AMERICAN CANNIBAL: HOW A COOKED UP TALE DROVE AN INSATIABLE HUNGER FOR THE NEW WORLD

Joseph Elliott BlaubergHistory Department Honors Thesis

May 8, 2015

This Departmental Honors Thesis was completed in the Department of History, defended before and approved by the following members of the Thesis Committee:

___________________________________Robyn Lily Davis, Ph.D. (Thesis Advisor)Assistant Professor of History

________________________________Onek Adyanga, Ph.D.Assistant Professor of History

__________________________________Clarence Maxwell, Ph.D.Associate Professor of History

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American Cannibal: How a Cooked Up Tale Drove Insatiable Hunger for the New World

The earliest explorers to the Americas brought home to Europe fantastic tales of a savage

race of men to the east who feasted on human flesh. Stories of forest dwelling man-eaters helped

create in the minds of the Europeans who heard these tales an image of the New World inhabited

by a race of animal-like heathen. By stripping away the humanity from the native inhabitants of

the Americas, European colonizers could feel justified in committing atrocities in the name of

God, profit, and sometimes both. Thus the stories of cannibals carried home by the earliest

explorers to the Americas became a tool in a propaganda war against the natives they

encountered, used to propagate an image of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas as man-

eating bestial killers. In European eyes, this image vindicated actions against the natives and the

expansion of European dominance in the New World during the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries.

The First Course: Early Explorers and the Cannibals of the New World

The emergence of the cannibal narrative follows a pattern of fifteenth-century explorers

encountering the indigenous people of new lands and misrepresenting them as either simple

creatures or savage beasts. When European explorers encountered natives in areas with

economic potential, they created a threatening adversary that was worthy of conquest. In

choosing to create a savage race of “Other,” European adventurers relied on familiar stories that

were active among Europeans. In this New World there were tribes of people alien to European

ways and customs. Beginning with Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, early

European explorers presented the peoples they encountered in a savage and antagonistic light in

order to justify aggressive and exploitive actions against them.

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It is with Christopher Columbus that we hear in 1492 the first mention of the native

cannibal, one that had unusual similarity to the stories told by other sailors exploring new

territories in Africa. When in November of 1492 Columbus landed on the island that would be

called Cuba, he began to barter with the natives. Unlike his behavior on other islands he had

visited, Columbus (and his men) began to make an attempt to understand the politics of the

natives of the New World. The natives of Cuba were reported to be at war with a figure that

Columbus referred to as “The Grand Can” or Cavila. According to Columbus, the natives

identified Grand Can’s men as dog-faced, one eyed cannibals.1 Columbus’ description of these

monstrous men matches the descriptions of early Portuguese interactions with the indigenous

people near the Congo River basin. These early impressions of Africans were also described as

having had dog-like features and savage mannerisms.2 The discovery of dog-faced natives from

newly discovered lands reveals how early colonials de-humanized the natives they encountered.

Columbus’ belief in dog-faced cannibals in the early Americas follows a medieval

European Catholic tradition of vilifying an outside group. Beginning in Norwich, England in the

1122 CE, Jews were accused of ritually murdering and drinking the blood of Christian babies.3

Blood libel accusations became popular in Europe throughout the twelfth and thirteenth-century,

helping to spread the idea of Jewish people as savage monsters living among Christian society.

These accusations continued as late as 1490 in Astorga, Spain. In 1492 when Columbus wrote of

godless blood-drinking cannibals on Cuba, he utilized imagery that would inspire a very familiar

horror to a devout audience in the Spanish court. Columbus’ royal benefactors had just spent the

1 Edward G. Bourne, “Original Narratives of the Voyages of Columbus,” in The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot: 985-1503, ed. Julius Olson (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1906), 137.2 Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 7.3 Dan Ben-Amos, Folktales of the Jews, Volume 1: Tales from the Sephardic Dispersion (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2006), 100.

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last decade waging a brutal campaign to chase the Moors from Spain and complete the

restoration of a Christian monarchy on the Iberian Peninsula. During this time anyone outside of

the Christian identity was viewed as suspicious at best and a dangerous monster at worst by

Spanish society.

