Columbus was most certainly not the first person to indicate the existence of savage cannibals in a faraway land, his momentous voyage ushered in a new era in which cannibals replaced anthropophagi.5 This chapter explores the discourse of cannibalism in the context of the discovery and early exploration of the Caribbean, addressing the ways the discourse of cannibalism drew from earlier classical and medieval precedents and developed in new directions in a unique context, beginning with a discussion of the development of the discourse of cannibalism in writings about the four voyages of Columbus. Then I examine how descriptions of cannibalism differed in the writings of Amerigo Vespucci, especially regarding the gendered nature of cannibal discourse. Finally, I will briefly examine the visual rhetoric of man-eating.
The discourse of Carib cannibalism was gendered in a variety of complex and sometimes contradictory ways. Europeans writings about the New World demonstrated preconceived notions about proper displays of gender and sexuality, and these assumptions led them to construct Indians as inferior Others. In my examination the intersections of the discourses of cannibalism, sex, and gender in the Caribbean, the development of European ideas about alterity and difference, which were fundamental to the establishment and maintenance of European power in the New World, becomes clearer. Furthermore this exploration provides greater insight into how Europeans expanded their power in the Americas and the justifications that this power rested upon, both in the Caribbean and in other regions.
The Caribs took the symbolic place of the Scythians as the paradigmatic cannibals in the minds of European writers in the early sixteenth century.6 Europe was first made aware of the Caribs/Kalinago by neighboring Arawak/Taíno Indians of the Greater Antilles, who informed Columbus and his crew about the fearsome tribe to the east who came over the sea to terrorize and consume them.7 European writings implied that the Arawaks and Caribs were long-standing enemies.8 This supposed enmity has come down to us as a reflection of the divide between “good Indians” and “bad Indians.” The Caribs, from the first moment of European contact, were portrayed as villains who terrorized the innocent Arawaks and posed a significant impediment to European expansion. Their reputation for cannibalism became one of the most damning pieces of evidence of their savagery and accordingly their availability for conquest. On his first voyage Columbus did not venture into the Lesser Antilles, but he undertook the second journey across the Atlantic with the express purpose of finding the islands of the Caribs.9 Thus the purported presence of cannibalism in the West Indies was an important catalyst for early exploration and conquest. By the mid-sixteenth century the practice of cannibalism would also determine the Europeans’ ability to enslave a given population.
The men who participated in these voyages of exploration-turned-exploitation came from many different parts of Europe and did not possess a unified understanding of Otherness. Yet, as discussed in chapter 1, there were some generalized tropes with which they would have been familiar. Even though Columbus sailed for Spain, he was Italian by birth, as was Vespucci, who sailed for both Spain and Portugal. Italian mariners dominated the seas in the fifteenth century and led the way in the conquest of America. Despite the multiethnic nature of the crew on voyages to the Caribbean, the writings about these voyages all indicate that European men brought preexisting traditions about encounter with difference with them on their journey. The discovery of the Americas represented the first time that Europeans were exposed to such a large, unknown, and seemingly barbaric population.10 There were innumerable accounts of savages, wild men, and witches living in Europe, as well as tales of cannibals at the edges of the civilized world, but what distinguished the encounter with the Americans was its scale, not necessarily its novelty.11
Based on intellectual traditions of monstrosity and cannibalism, Columbus fully expected to encounter amazing and monstrous creatures when he arrived in the New World.12 The cannibals of Columbus’s day were part of the same family of monsters as dog-headed men, though today we consider the existence of cannibals as less dubious.13 While the cannibals of Europe’s imagination may have been considered among the monstrous and magical, this was no longer the case less than a century after discovery. Through an examination of the writing of Columbus, Vespucci, and others, the way the figure of the cannibal became disassociated with the realm of the imaginary and instead came to represent real, living people with disastrous consequences becomes clearer as well.
The beginnings and ends of historical epochs are always fuzzy, and while there is no clear moment in which the medieval world ends, Columbus’s discovery of the Americas was a harbinger of modernity. In many ways he was a man straddling the medieval and the modern; he challenged conventional wisdom about geography (although, contrary to the prevalent American cultural myth, people of his time knew that the world was round), traveled widely throughout Europe and Africa, and opened Europe’s eyes to the vast lands to the west. At the same time, he was obstinate in his belief that he had discovered the western route to Asia and found evidence to confirm his belief without recognizing the glaring errors in his observations. Furthermore his way of understanding difference was shaped by medieval epistemologies.14
First Impressions
In a journal entry from November 4, 1492, Columbus mentions cannibalism for the first time, more than three weeks after the first sighting of land on October 12.15 This initial observation is often overlooked because it does not relate directly to “real” Indians, but it is nonetheless very important. The entry, as abstracted by Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, reads, “He [Columbus] understood also that, far from there, there were one-eyed men, and others, with snouts of dogs, who ate men, and that as soon as one was taken they cut his throat and drank his blood and cut off his genitals.”16 Columbus accepted the presence of wondrous creatures, like the fabled dog-headed men, albeit with a dollop of skepticism.17 He and his crew never encountered these creatures, although he did find a couple of mermaids who turned out not to be as beautiful as he anticipated.18 Despite that, he still insisted that they were in fact mermaids. Similarly he insisted that the islands of the Caribbean were actually India, in spite of the evidence to the contrary. He exhibited a curious combination of empirical observation coupled with confidence in his ability to interpret data based on a preconceived understanding of the outcome. Like most others of his time, he knew what he would find in the New World and simply looked for evidence to confirm his assumptions.19 Rather than letting his observations speak for themselves, Columbus insisted on the existence of truth in medieval and classical texts that he simply needed to confirm. In this way he was no great innovator or discoverer, for he was discovering only what he believed had already been proven to exist. His real discovery from his perspective, then, was the route that he took to get to Asia, not learning of new lands and new peoples.
In his famous letter to Luis de Santángel, the finance minister who was instrumental in convincing the Crown to fund the voyage, Columbus remarked that because of God’s divine will the lands that had been “talked or written” about by men but were known only through “conjecture, without much confirmation from eyesight, amounting only to this much that the hearers for the most part listened and judged that there was more fable in it than anything actual,” had finally been observed and were now known to Christendom.20 In the past several decades, much doubt has been cast on the novelty of Columbus’s discovery, but that is not at issue here. It does not matter that he was not the first European to set foot in the Western Hemisphere, but rather that his actions started a chain of events that radically altered the course of history. Through his writings and their legacy he originated an idea of the cannibal that not only affected the way scholars and laypeople speak about indigeneity, savagery, and civilization but had real tangible effects on people’s lives.
There are very few surviving records of Columbus’s voyages in his own words; the vast majority of what remains are summaries and abstracts of his work written by his contemporaries. Bartolomé de Las Casas abstracted and edited Columbus’s journal of his first voyage and published it as part of his larger work, Historia de las Indias. Las Casas’s book contains some of the actual language from the no longer extant journal, as well as editorial summaries of other portions. Ferdinand Columbus also abstracted and summarized his father’s journal in a biography about him that survives in a Latin translation from 1571.21 The state of the historical records makes it difficult
