Cannibalism and the ÒNew
WorldÓ Textual Economy
Turning away from the initial
letters of Cadamosto, the letters included in Paesi cover a variety of areas, yet the
themes of gender and sexuality are persistent.
Another one of the more persistent
early images of people of the Americas is that of Òthe cannibal,Ó that is the
commercial representation of people who take pleasure in the consumption of
another humanÕs flesh. Throughout
the letters written by Columbus himself, as well as a letter written by a Dr.
Diego Alvarez Chanca who accompanied Columbus across the Atlantic, incidents
are recounted as evidence of the man-eating habits of Amerindians.[1] Whether these narratives are true or
not has been the focus of years of debate with no sight of conclusive evidence
forthcoming,[2] however
their efficacy in demarcating Amerindian people as sub-human in the early days
of colonization cannot be denied.
My focus, therefore, is not on whether there was cannibalism or not, but
rather on analyzing the effects of the persistence of cannibalism in representations of
the Americas from the first accounts of the ÒNew World.Ó
First, to understand the
implications of Columbus and Alvarez ChancaÕs letters it is useful to relate the
earliest reports of man-eating peoples that the two men were familiar
with. The earliest written account
of a man-eating people is from Pomponius Mela in 50AD. Mela writes:
In the furthest east of Asia are the
Indians, Seres, and Scythians. The Indians and Scythians occupy the two extremities, the Seres are in the
middleÉThat part which adjoins the Scythian promontory is
impassable from snow; then follows an uncultivated tract occupied by savages.
These tribes are the man-eating Scythians and the Sakas, severed from one
another by a region where none can dwell because of the number of wild animals.[3]
Similar to depictions
of Africa as the Òends of the earth,Ó the Scythians live on the outmost regions
of the ÒeastÓ in an equally remote area in the lands we now call Iran. Pliny, a friend of Mela and also an
historian writing around 50AD with whom Christopher Columbus was familiar,[4]
describes the Scythians in the following passage:
The first portion of
these shores, after we pass the Scythian Promontory, is totally uninhabitable,
owing to the snow, and the regions adjoining are uncultivated, in consequence
of the savage state of the nations that dwell there. Here are the abodes of the Scythian man-eaters who feed on
human flesh. Hence it is that all
around them consists of vast deserts, inhabited by multitudes of wild beasts,
which are continually lying in wait, ready to fall upon human beings just as
savage as themselves.[5]
These earliest accounts of a
savage, beast-like, man-eating people in the furthest eastern reaches of the
known world are what identify and distinguish Òhumans,Ó from inhuman others.[6] It is this abstract conceptual
relationship between human/sub-human that creates the conditions for
articulating a coherent Euro-Christian identity. What I want to draw your attention to in this instance, is
that when contrasted with the future letters about the Americas, the accounts
from Pomponius Mela and Pliny are noticeably non-gender specific.
The Blemmyae were believed to be people Òwithout necks,
having eyes in their shouldersÓ and to live in Africa and India. (Pliny, Natural
History, 57-58.)
Source:
Liber Chronicarum (Nuremberg Chronicle). Author: Hartman Schedel (1440-1514)
Illustrators: Michael Wolgemut (German, 1434/37-1519) and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff
(German, ca. 1460-1494) Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1493. George Khuner
Collection, Gift of Mrs. George Khuner, 1981 (1981.1178.29).
The representations of Amerindians
in the ÒNew WorldÓ as cannibals in an explicitly gendered rendering establish a unique boundary
between savage and civilized. The sharp divisions constructed
between ÒmanÓ and ÒwomanÓ throughout the Christian Bible and later secularly
reinforced and modified by the recovered texts of Aristotle[7]
are newly mobilized in this novel rendering of man-eating peoples. Note this quote from Dr. ChancaÕs
letter to the Queen about ColumbusÕs second voyage, describing what he claims
the Carib Indians do to other people on the islands:
These women also say that they are
treated with a cruelty, which appears to be incredible, for they eat the male
children whom they have from them and only rear those whom they have from their
own women. As for the men whom
they are able to take, they bring such as are alive to their houses to cut up
for meat, and those who are dead, they eat at once. They say that the flesh of a man is so good that there is
nothing like it in the world, and it certainly seems to be so for, from the
bones which we found in their houses, they had gnawed everything that could be
gnawed, so that nothing was left on them except what was too tough to be
eaten. In one house there a neck
of a man was found cooking in a pot.
They castrate the boys whom they capture and employ them as servants
until they are full grown, and then when they wish to make a feast, they kill
and eat them, for they say that the flesh of boys and of women is not good to
eat. Of these boys, three came
fleeing to us, and all three had been castrated.[8]
An image of a life lived in
extraordinary perversity is created in this account.
ChancaÕs letter marks an important
moment in colonial discourse and a departure from earlier Greek narratives: the
explicit imagery of gendered violence emerges as a way in which to elaborate
the state of degeneration of the people encountered. In this fabulation of Amerindian society men are the weaker
sex and the chaos caused by this inversion of so-called Ònatural lawÓ is on
display for all to see.
Theodore
de Bry, copper engravings, 1598.
Source: Discovering the New World,
ed.
Michael Alexander (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 111.
This image was created by Theodor De
Bry and printed in 1598, more than 100 years after the printing of ChancaÕs
letter. It was actually inspired
by a 1578 book, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, written by Jean de LŽry a French
Protestant man, similar in many ways to the 1557 book, True History and
Description of a Land Belonging to the Wild, Naked, Savage, Man-munching
People, Situated in the New World, America, written by a German man named Hans Staden upon
his return from Brazil. What I
want to emphasize here is that what may have started as an individual, hand
written, letter to the Spanish Crown by Dr. Chanca, was printed and reprinted,
along with other narratives, and then large, lavishly illustrated series by
artists such as De Bry were also produced. Together, the narratives and images, in effect, produced a
regime of representation that would form the backdrop for the debates about
whether peoples in the Americas were human at all.