Artwork from fifteenth-century Europe also often depicted bestial man-eating demons

that resembled the cannibal narratives of the early explorers to the New World. Apocalyptic

images were part of the European Christian culture that Columbus grew up around, and may

have had some influence on his perception of how to best present a monster to Spanish officials

back home. Stefan Lochner’s Last Judgment, painted in 1432, depicts several dog-like demons

fighting with angels over humanity.4 Just a year earlier in Florence Fra Angelico produced his

own painting titled The Last Judgment, in which he depicted some humans ascending to heaven,

where others were left in a hellish mountain, at the base of which was a dog-faced demon that

was in the act of biting someone in two.5 It was a remarkable and unlikely coincidence that the

natives recounted tales of dog-faced cannibals that matched the descriptions of the man-eating

demons of European Renaissance artwork. The fact that these images were familiar among

Europeans of the late fifteenth-century suggests that Columbus fabricated the tale using popular

imagery of his time to incite xenophobia.

Creating this imagery of the natives was essential in Columbus’ primary goal of

establishing himself -and his heirs- as powerful figures in the Spanish hierarchy. In the “Articles

of Agreement Between The Lords The Catholic Sovereigns and Cristobal Colon,” which detailed

the agreement between Columbus and the Spanish monarchy, the monarchs were to “appoint

4 Stefan Lochner, Last Judgment, c. 1432, oil and gold on oak panel, Wallraf-Richarz Museum, accessed November 3, 2014, http://www.backtoclassics.com/gallery/stefanlochner/thelastjudgment/ 5 Fra Angelico, The Last Judgment, c. 1431, tempera on panel, Museo di San Marco, Florence, accessed 3 November 3, 2014, http://www.abcgallery.com/A/angelico/angelico39.html.

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from this date the said Don Cristóbal Colon to be your Admiral in all those islands and

mainlands which by his activity and industry shall be discovered or acquired in the said

oceans…”6 This agreement stretching to Columbus’ heirs, was intended to establish Columbus as

a figure of nobility in the new Spanish court. As a commoner and sailor from the Italian state of

Genoa, this level of upward mobility was uncommon in Europe at the time. An important caveat

to this deal was that Columbus was rewarded with positions to the islands and lands he

discovered and conquered for Spain. If Columbus were to land in the East Indies in his travels,

he would not be rewarded for anything and his ennobling would not last. In order to secure the

natives as subjects of the Spanish crown, Columbus was ordered to have them swear an oath of

fealty to Spain and promise a conversion to Catholicism.7 By creating the image of the demonic

monster for the Spanish court, Columbus created an adversary for a Christian society that was

eager to expand its power.

When Columbus failed to find significant material wealth on his first journey in 1492, he

had to generate interest in the New World from the Spanish monarchy using other commodities.

Columbus had promised Isabella and Ferdinand that they would receive nine-tenths of all the

gold, jewelry, precious stones, and other valuable materials discovered on his journey in

exchange for the granting of the titles and funding he desired for his expedition.8 Columbus’

account of his first journey talked about the wealth among the islands,

The master of the Pinta said that he had found the cinnamon trees. The Admiral went to the place, and found that they were not cinnamon trees. The Admiral showed the Indians some specimens of cinnamon and pepper he had brought from Castile, and they knew it, and said, by signs, that there was plenty in the vicinity, pointing to the S.E.9

6 Bourne, “Columbus,” 79.7 Bourne, “Columbus,” 139. 8 Bourne, “Columbus,” 139. 9 Bourne, “Columbus,” 140.

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The potential for lumber was another highlight of Columbus’ accounts of the wealth of the new

world, noting that the pine found in the Islands around Cuba were “too tall to exaggerate” and of

a fine quality for ship building. The variety of spices were also items of wealth that Columbus

wrote about in his reports of the New World, going on about the ease and quantity of cinnamon

that the natives have discovered, and that there were a number of others entirely new to the

islands he was discovering.10 While these commodities were of growing importance to European

society in the fifteenth-century, they were not as valuable as the precious metals that Columbus

initially promised. As Columbus continued to explore the region southeast of Cuba, he came to

believe – or at least he wrote that he believed – that the natives of those profitable islands were

dangerous, and he implied that they would need to be removed in order to exploit the islands of

the Caribbean to their fullest potential,

there were people in it who had one eye in their foreheads, and others who were cannibals, and of whom they were much afraid. When they saw that this course was taken, they said they could not talk to these people because they would be eaten, and that they were very well armed.11

The quickest way to gain legitimacy from the strictly Christian Iberian monarchs was to promise

conversions of a godless people, who were either demonic man-eaters themselves, or people

under constant threat of bestial cannibals. In order to compensate for the lack of wealth gained

during his first voyage, Columbus had to promise something equally enticing; the idea of a vast

population of new Christian subjects.

