In the passage quoted earlier, from Las Casas’s record of the journal of the first voyage, Columbus did not really doubt the veracity of the existence of dog-headed cannibals or men with one eye. However, in his widely published letter to Santángel, which was written in his own hand and published in Barcelona in April 1493, Columbus displayed a measured skepticism about the wonders of the New World.22 He wrote, “Down to the present, I have not found in those islands any monstrous men, as many expected, but on the contrary all the people are very comely.”23 Considering precedent, one might reasonably expect that men with dog heads would be considered monstrous.
Columbus wrote that he had not obtained any information about the existence of monsters in the Indies except for an island that was inhabited by those who other Indians “regard as very ferocious, who eat human flesh.” The people, he reported, plundered the other islands in their canoes. These cannibals were “no more ill-shaped than the others, but have the custom of wearing their hair long, like women.” Their ferocity was starkly contrasted by the excessive cowardice that Columbus attributed to other Indians. Finally, he indicated that the cannibals consorted with the people of the Island of Matinino, which was populated only by women who “practice[d] no female urges,” a tale that bears a striking resemblance to one told by Marco Polo and legends of Amazons in general.24 In this description of the peoples of the Caribbean islands, he denies the existence of monsters in the West Indies but confirms the presence of cannibals and the Amazon-like women of Matinino, with whom the cannibals mated. According to his letter, Columbus did not doubt that the cannibals were indeed human; they may have behaved monstrously, but they were not actually monsters. While his journal contains the record of what occurred on his journey, including that the Natives told him of the existence of the fabled dog-headed people, his letter to Santángel was more careful and did not relate such tales as reflections of reality.
After departing from Palos de la Frontera in Andalusia on August 3, 1492, the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María headed first to the Canary Islands, finally heading for the unknown west on September 6.25 Columbus and his crew explored the islands that we now call the Greater Antilles, including Hispaniola and Cuba. It was here that he encountered the Arawaks.26 His first written impressions of this group of Indians stressed their docility, generosity, and of course their nudity.27 During this initial contact he also learned that they were being terrorized by a fearsome neighboring tribe. Ferdinand Columbus reported, “Some Indians had scars left by wounds on their bodies; [we] asked by signs what had caused them, they replied, also by signs that the natives of other islands came on raids to capture them and they had received their wounds defending themselves.”28 Columbus’s journal contains a similar account of this fateful meeting.29
Throughout these first travels in the Caribbean, Columbus claims to have heard often about the atrocities of the neighboring Caribs. He recorded on November 23, 1492, that the Indians expressed great fear of the island of Bohío, where well-armed one-eyed cannibals resided.30 He doubted what the Arawaks told him; he wondered if perhaps their people were simply taken captive and, because they did not return, were assumed to have been eaten. He remarked that they expressed the same fear about him and his men when they first encountered them. The Arawaks’ fear inspired him with the hope that based on their superior technology and organization, these Caribs might in fact be the same people of the Great Khan for whom he had been searching. Despite the number of times the Arawaks reportedly told him that the Caribs had one eye or the faces of dogs, he did not believe them, and his excitement to meet the Great Khan only increased. At one point he believed that he encountered some Carib individuals based solely on their hideous appearance. However, he did not record much of importance about this encounter, and based on the navigational records of his journey, it is unlikely that these individuals were actually Caribs.31
In addition to the stories of being terrorized at the hands of cannibalistic seafaring Caribs, the Arawaks also told the Europeans about the legendary women of the island of Matinino. Columbus recorded that only women lived on this island and that they did not practice the traditional employs of their sex, but rather were fierce warriors. These women were said to be the consorts of the Carib warriors, who at a certain time of the year traveled to Matinino to mate with them. Male children were returned to their Carib fathers, and female children were raised by the women.32 Together the cannibals and the women of Matinino fascinated Columbus and filled him with the desire to encounter them on his second voyage. Herodotus indicated that the Amazons lived in a region bordering Scythia and the cannibals and tells a similar story about sex between Scythian men and Amazonian women.33 Although Columbus never explicitly connects the Caribbean with Scythia, he nonetheless transposes the geographical and sexual relationship between cannibals and Amazons onto the New World.
On his first voyage of discovery, Columbus did not find great caches of gold or spices, but his encounters with Indians provided him with clues about their possible location and what he believed to be the location of the Great Khan. The writings from this voyage reveal a profound ambivalence about the presence of cannibalism in the Caribbean. At times the admiral seems quite skeptical about what is revealed to him; at other times, however, he appears eager to hear about the sophistication of the man-eaters and the possible presence of gold in their midst. His diary and the published letter to Santángel further emphasize this ambivalence; he recorded that the cannibals were supposedly one-eyed and dog-headed, yet he doubted the truth of this. He was less skeptical about their cannibalistic ways but still did not unquestioningly accept it.
Neither Columbus, his son Ferdinand, nor Las Casas provides much detail about the gendered or sexual practices of Caribbean Natives. However, Columbus was intrigued by their nudity and remarked upon it a number of times.34 He fixated on the beauty of some of the Indians, but in the published versions of his accounts, he stops short of describing sexuality in any detail.35 He wrote that the men on Hispaniola only possessed one wife each, “except for the king, who could have as many as twenty.”36 The sexual practices of the women of Matinino and their Carib lovers did appear of some interest to the admiral, perhaps because of their relative strangeness.
The connection between sexuality and cannibalism became more firmly established in accounts of the second voyage and subsequently in the writings of Michele da Cuneo and Amerigo Vespucci. Additionally the first reference to cannibalism described dog-headed beings who drank blood and removed the genitals of their victims. In the coming decades Caribs would be widely accused of castrating and consuming their victims. This particular threat to masculinity embodied the most deep-seated fear of European men: not only did the Caribs practice strange sexual behaviors, but they also enacted their rage and vengeance on virile men, first by removing their “manhood,” then by ingesting and incorporating male bodies into their own.
There were a number of published secondhand accounts that deal with the admiral’s first voyage to the Americas. For example, Allegretto Allegretti wrote in 1493, “On one island there are men who eat other men from a nearby island, and they are great enemies to each other and do not have any type of weapons.”37 Allegretti displays none of the ambivalence evidenced in Columbus’s writings. He also incorrectly asserts that none of the islanders had any weapons, which was directly contradicted by the letter to Santángel, which was published in the same month in which Allegretti wrote his account.38 Allegretti also claims that the Indians welcomed the Spaniards by presenting them with “many young virgins,” an event that does not occur in the extant records of Columbus.
In his chronicle of the history of Venice from 1493, Domenico Malipiero repeats that the Indians of the New World were generous, timid, and good-natured. However, he also notes, “The island called Santa Maria has people like the others, except they have very long hair and eat human flesh, and they go about in the vessels referred to above [canoes] abducting men from other islands.”39 In this passage the Caribs and those that eat human flesh are clearly conflated. Interestingly Malipiero seems to suggest that the length of their hair is as important and interesting as their man-eating. He does not doubt that the cannibals are men and not monsters, nor does he express doubt about the veracity of the Arawak descriptions of them.
