Thursday, May 30, 2024

Bartolomé de las Casas Engaging in a Form of Loan Shifting and "Javelins"

 October 12, 1492

 

Bartolomé de las Casas recounting Columbus telling the Spanish Crown his belief in converting the Indians through love instead of sheer force:

 

14. They have no iron; their javelins are a kind of staff without an iron point, but some of them have a fish's tooth on the end, and others, other things.

 

A Synoptic Log of Columbus's First Voyage, ed. and trans. Francesca Lardicci, Valeria Bertolucci Pizzorusso, Cynthia L. Chamberlain, and Blair Sullivan (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 48

 

 

 

c. October 12, 1492:

 

*f.[FH,14.] The natives had no weapons, except that there were some javelins, which are staffs with the points fired and sharpened, or some of them with a fish's tooth or bone on the end, which they used for fishing rather than killing any person, . . .

 

A Synoptic Log of Columbus's First Voyage, ed. and trans. Francesca Lardicci, Valeria Bertolucci Pizzorusso, Cynthia L. Chamberlain, and Blair Sullivan (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 197