Columbus’ final entries in his report of his initial voyage in 1492 established the pattern

of European dominance of the New World and the exploitation of its peoples for centuries to

come. Columbus believed the so-called cannibals could be civilized by taking them back to

Spain, separating them from the rest of the natives they had captured, and teaching them the 10 Bourne, “Columbus,” 150.11 Bourne, “Columbus,” 153.

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Spanish language along with the Catholic faith.12 Columbus spent a significant portion of time

describing the natives on a broad spectrum between innocent, naïve, and cowardly, to savage and

bestial. At the end of his journal, he claimed that with great care and proper patience these

cannibals could be converted into productive servants of the Spanish crown as soon as they learn

to abandon their barbaric practices.13 The other side of Columbus’ proposition of sending these

cannibals back to Spain was economic. Writing of the intelligence and strength of these

cannibals, Columbus assured that the natives would be profitable on the slave market in Europe,

and hence would recoup some of the investment in Columbus’ journey. Columbus wrote

that to take the males and females from them and send them to Castille will be advantageous, losing their inhuman practice of eating people, and in learning the language in Castille, they will more readily receive baptism and receive the welfare of their souls.14

The Spanish could then act as a peacekeeping force in the region, protecting these natives from

their savage neighbors. Here the common patterns of the colonizer begin to develop, the bringer

of civilization, and the protector from the natives own self-destructive customs, all while

exploring how to best make those endeavors a profitable enterprise.

The Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci also utilized a narrative of New World cannibals

to further his fame and renown, possible as a ploy to gain more patrons for future expeditions. A

recurring theme in the written accounts of Vespucci’s first voyage, which he too reported to

Queen Isabella, was the many barbarous customs he encountered in his initial voyage to the New

World. These he promised would be detailed in full a forthcoming book.15 As Clement Markham

notes in the introduction of the Haklyut Society’s edition of Vespucci’s letters, at the time of his

12 Bourne, “Columbus,” 176.13 Bourne, “Columbus,” 177.14Carl O. Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (London: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 76.15Clements R. Markham, trans., The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci and Other Documents Illustrative of his Career (New York: Burt Franklin, 1906), accessed 9 November 2014, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18571/18571-h/18571-h.htm. XIX

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initial voyages, Vespucci was relatively new to navigation, and relied heavily on more

experienced pilots to aid him. Already in his early 50’s at the time he began to write Four

Voyages he was by any measure, in any era, at an advanced age to begin a new career in an

extraordinarily difficult field. Vespucci would have needed to quickly establish himself as a

competent sailor and explorer, and in order to do that he would need to highlight sensational and

fantastic stories of his adventures that would make him an exciting and yet credible choice for

future potential patrons. This may be why Vespucci continuously alluded to a future book

project, and may also explain the choices he made in how he told the narrative itself. Whereas

Columbus’ reports to the Spanish monarchy were relatively dry and detailed accounts of the New

World, Vespucci portrayed himself as an adventuring hero in strange new world and amidst an

alien culture.

Vespucci’s initial letters to the Spanish monarchs detailed the vast differences between

the cultures of Europe and those natives he encountered. In these descriptions he differs very

little from Columbus, but where Columbus focused on the potential wealth and advantage the

new lands offered, Vespucci’s focus begins to stray into what would be considered much more

sensational and scandalous to European sensibilities. Vespucci focused on the differences in

sexual attitudes that the natives had. He wrote:

They do not practise matrimony among them, each man taking as many women as he likes, and when he is tired of a woman he repudiates her without either injury to himself or shame to the woman, for in this matter the woman has the same liberty as the man.16

Here, Vespucci created the image of a society without civilization, one unaware of or unwilling

to engage in the institution of matrimony. Writing to a staunchly Catholic audience, Vespucci

was able to even further vilify the women of the tribes he encountered, writing of their sexual

16 Markham, Letters of Amerigo Vespucci, 8

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attitudes “I do not further refer to their contrivances for satisfying their inordinate desires, so that

I may not offend against modesty.”17 It was after having described these people as without

custom or modesty, that Vespucci described their diet as meatless except in the case of the

human flesh they eat when they capture an enemy of their tribe.18 All of these details directly

contradicted the customs, traditions, and cultural mores of a European Christian society. Stories

of an alien society of wild, sexually uninhibited, man-eating savages far across the water could

create interest for a book, and make the novice navigator a celebrity back home in Europe.

