Published in Venice in 1565, Girolamo Benzoni's account of his travels (1541-47) in the Caribbean and the Southern Pacific Ocean in the company of Spanish conquistadors became a best seller at a time when Europe was consumed with the desire to have more news about the New World, its riches, and the destruction of the Amerindian peoples and civilizations. In addition to incidents of travel in search of treasure, Benzoni's lengthy book also maintains a disputation with the writings of the Spanish official cronistas who saw conquest and pillage as a normal part of their civilizing and evangelizing narrative. This very readable, nimble translation is an abridged version that does not rely on the frequently cited 1847 translation into English.

Benzoni (1519–1572?) offers an account that successfully competes with writings by Bartolomé de Las Casas (1483–1566). In precision, it equals Las Casas's Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552, in English 1554). Based as they are on both personal experience and the authority of eyewitness, both books (one short and the other shortened, in this edition) offer a robust and modern description of the lethal combination of Spanish avarice and permanent war that annihilated Amerindian populations. Neither Las Casas nor Benzoni tires of remarking on the wanton killing of the Indians and on their ever-dwindling numbers. “So many died that eventually of the two million Indians who were on the island not even 150 can be found” (130).

Nothing in Benzoni's account of his own efforts to get rich by taking pearls, emeralds, and gold possessed by Indians would give the lie to the history of plunder that he reports. As a merchant, however, he does not see the need to kill the people who produce and possess the goods he desires. It is enough to approach them under the threat of violence and the corresponding protection offered by the Spanish conquistadores (34). Benzoni's merchant mindset does not detect the hypocrisy on which his more benevolent approach is founded. His wish is for a commercial world open to foreigners like him. After six grueling years, he reaches the riches of Peru but is soon forced to return to Italy when Peru's viceroy expels all foreigners. Loaded with his treasure, he must face one more impediment of Spanish inefficiency and shortsightedness before he can reach Europe: the lack of protection against French corsairs. The corsairs attack because they can—they know the Spanish ships to be ill defended due the avarice of the Spanish captains who do not spend sufficiently on defensive armament.

Benzoni's vivid account of his travels in Spanish imperial territory make a very informative, dramatic, and readable text—without the moralizing tone of Las Casas—that nonetheless gets across the same reality of human cruelty, horror, and survival.

Introducing himself as an everyday man who wants to get rich, Benzoni opens his tale of adventure with sharply detailed observations on both Indian costumes and Spanish manners and practices. The distance offered by his observer stance provides the narrative with a neutrality that allows for interesting points of comparison in which, for example, Indians’ “cruel” customs and especially the abusive treatment of women seem no worse than the Spanish enslavement of Indians and the gang rape of Indian girls (25–28).

In search of Indians who might have food, information, or treasure to plunder, Benzoni offers, in direct and intelligent prose, quick assessments of the material wealth available and the risks involved in the taking. He is most pleased at an encounter with Indian villagers who regale his party with gold—they have heard that the Spanish eat gold and thus hope to avert their foreordained destruction by offering metals. Perhaps his most detailed and harrowing descriptions involve not so much the killing of individual Indians as they do the enslavement of whole villages and the annihilating treatment they were subjected to as they marched to their deaths carrying heavy loads for the Spaniards.

But even as he records these horrors, Benzoni is thinking in cartographic terms: measuring distances, memorizing details of the terrain, calculating proximity to the coast, and of course, taking note of what objects—jewels, medicinal plants, construction materials—could be exploited for trading. All things seen, sensed, and imagined are weighed in a scale of merchandise value and exchange. Killing Indians means the loss of knowledge necessary for discovering other lands, routes, mines, minerals, and even rich civilizations.

Benzoni's chronicle of horror seems most intense when he describes the fleeing villagers who, in their despair, cannot even grab a rope with which to hang themselves in the forest. Naked, with nothing but terror in their hearts, mothers kill their children before they hang themselves by tossing their long hair around a thick branch of a tree in hopes that their neck will break and they will then die. These are indeed the killing fields of modern imperialism. This Dantesque horror is even more shocking when, as Benzoni repeatedly remarks, it is enacted in the name of evangelization. During his stay in Peru, he speaks to survivors of the Spanish conquest. In a very modern gesture, he manifests a sincere interest in finding out what they think about the conquest and the colonial order the Spanish are putting in place. Although it is clear that Benzoni needs to make friends with the colonial authorities, he does not hesitate to denounce them for their incessant and predatory cruelty and avarice (60). He quotes the Indians in Quito and Lima: the Spaniards are “demons,” they “have come to destroy the world . . . for they devour everything . . . consuming the earth. They never rest . . . [are] never satisfied. They never speak the truth and they have taken away our sustenance” (96).

But even as he sees and condemns the destruction of human beings, he does not quite see the accompanying destruction of the environment that undergirds the colonial economic regime. This destruction would usher in the end of the Holocene and the opening of the Anthropocene, an era in which our planet is considered by scientists today to be facing its own irreversible exhaustion in the days to come. Benzoni is indeed recommended reading for all courses and discussions considering the birth and girth of global modernity.