with them children to sell to them of the country, and they buy them. And if they be fat they eat them anon. And if they be lean they feed them till they be fat and then they eat them. And they say, that it is the best and sweetest of all the world.” Not only are the people of Lamary cannibals, but they also trade in the flesh of children. Curiously, however, he explains that they do not wear clothes because Adam and Eve were naked, suggesting that the people of Lamary have some primitive understanding of Christianity. Beyond Lamary, and in fact beyond the entrance to Hell, another group of cannibals reportedly live ready to capture any unfortunate passersby. In addition to enjoying the flesh of men more “than any other flesh,” these people were supposedly twenty-eight to thirty feet tall. Mandeville also tells a tale about a group of priests in the lands beyond Prester John’s country who disarticulate the corpses of people and feed most of the remains to birds. The head is reserved for the son of the dead man, who takes it home and serves it to his friends and family during a great feast. He then uses his dead father’s skull as a drinking vessel.46 This story, along with many of Mandeville’s other tales of cannibals, come almost word for word from the less well-known fourteenth-century travelogue of Friar Odoric of Pordenone.47 The dog-headed cannibals are also mentioned in Odoric’s writings.48
Discursive Precedents for the New World
It may seem logical to dismiss cannibalism as an element of the past, something that we have moved beyond, but this ignores the contribution of cannibalism in constructing modern identity. Cannibalism is an inseparable feature of racism, colonialism, and sexism. The trope of cannibalism was employed by European writers as an important justification for the subjugation of peoples. It was the discursive presence of cannibalism, which was consistently linked to understandings of gender and sexuality, that indicated savagery long before race, as we understand it in the modern context, became fully developed.
When Portuguese caravels began exploring the African coast in the first half of the fifteenth century, they were in possession of technological advances that allowed them to travel farther and faster and to navigate more efficiently. These explorations and conquests, particularly in the Canary Islands, set the stage for the conquest of the Americas. The Spanish and the Portuguese first tested their imperial machines on Atlantic islands, subjugating people and establishing mercantilist ventures that would lead to unprecedented royal profits and a new thirst for expansion. Columbus did not decide in isolation to venture west to discover a new route to Asia; he was born into a rapidly changing world dominated by Italian merchants with a burgeoning desire to possess and consume the world’s resources. He was not simply curious about what lay to the west; he wanted to find riches and respectability there. He was driven by competing desires for gold, for glory, and for God. As we all are, Columbus was a product of his time. Born into a world on the cusp of modernity, he inherited intellectual legacies about the wonders of the far reaches of the globe from the medieval world, just as he possessed the mercantilist, empirical desires of early modern empires.
Medieval tales of cannibalism reveal a fascination with the unknown and a profound wonder at the diversity of the world. Cannibals were almost always portrayed as outsiders; whether they lived within the boundaries of “civilization” or somewhere far from European influence, they were Other. Travel writings demonstrate that the connections evident in classical discourse between sexuality, gendered norms, and cannibalism persisted. Even when a group of people was not explicitly described as cannibalistic, “improper” consumptive patterns went hand in hand with other supposedly deviant practices. For example, Mandeville describes a group of people on a far-flung island who have a wide array of edible animals available to them yet limit themselves to certain animals and never consume the myriad fowl or rabbits among them. These people “eat flesh of other beasts and drink milk. In that country they take their daughters and sisters to their wives, and their other kinswomen. And if there be ten men or twelve men or more dwelling in an house, the wife of everych of them shall be common to them all that dwell in that house; so that every man may lie with whom he will of them on one night, and with another, another night. And if she have any child, she may give it to what man that she list, that hath companied with her, so that no man knoweth there whether the child be his or another’s.”49 Mandeville places a description of their dietary habits right next to a report on their sexual and kinship practices. Taken together, this and other descriptions of exotic people in medieval travel narratives clearly demonstrate a pervasive belief in the connection between seemingly disordered sexuality and eating habits. Not only were other humans the most improper food to eat, but cannibalism was perceived as both gastronomic and sexual.
In addition to the concept of Otherness and the connection between sex and cannibalism, medieval narratives reinforce the link between anthropophagy and imperial expansion. From Herodotus to Marco Polo, the concerns of empires, city-states, and rulers were intimately tied to the accusations of cannibalism. As empires and cities grew and expanded, they came into contact with new groups of people, many of whom resisted foreign influence. The peoples inhabiting the areas to the north and east of the Black Sea proved to be formidable obstacles to both Hellenic and Roman expansion. For centuries these Scythians were also considered to be the consummate cannibals. In one way or another all of the accusations of cannibalism discussed herein are connected to the expansion of empires and cultures but not always outright conquest. Thus even though Columbus did not sail west with an army at his back, he did bear with him a millennium’s worth of axioms about Otherness. Well before any documented interactions between Americans and Europeans, including Vikings in Newfoundland, new lands and strange new peoples were quite often already believed to be savage and cannibalistic. The categorization of the peoples of the Americas, setting aside any evidence of anthropophagous practices, was perfectly consistent with European expectations.
2. Discovering Cannibals: Europeans, Caribs, and Arawaks in the Caribbean
In the Pulitzer Prize–winning book Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus from 1942, Samuel Eliot Morison attempts to capture the awe-inspiring wonder of the discovery of the Americas. He describes the experience as earth-shattering, ushering in a new era of human experience: “Every tree, every plant that the Spaniards saw was strange to them, and the natives were not only strange but completely unexpected, speaking an unknown tongue and resembling no race of which even the most educated of the explorers had read in the tales of travelers from Herodotus to Marco Polo. Never again may mortal men hope to recapture the amazement, the wonder, the delight of those October days in 1492 when the New World gracefully yielded her virginity to the conquering Castilians.”1 Morison’s choice to describe the American continents as a virginal woman and Spanish exploration as sexual conquest follows a long-standing pattern. The notion of land as feminine and conquest as masculine appears often in the literature of imperialism.2 But the Americas did not willingly yield their virginity to Europe, as he suggests; rather Europe claimed and constructed the continents as pure and unspoiled in order to create a narrative of consent. Describing the encounter as consensual denies the fact that the Americas had minimal agency in regard to the Columbian encounter. There was no real choice: Columbus showed up without their permission and laid claim to lands and people who could not object because they were not even aware that a claim was being made. If one were compelled to describe the first meeting of Europeans and Americans in sexual terms, rape would be a much more appropriate metaphor.
Morison also highlights the novelty of the encounter between America and Europe while connecting it to the same historic context that I discussed in chapter 1. He argues that even with the knowledge of earlier traditions of contact with strange people and far-flung lands, something unique and unprecedented occurred when men from Europe met the men and women of the Americas for the first time. Accordingly this chapter uncovers the novelty and continuity of the discursive traditions of cannibalism in the context of the first encounters in the Caribbean. Furthermore I examine the connection that Morison makes between sexuality and conquest. The discussion will predominantly focus on the Caribs of the Lesser Antilles, for it is on these islands that the fearsome cannibals reportedly resided.3 However, particularly in the section on Amerigo Vespucci, I discuss mainland Carib peoples as well.4
The figure of the cannibal remains one of the most enduring