Vespucci also took every opportunity to promote himself as a heroic figure among the

savages of the New World. In the accounts of his second voyages, he contradicted an earlier

image of natives he encountered. Vespucci claimed some natives ate lizard meat, unlike the

previous natives he encountered on his first voyage, who only ate flesh when it was from

captured enemies. Vespucci took time to differentiate the natives first encountered on his second

voyage from the first, making them out to be much more innocent, generous, and receptive to the

Europeans presence. Vespucci wrote of attacking a group of cannibals in a canoe, the natives

fled, leaving behind prisoners that these cannibals had previously caught. According to

Vespucci, these prisoners had been castrated in preparation of being eaten. Vespucci takes these

prisoners back to their people as a showing of friendship to the natives who had become wary of

Vespucci and his crew.19 Here Vespucci portrayed himself and his crew as heroic, rescuing these

poor mutilated and helpless natives from their more savage cannibal neighbors. By creating the

images of the helpless native being constantly victimized by the savage bestial cannibal,

Vespucci followed Columbus’ lead in having implied that intervention from the superior

17 Markham, Letters of Amerigo Vespucci, 918 Markham, Letters of Amerigo Vespucci, 919 Markham, Letters of Amerigo Vespucci, 14.

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Christian European cultures was necessary in order to protect misguided innocents from

themselves.

Second Course: Gold and Guts- The Conquistadors and the Pagan Cannibal

After the Spanish conquistadors conquered the Aztecs of Mexico in 1521, they had to

defend themselves against criticisms about their treatment of the vanquished natives. Bartolomé

de las Casas was a Dominican friar who went with the conquistadors to the New World. After

seeing the brutal treatment of the Indians in the enconmienda system in Mexico, de las Casas

used his influence as a priest to protest the work conditions in the Spanish colonial system. The

conquistadors responded by publishing a series of memoirs that portrayed the Aztec as savage

pagans and a monstrous people, who enjoyed nothing more than mutilating and eating pious

Christian soldiers. In the conquistador accounts, the natives became the villainous opposite of the

conquering Christian hero.

The Papal Bull of Alexander VI in 1493 and the subsequent Treaty of Tordesillas in

1494, granted colonization rights to Portugal east of the Azore Islands, and Spain to the west

ensured there would be no war between the two Iberian powers.20 By losing favor with the

Catholic Church, either the Portuguese or Castilian monarchies risked the Church withdrawing

its support in favor of its rival. In order to maintain this good standing with the church, these

explorers abided by the legal theory of Alexander’s successor, Pope Innocent IV, and attempted

to enforce a system of fealty to the Pope and Christianity known as the Requerimiento. The

Requerimiento was a system of forced conversion in which the conquistadors would read a

proclamation in Latin demanding the natives convert to Christianity. According to James

20 “The Papal bull Inter Caetera Alexander VI May 4 1493:” American History: From Revolution to Reconstruction and Beyond, accessed 23 November 2014, http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/documents/before-1600/the-papal-bull-inter-caetera-alexander vi-may-4-1493.php.

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Muldoon the Requerimiento was “to protect the Spanish government that the conquest was based

on heretical principals.”21 Without the church approval, the Spanish in the New World could

have faced the charge that their conquest was illegitimate and ungodly.

The conquistadors that came to the New World quickly emphasized the strange

differences in American Indian culture in order to promote the need for their continued presence.

The pagan idolatry and strange sacrificial rites published by conquistadors in their memoirs of

the conquest of Mexico were a complete and total violation of Christian European taboos in the

sixteenth century.22 These accounts provided a greater sense of importance and urgency to the

missions of the conquistadors; such men were not just going to just conquer the new world for

profit, but were motivated out of a sense of Christian duty as well.

The conquistadors needed to overthrow the Aztec Empire in order to exploit the New

World to the extent they wished, but they needed to ensure that the war they engaged in was seen

as justifiable to their superiors in Spain. As Samuel Dorris Dickenson argues, “most Spanish

jurists and theologians rationalized that war would be proper if it were needed to Christianize

infidels in order to protect Christians.”23 The pagan cannibal was the ultimate foil to the Christian

colonizer. The more savage the Aztec, the more justified the brutal tactics of war could be.

