viable, Europeans had to see themselves, and their social and cultural traditions, as different from American ones.
Anthony Pagden discusses many of the heated Spanish arguments about Indian humanity in The Fall of the Natural Man. He demonstrates that mainstream Spanish thought came to recognize the shared humanity of Spaniards and Indians, even if Spaniards considered Indians to be inferior. They assumed that it was their job to provide Indians with the knowledge that was denied them by their fall from grace. Spanish thought presumed that one of the most fundamental tenets of humanity was that humans should not consume one another. God called humanity forth to prosper, populate, and control the world through his word and glory; consuming one another violates his divine will. A similar sentiment was echoed in other empires as well, and although the English and the French may have had different ideas about God and about their relationship with the land and peoples of the New World, they still believed that human consumption violated fundamental tenets of Christianity.
The modern concept of the Other is useful here. While it is difficult to provide a concrete definition of this term, in its simplest form Others are those who represent the opposite of the Self/Subject. The Other serves to provide a Subject with a point of reference for something it is not and must strive not to be. Although the Other represents what a society should not be, there is also often a fetishistic reverence for the Other. It stands in opposition to the Self, the Subject, the Signifier. In order to define itself, a being must determine what it is not. The Subject is not merely constructed in opposition to its Object, however, as the reverse is also true. The “civilized” being exists because of the cannibal, just as the cannibal takes form because of the existence of the civilized world.
In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha puts forth a methodology for the analysis of the Other in discourse: “My reading of colonial discourse suggests that the point of intervention should shift from the ready recognition of images as positive or negative, to an understanding of the process of subjectification made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourse.”37 The cannibal was a key site for mapping subjectification for European writers, as the opposition between presumed American cannibal savages and civilized Europeans became a fundamental trope through which early modern ideas about identity, and especially masculinity, were formed. While there are texts that are more “sympathetic” to the cannibal, for most the cannibal is the supreme representative of savagery. To oversimplify the matter slightly, it was not because Native peoples were cannibals that Europeans felt they needed civilizing, but that because they needed civilizing they must be cannibals.
Cannibalism versus Anthropophagy
It is important to separate the very real physical act of anthropophagy from the idea of the cannibal. The cannibal is a construct produced by imperialism and maintained through discourse. The image of the cannibal was the product of a complex set of interactions and assumptions. As Hulme argues, “To concentrate on the notion of a dialogue is to insist on two emphases, not always present in discussions of cannibalism; on the agency of those described as cannibals—difficult to access but necessary to posit; and on the relationship between describer and described, between Europe and its others. The figure of the cannibal is a classic example of the way in which that otherness is dependent on a prior sense of kinship denied, rather than on mere difference.”38 Thus in order to understand the idea of the cannibal, one must first understand the complex power dynamics inherent in interactions between Europeans and American Indians, as well as prevalent beliefs about alterity. Many sources reveal instances when Native peoples called Europeans cannibals and feared them for their cannibalistic reputation.39 What differentiates this kind of relationship is the imbalance of power between colonizer and colonized. This difference most clearly manifests in European dominance of the written record. The image of the savage cannibal Native has lingered and prospered over time; the figure of the bloodthirsty cannibal European, however, has not. Cannibalism still remains perhaps the most powerful and enduring image of savagery.40
Before moving forward into a description of the chapters to follow, I must present an idea that is fundamental to this work and any study of cannibalism. As some readers may know, the modern English words cannibal and cannibalism are the etymological descendants of word Carib. The Carib tribe, as I argue in chapter 2, in addition to having inspired the name of the Caribbean and the term that we now use to describe man-eating, was one of the main targets of European accusations of savagery. In discourse Caribs were placed in opposition to their supposedly more docile neighbors, the Arawaks. Despite the etymological relationship between Carib and cannibalism, the language employed in early works on the Caribbean to describe the act of man-eating and the people now known as the Caribs was quite complex, and it is not always clear if a writer is referring to the Caribs, to man-eaters, or to both. Columbus and others sometimes wrote about the Caniba, or people of the great Khan.41 Much important linguistic work has been done on the use of the words Caniba, Caribes, Carib, and others in early writings, but suffice it to say that while the meanings that Columbus and others attached to these words cannot be fully recovered, these early writings established a precedent in which Carib became equivalent to cannibal. However the modern word came to be, it is important to note that cannibalism and cannibal differ from the more formal descriptive terms anthropophagy and anthropophagite. Cannibals and cannibalism came to be associated with a whole host of other savage traits and bear a heavy discursive legacy.42 Anthropophagy, on the other hand, derives from the Greek and simply means human-eating. This book primarily examines cannibalism, not anthropophagy. I am not strictly concerned with acts of human-eating but rather with the development of the discourse of cannibalism and all of the historical and etymological baggage that this term carries with it. In fact there is a debate within anthropology as to whether or not the term cannibalism should be reserved for use “for the ideology that constitutes itself around an obsession with anthropophagy.”43 However, despite the important conceptual differences between these two terms, I use them interchangeably to prevent excessive repetition.
Figure I.1 “Allegorical image of America.” Engraving. Frontispiece in Ferdinando Gorges, America Painted to the Life the True history of the Spaniards proceeding in the conquests of the Indians, and of their civil wars among themselves (London, 1659). It was quite common for the American continents to be represented in allegorical form as a cannibal woman. (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.)
The primary sources discussed herein were chosen based on a number of criteria. While there are some accounts in the historical record about Europeans consuming one another, especially in times of starvation or extreme stress, these are rare and remarkable.44 There are also numerous accounts of shipwreck cannibalism among Europeans, most famously in the wrecks of the French frigate Méduse and the English ship Mignonette.45 These occurrences were always dealt with differently in European texts than those perpetrated by Natives, as there was never the assumption of a cultural pattern of cannibalism. While starvation cannibalism was considered singularly abhorrent by some, as evidenced by Jean de Léry’s writings about the siege of the Sancerre in France in 1572–73, for example, it was nonetheless treated as a momentary aberration.46 The most prevalent type of cannibalism presented in European chronicles was performed by Native people on Native people. Less common, but still notable, were accounts of Natives consuming Europeans.
This book draws primarily from published works in part because of the popularity of accounts of cannibalism and exploration, but primarily because of its focus on discourse. Insatiable Appetites cannot claim to encompass every possible source that includes anthropophagous references; instead I focus on those that contain substantive references. The evidence discussed in the following chapters is limited to explicit references to cannibalism. I do not assume that the use of a term like bloodthirsty to describe Native peoples is an indicator of the practice of cannibalism, yet there was clearly a connection between the European conceptions of warrior bloodlust and the desire to consume human flesh. Finally, whenever possible, the sources discussed in this
