I have been following this thread with much interest. Thanks, Alison, for the earlier quotes from Kott, though I too haven't read him (I will!) But in terms of las Casas:

Bartholomé de Las Casas was petitioning King Ferdinand as early as 1515 and writing letters to Emperor Charles V about the treatment of the Indians as early as 1528, but his views became public in 1552 with the publication of his first eight essays of brevissima relación de la destruycion de las Indias (Brief account of the destruction of the Indians). A ninth essay followed in 1553. The essays came out of an inquiry into the treatment of the Indians that began in 1550 as well as out of his great debate in Vallaloid with Juan Gines de Sepúlveda, the Spanish Bishop, who, arguing for the view held in the colonies, argued that Indians, being less than human, were suited only for slavery. Translations of these essays into French appeared in 1579 and an English translation, The Spanish Colonie, or Briefe Chronicle of the actes and gestes of the Spaniardes in the West Indies, in 1583.

So, yes, Shakespeare could have read this account, and, if I may add a bit of speculation, if "Caliban" may be some combination of "Cannibal" and "Carib," it also has a bit of "Castilian" or "Catalan" in it. Particularly as it looks upon the page in that first translation and which can be viewed online at http://www.library.upenn.edu/special/gallery/kislak/viewers/black.html
along with other original title pages of the work of las Casas, etc.

I also think, in the same line of speculation, that it's perhaps noteworthy that las Casas makes so much of islands and the ruin of islands by the arrival of Europeans in his account:

"The first place they came to, was Hispaniola, being a most fertile Island, and for the
bignesse of itvery famous, it being no less then six hundred miles in compass.
Roundabout it lie an innumerable company of Islands, so throng'd with In-habitants, that
there is not to be found a greater multitude of peoplein any part of the world."

Mark wrote:<<--and I'm not sure that the reference to them is from Las Casas>>

Las Casas does refer to the Spanish use of dogs on several occasions. I'll enclose an excerpt or two, from the Penguin:

One of the dogs, agitated by the waving of the chief's stick,...strained at the leash [and] the Spaniard who held the dog could hardly restrain him. "Then for a laugh, he and his friends, both devils incarnate, told the dog to attack, thinking they could control him. But the dog charged like a mad horse and dragged the Spaniard behind him; he was unable to hold [on] and let go of the leash."

"One of the dogs, agitated by the waving of the chief's stick,...strained at the leash [and] the Spaniard who held the dog could hardly restrain him. "Then for a laugh, he and his friends, both devils incarnate, told the dog to attack, thinking they could control him. But the dog charged like a mad horse and dragged the Spaniard behind him; he was unable to hold [on] and let go of the leash."

These two quotes refer to a particular incident, where a local chief was disemboweled by one of these dogs. Another chief hearing of this took revenge for the incident by killing eight Spaniards who happened to put ashore. The Spanish governor then followed with an attack and massacre of a still different tribe, one that had been particularly friendly to the Spanish and whose destruction las Casas may have been eyewitness to, since he had just arrived in the area, during this local "incident," and which he recounts:

The fourth kingdom was known as Xaragu, and was really the heart and core of the whole island. In no other part of the island was the language as refined as here nor the court discourse as cultivated; nowhere else were the people of such quality and breeding, the leading families as numerous and as liberal -- and this kingdom boasted many nobles and great lords -- nor the inhabitants as easy on the eye. Chief among them was the king, Behechio, and his sister, Anacaona, both of whom rendered great service to the Spanish Crown and gave every assistance to the European settlers, on occasion even saving their lives; after Behechio's death, Anacaona ruled in his stead. Over three hundred local dignitaries were summoned to welcome the then governor of the island when he paid a visit to the kingdom with sixty horse and a further three hundred men on foot (the horsemen alone were sufficient in number to ravage not only the whole island but the mainland as well). The governor duped the unsuspecting leaders of this welcoming party into gathering in a building made of straw and then ordered his men to set fire to it and burn them alive. All the others were massacred, either run through by lances or put to the sword. As a mark of respect and out of deference to her rank, Queen Anacaona was hanged. When one or two Spaniards tried to save some of the children, either because they pitied them or perhaps because they wanted them for themselves, and swung them up behind them on to their horses, one of their compatriots rod up behind and ran them through with his lance. Yet another member of the governor's party galloped about cutting the legs off all the children as they lay sprawling on the ground. The governor even decreed that those who made their way to a small island some eight leagues distant in order to escape this bestial cruelty should be condemned to slavery because they had fled...


<<"The Black Legend" refers to the prolonged propaganda effort of the Dutch
and English, not to the materials from which it was drawn. >>

Las Casas' "brief account" has been described, even by Catholic apologists, as a "violent libel," so many have thought that the ‘black legend,' a sort of calumny placed upon the Spanish, began in his work, that his account is unbalanced in its blanket condemnation of all Spaniards or in his demonization of Spanish character.

In my view, las Casas was very much a party to many of these military actions. He went to the New World when he was 18 and in reward for his efforts was given an encomienda and Indian slaves. He became a deacon and gave up his encomienda and his slaves, even though he was aware to do so was merely to relinquish them to a more brutal existence as the slaves of someone else. In Cuba, he again was rewarded with an encomienda. He seems to me to have been somewhat internally crucified between a privilege which was granted to him and the awareness of the great cruelty upon which this privilege was based. It's why his thought was somewhat divided, I believe, and even somewhat disordered. If his "brief account" is somewhat imbalanced it may be because it was written following his own personal experience of the massacre. As he himself says, "I myself saw" these chiefs being roasted on a slow flame until they melted. And in many respects, the argument about how many Spaniards engaged in this kind of cruelty is like the debate about the existence of "the good German" in ours. He also retired to write his comprehensive history after he had 'won' many of the debates and legal issues, while having lost in the sense of being able to change the actual practices in the colonies.

And before I forget, about the dogs:
<<As far as I know military dogs were not a Spanish invention--I think the
ancients used them>>

Yes, the war dog, a mastiff, has a long history going back to Assyria and Babylon. There are depictions of them hunting lions in Babylonian bas-reliefs. And Hannibal, for instance, had not only 40 elephants but several "battalions" of war mastiffs. Breeders of Old English Mastiff are fond of these histories, the Celts who used mastiffs in their battles against the invading Romans, unsuccessfully, since the mastiff, in its modern form, is considered to be the most English of dogs, etc, Henry VIII gave several hundred war mastiffs to King Charles V of Spain, so, yes, Shakespeare's phrase "the dogs of war" is often thought, by dog people anyway, to refer to the mastiff.

However, as far as reading Shakespeare, I think perhaps it's not so much an issue of whether the dogs would have been specifically the dogs the Spanish used or the English mastiff, but that rather there might have been a troubling and complex intersection of realities in those dogs used to hunt human beings. In the way that poetry often works, where the wound of one's old world is so much like the wound of the other's new world.

Best,

Rebecca

Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com