The conquistadors followed in the example of Columbus and expanded on the narrative

of the demonic cannibal. In Bernard Diaz’s memoirs he gave a first- person account of the

conquest rituals of the pagan Aztecs. Diaz described the human sacrifice practices of the Aztec in

as frightening detail as possible. He wrote “we saw how they stretched them out at full length on

21 James Muldoon, “John Wyclif and the Rights of Infidels: The Requerimiento Re-Examined,” The AmericasVol. 36, No. 3 (Jan., 1980): 303.22 Bernal Diaz, Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz Del Castillo (London: J. Hatchett and Son, 1844) 86.23 Samuel Dorris Dickenson, “De Soto and the Law,” The Arkansas Historical QuarterlyVol. 49, No. 4 (1990): 298.

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a large stone, ripped open their breasts with flint knives, tore out their palpitating heart, and

offered it to their idols.”24 Diaz wrote of being forced to bear witness to what the Aztecs did with

the corpses of their sacrificed victims, which were skinned, tanned, turned into leather for

clothing, and “the legs, arms, and other parts of the body being cut up and devoured.”25 Diaz

writings recounted how the Aztecs would brag of eating the captured Spanish, having recorded

an Azetc shouting over the wall of a besieged Aztec city how Spanish flesh had tasted bitter, but

Diaz attributed that to “the Almighty” who “in his mercy, had turned the flesh bitter.”26 In this

statement Diaz was able to reaffirm the religious missionary aspect of the conquest of Mexico.

Diaz thus framed the siege as a contest between brave Christians and savage pagan cannibals

who refused any attempts at diplomacy. Much more important still, Diaz asserted that within this

conflict against the pagan cannibals, the God was on the side of the conquistadors.

Diaz’s book was originally published in 1522, a few years after Bartolomé de las Casas

was declared by the Spanish Crown Protector of the Indians, and condemned the harsh

conditions that the Spanish ecomienda had created. In his In Defense of The Indians, de las Casas

described the Spanish colonists as “crazed by blind ambition, bend[ing] all of their energies of

mind and body to one purpose of gaining wealth, power, honor and dignities.”27 Las Casas then

accused the conquistadors of exaggerating their accounts of the crazed savage writing that “for

the sake of wealth they kill and destroy with inhuman cruelty people who are completely

innocent, meek, harmless, temperate, and quite willing and ready to receive and embrace the

word of God.”28 De las Casa’s words created enough of a stir among court officials, who now

feared that the spread of Catholicism was being perverted for the material gains of the

24 Diaz, Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz Del Castillo , 88.25 Diaz, Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz Del Castillo, 89.26 Diaz, Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz Del Castillo, 92.27 Bartolome de las Casas, In Defense of The Indians (Chicago: Northern Illinois University Press), 27.28 Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, 27.

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conquistadors It demanded a series of responses placing the blame for the treatment of the

Indians on the Indians themselves. As the conquistador Ruy Gonzalez inquired when he wrote to

the Spanish King in 1522, “why should all the conquistadors pay for these sins? Let those pay

who committed them…”29 Gonzales implied that what the conquistadors had been doing to the

Aztecs in the years following the conquista was punishment for what the Aztecs did to them

during the war.

What followed after the popularization of de las Casas in the Spanish court was a flood of

reports from otherwise little known conquistadors of the savagery of the natives they

encountered in Mexico. Juan Diaz told of his 1518 travels through the Yucatan peninsula in

search for gold, writing of a land rich in gold and helpful natives, until they were towards a

group of mountains. There the tales about the natives took a more savage tone. Here Juan Diaz

described gold-rich natives sacrificing children, cutting out their hearts, and eating their thighs.30

The location was important: the further away from Spanish control the explorers went, the more

gold there was to be had, but so too were there more barbaric natives who violated sensitive

European religious taboos.

To further counter de las Casas message of unwarranted Spanish cruelty to the Indians,

the conquistadors were determined to present an image of the conquistador as well-intentioned

missionaries who were forced into violence by hostile natives. Andre de Tapia’s story recounted

his experiences of travel across the Caribbean and his encounters with several native groups

whom he attempted to convert people to Christianity. While de Tapia’s group had some success

erecting crosses in one of the first villages they encountered, they found themselves the victims

29 Patricia de Fuentes, trans., The Conquistadors: First Person Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico (New York: Orion Press. 1963), IX.30 Diaz, Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz Del Castillo, 12.

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of a series of unprovoked attacks afterwards.31 When De Tapia and his men captured a couple of

the natives and interrogated them, they discovered that the Indians were themselves planning to

capture and eat any Christians they could find.32 De Tapia’s account became important because it

was a clear case of the Spanish portraying themselves as innocent and good intentioned

Christians being set upon by the savage barbaric pagan natives.

