty years after the arrival of Columbus, at the height of Spain's conquest of the West Indies, Spanish bishop
and colonist Bartolomé de Las Casas dedicated his Brevísima Relación de la Destruición
de las Indias to Philip II of Spain. An impassioned plea on behalf of the native peoples of the West Indies, the
Brevísima Relación catalogues in horrific detail atrocities it attributes to the king's colonists
in the New World. The result is a withering indictment of the conquerors that has cast a 500-year shadow over the
subsequent history of that world and the European colonization of it.
Andrew Hurley's daring new translation dramatically foreshortens that five hundred years by reversing the usual
priority of a translation; rather than bring the Brevísima Relación to the reader, it brings the
reader to the Brevísima Relación--not as it is, but as it might have been, had it been originally
written in English. The translator thus allows himself no words or devices unavailable in English by 1560, and
in so doing reveals the prophetic voice, urgency and clarity of the work, qualities often obscured in modern translations.
An Introduction by Franklin Knight, notes, a map, and a judicious set of Related Readings offer further aids to
a fresh appreciation of this foundational historical and literary work of the New World and European engagement
with it.