Las Casas was an eye-witness of the cruelties which he exposed in his memoirs to the Government, those uncompromising indictments of his own nation and of the spirit of the age.  He had seen the natives slaughtered like sheep in a pen, and the butchers laid bets with each other upon their dexterity in cleaving them asunder at a stroke.  Children, torn from the bosoms of their mothers, were brained against the stones, or thrown into the water with mocking cries,—­“That will refresh you!” A favorite mode of immolation, which had the merit of exciting theological associations, was to bind thirteen of the natives to as many stakes, one for each apostle and one for the Saviour, and then to make a burnt-offering of them.  Others were smeared with pitch and lighted.  Sometimes a fugitive who had been recaptured was sent into the forest with his severed hand,—­“Go, carry this letter to the others who have escaped, with our compliments.”

“I have seen,” says Las Casas, “five chiefs and several other Indians roasting together upon hurdles, and the Spanish captain was enraged because their cries disturbed his siesta.  He ordered them to be strangled, that he might hear no more of it.  But the superintendent, whom I know, as well as his family, which is from Seville, more cruel than the officer, refused to end their torture.”  He would not be cheated of his after-dinner luxury, so he gagged them with sticks, and replenished the fires.[T]

[Footnote T:  Llorente’s Oeuvres de Las Casas; Premiere Memoire, contenant la Relation des Cruautes, etc.]

Columbus first made use of dogs against the Indians, but merely to intimidate.  They were swift dogs of chase, impetuous and dangerous, but did not yet deserve to be called blood-hounds.  The Spaniards, however, by frequently using them in the pursuit of escaping natives, without thinking it worth while to restrain their motions, gradually educated them to a taste for human blood.  From the breed, thus modified, the West-Indian blood-hound descended, possibly not without admixture with other savage dogs of French and English breeds which were brought to the island by their scarcely less savage owners.  Many of the dogs which the Spaniards carried to South America roamed at large and degenerated into beasts of prey.  Soldiers at one time were detailed to hunt them, and were then nicknamed Mataperros, or dog-slayers.

But if the dogs fed upon the Indian’s body, the monk was ever vigilant to save his soul.  A woman was holding her child of twelve months, says Las Casas, when she perceived the approach of the hounds in full cry after a party of natives.  Feeling that she could not escape, she instantly tied her babe to her leg and then suspended herself from a beam.  The dogs came up at the moment that a monk was baptizing the child, thus luckily cutting off its purgatory just behind the jaws that devoured it.