De Tapia presented his mission as a peaceful one that had gone awry. In his account, De

Tapias stated when his group had landed on shore to gather supplies; they encountered a group of

natives that asked the conquistadors to allow the natives to prepare for a proper greeting for the

arrival of de Tapias and his group. When the Spanish agreed, the natives arrived the next day

with an armed detachment and were prepared for war. De Tapias commander, the Marques

“demanded several times to be received in peace because he knew otherwise they would be

destroyed; but they refused, and threatened to kill us if we came ashore.”33 It creates a clear

narrative of Christian versus cannibal that is implied throughout the tales preceding it, but

afterwards became the heart of the cannibal tale.

Third Course: Christian Hero versus the Native Cannibal

As the spread of Europeans across the Americas continued, the cannibal narrative began

to evolve into a story of civilization versus the savage wild beasts that lived just beyond its

borders. Hans Staden’s True History, first published in 1557, became an influential tale about the

presence of the native cannibal in the Americas. Hans Staden was a sailor in the employ of a

Portuguese merchant vessel on the way to Brazil. Once in Brazil Staden was captured by the

local Tupinamba tribe. The Hans Staden narrative was most responsible for the evolution of the

31Fuentes, The Conquistadors, 23.32Fuentes, The Conquistadors, 24.33Fuentes, The Conquistadors, 22.

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portrayal of the native cannibal as a direct antagonist of the Spanish into an inhuman, to the wild

animal that reveled in base desires. Staden’s book Han Staden’s True History was, as Malcom

Letts described in 1928 Broadway Travelers edition of the book, “one of the earliest accounts of

the New World and Brazil to appear in German, and its success seemed immediate. A second

Marburg edition was published in a few months, and two further editions were printed in

Frankfurt, both dated 1557.”34 Staden’s True History sets the stage for cannibal narratives

afterwards, as many of the cannibal stories after Staden’s follow the pattern of the Christian hero

trapped in a pagan world with only his faith in God to comfort him. Staden’s published account

presents him as a pious Christian, who had readied himself as the lone beleaguered Christian

staying true to God in a brutal world that did not know Christianity.

The image of the faithful Christian held captive in the lands of the hostile cannibal was

the primary theme in the account of Hans Staden. While Brazil had technically been considered

the colonial holding of Portugal since 1500, the first permanent settlement in Brazil was not

founded until 1532. When Staden set out for Brazil in 1548 it was still an untamed country filled

with unpredictable Tupi natives who lived in the region. To illustrate the danger of Tupi native,

Staden wrote of a native attack on a small Portuguese trading outpost near the settlement of

Garasu, “the savages besieging us were estimated to number eight thousand.”35 These grand

claims were a common occurrence in the beginning of Staden’s narrative that presented him as

divinely favored. Just before reaching the settlement of Garasu, Staden spoke of praying in order

to stave off a storm, and in the process having seen St. Elmo’s Fire, thought to be a signal of

divine favor from the patron saint of sailors. 36 Staden carefully utilized common superstitions

34 Malcom Letts, ed., Hans Staden: The True History of his Captivity, 1557 (London: The Broadway Travelers. 1928), 9.35 Hans Staden Hans Staden’s True History: An Account of Cannibal Activity in Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press.2008), 26.36 Staden, Han Staden’s True History, 25.

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and unverifiable anecdotes in order to establish himself as a heroic pious figure in a savage and

untamable world.

Staden presented the very act of trade to be a holy one that his God encouraged, having

justified the practice of overseas commerce in as a religious duty. Staden’s portrayal of himself

as a pious figure favored by divine forces in the face of hostile pagan cannibals presented the

natives as antagonists to Christianity itself. The very first line in his book, Staden wrote “Mercy

and peace in Christ jesu our Savoir, Gracious Prince and Master.”37 With this beginning Staden

set the tone of the Christian lost in a savage, pagan world. Quickly invoking God in his ventures,

Staden wrote, “That they go down to the sea in ships that do business in great waters. These see

the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.”38 While this justification may sound similar

to the Spanish in the Caribbean, the Spanish never associated commerce directly with religion,

here Staden wrote about how the economic nature of imperialism was a Christian duty. Staden

then presented himself as a loyal Christian doing God’s commercial work in the New World, an

innocent and holy figure in a strange new land.

