Bartolome de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies.
I think you could consider this the first activist or social justice writing. De la Casas was a contemporary of Columbus, and this 1552 work decries the slaughter of the Central and South Americans by the conquistadores. True, he was the Bishop of Chiapas, and thought that the Indians should have been converted to Christianity, but he also felt that the Spanish were quite unchristian by killing them by the hundreds of thousands, regardless of whether they heard the Gospel or not. There are some graphic descriptions, which are not really worth repeating, they are written again and again throughout human history. But I enjoyed this:
Once he [a minor Native Central American official] was tied to the stake, a Franciscan friar who was present, a saintly man, told him as much as he could in the short time permitted by his executioners about the Lord and about our Christian faith, all of which was new to him. The friar told him that, if he would only believe what he was hearing, he would go to Heaven there to enjoy glory and eternal rest, but that, if he would not, he would be consigned to Hell, where he would endure everlasting pain and torment. The lord Hatuey thought for a short while and then asked the friar whether Christians went to Heaven. When the reply came that good ones do, he retorted, without need for further reflection, that, if that was the case, then he chose to go to Hell to ensure that he would never again have to clap eyes on those cruel brutes.
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This entry was posted by Steven Chabot on Monday, August 21st, 2006, at 4:03 pm, and was filed in Books.
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