Staden found himself in Brazil at a time where European powers and tribes of the Tupi

language group were battling over territory and trade. The Tupinamba were a tribe indigenous to

Brazil who were allied with French traders and hostile to the Portuguese settlers, and they

captured Staden while he was working as a soldier to a small Portuguese village. Staden painted

the picture of their cruelty, and in many ways echoes the warnings the conquistadors implied

when writing in response to de las Casas. “The ropes which I had round my neck, they lashed to

a tree above, and they lay during the night round me, mocking me, and calling me in their

37Staden, Hans Staden’s True History, 1.38 Staden, Hans Staden’s True History, 1.

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language ‘Schere inban ende,’ you are bound be[a]st.”39 This part of Staden’s account showed

that when given the chance, the Tupinamba would strip a European of his very humanity,

treating him like the Europeans would treat cattle. Not being afforded the mercy or whatever

dignity would be afforded to a Christian European captured by another European, Staden implied

that in matters of war as well as civilization, the Tupinamba were incapable of civilization.

One of the great violations of European taboos that Staden reportedly observed was the

role of the Tupinamba women in warfare. Staden saw himself as a prisoner of war, yet unlike in

Europe where the responsibility for prisoners of war was the job of the men of society,

preparation of prisoners of war who were to be eaten was the responsibility of the women of the

tribe. Staden seemed shocked and amazed at the violent role that the women seemed to revel in.

He wrote of being left in a hut to the care of the women of the tribe “the women came in and

struck and pulled me before and behind, and threatened how they would eat me.”40 This active

and violent role in the care of prisoners of war was a direct contrast to the inactive role European

women played in warfare.

The role of women as the head of ceremonies in the Tupinamba tribe was yet another

facet of how Staden presented these natives as savage and merciless monsters. When Staden was

being prepared to be eaten by the tribe, the women bring him to a shrine, where they tie him to

an idol, and force him to participate in a ritual dance celebrating their gods.41 This gender

reversal flies in the face of the considerably less pronounced role of women in Catholic ritual.

Staden showed that in the pagan religions of the Tupi people women had a central role in the

direction and implementation of the religion. Not only was Hans Staden about to be killed by

39 Staden, Hans Staden’s True History, 57.40 Staden, Hans Staden’s True History, 60.41 Staden, Hans Staden’s True History, 63.

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savage cannibals, he was to be killed in such a way that is a direct violation of the tenants of

sixteenth-century European society.

The direct blasphemies of the Tupinamba people were often a highlight of Staden’s

portrayal of the natives of Brazil. During the early days of his capture Staden often appealed to

God, either through prayer or song. The Tupinamba repeatedly mocked him saying, “your god is

filth”42 in response to any religious explanations that Staden would give them for his religious

outbursts. Here is where Staden’s account begins to sharply deviate from the accounts of the

early explorers five decades prior. Vespucci claimed that the natives he encountered were

godless, and Columbus, Diaz, and De Tapia all claimed that at least some of the natives were

partially receptive to Christianity. These earlier accounts of godless pagans allowed for the idea

that these pagan natives could be converted or cowed by the power of Christianity. The

Tupinamba of Hans Staden’s True History were actively hostile to the very idea of Christianity.

Not only were the Tupinamba customs a violation of European Christian culture, but Staden

portrayed the Tupinamba as direct antagonists to Christianity in the region. While the

conquistadors highlighted the Aztecs paganism to demonstrate why the encomienda system was

a civilizing force, Staden’s Tupinamba were not ignorant barbarians, but villainous ones.

When some of the Tupinamba villagers get sick, Hans Staden was able to present himself

as a miracle healer in order to save his own life, demonstrating the power of pious and

unwavering faith in Christianity. A few days before his captors began to fall ill, Staden had told

them that “the moon was angry with them,”43 Staden admitted this was a ruse to cover for the

fact that he was once again praying and wished to avoid the mocking of his religion that he had

grown accustomed to. The Tupi natives were upset with this news, and Staden quickly changed

42 Staden, Hans Staden’s True History, 74.43 Staden, Hans Staden’s True History, 76.

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his story. When the villagers began to fall ill, Staden was brought to their huts because they

recalled Staden’s claim about the moon and they thought that Staden may be some sort of

prophet. Staden presented these illnesses both to the Tupinamba and the readers of these illnesses

being the angry wrath of the Christian God, who did not want them to eat Christians.44 Here is

where Staden’s narrative turns from the beleaguered Christian to one favored by divine

providence.

Staden’s revelation about the Christian God’s displeasure with his captors holds

significance for the philosophy of early imperialism in the Americas. The stories of the Tupi

villagers who fell under a mysterious illness, only to be revived by the prayer of the lone

Christian captive presents the idea of divine protection of and favor to the activities of the

Europeans colonists. Staden himself owned native slaves, captured and destroyed ships, and

engaged in violence without a hint of remorse in his recounting; but that was excusable due to

his Christian European background. This idea of the justification of violent and tyrannical

activities over the natives due to belonging to a superior culture is one that spreads far beyond

the Staden narrative to every facet of the early colonial culture of the Americas.

Christianity was also a unifying force against the natives of Brazil. When Staden was first

captured, there was a French trader who came to the village who when asked if Staden was “one

of the hated Portuguese,”45 told the Tupinamba that he was and should be eaten. When the

Frenchman returned, Staden attempted to appeal to his Christian nature, claiming that God

clearly wanted him to live, and that the Frenchman should save him from captivity.46 It was only

then after appealing to the Frenchman’s religious sensibilities that he agreed to aid Staden in

44 Staden, Hans Staden’s True History, 80.45 Staden, Hans Staden’s True History, 61.46 Staden, Hans Staden’s True History, 84.

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negotiating with his captors. Once the idea was presented that helping Staden was a moral

Christian thing to do, the Frenchman became a steadfast ally of Hans Staden in attempting to

secure his release. In this act, Staden reveals how national rivalries, as bloody as they could be in

colonial South America in the sixteenth century, fell by the wayside when dealing with the pagan

natives.

The Staden story also shares with other Christian cannibal narratives the ideas of

martyrdom. When Bernal Diaz wrote of the losses of the Spanish Conquistadors to the Aztec

cannibals, he spoke of how the men died in service to the catholic God.47 When Staden was

confronted with a prisoner that the Tupinamba had planned to eat – a native Christian from a

tribe allied with the Portuguese – he counseled the native that “he was to be of good cheer, for

they would only eat his flesh, his soul would proceed to another place, wither his countryman’s

souls also proceeded, and where there was much happiness.”48 Staden promised this native that

he would die with the favor of the Christian God, and so his death was not to be seen as

something tragic.

It should be noted that in this incident in the Staden account the hierarchy of Christians in

the colonial New World began to emerge. At the very top the Christian hierarchy sat the

Christian Europeans, who not only were deserving of mercy, but worthy of divine intervention.

In the middle of this order was the Christian native, who was seen as noble at best, and simple

but useful at worst, but altogether lower and less worthy than Europeans. At the bottom of the

hierarchy sat the pagan natives, who were unnecessarily cruel, naïve, and deserving of whatever

abuses the Europeans deemed to inflict on them. When it was Staden’s life on the line, he

pleaded to the Frenchman’s Christian sense of duty to bargain with the natives for his release.

47 Diaz, Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz Del Castillo, 86.48 Staden, Hans Staden’s True History, 85.

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Staden did not attempt to have the prisoner freed or even to have him spared from his fate of

being devoured by the Tupinamba tribe, instead telling him to take solace in the fact that he

would join the Christian afterlife.

In the written accounts to a European audience the natives of the Americas were

portrayed as fierce animals, and narratives such as Staden’s reinforced the idea that these

indigenous people of the Americas should be regarded as less than human. The most telling

exchange in the Staden narrative is when Staden is talking to the king of the Tupinamba, Konya

Bebe, who had a “basket of human flesh before him,”49 and while Staden was a prisoner, at this

point after acting as a healer, he was often regarded well by the king. When Konye Bebe offered

Hans some of the human flesh to eat Staden was mortified and refused, which confused Bebe.

Staden responded with “unreasoning animals hardly devour their own kind; ought one man,

therefor devour another?”50 Bebe, defiant to Staden’s reasoning responded with “I am a tiger-

animal, it tastes well.”51 No longer making a narrative inference to these natives being inhuman,

Staden now directly accuses them of behaving more savage than “unreasoning animals,” and the

king of the Tupi people he so charged not only admitted to being an animal, but actively

enjoying the barbarity of cannibalizing. There are few moments within Staden’s story that better

speak of how the European colonists view the native people than this exchange. To Staden and

the Europeans at the time, the native they encountered were savage beasts who could never really

join civilized society. To Staden and his ilk, such natives might be allies, or could be useful to

Europeans as servants or slaves, but much like a domesticated dog, they could never be fully

recognized members of society of any real value.

49 Staden, Hans Staden’s True History, 102.50 Staden, Hans Staden’s True History, 103.51 Staden, Hans Staden’s True History, 103.

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Staden’s capture and time among the Tupinamba is to both him and his contemporary

readership a tale of a man being trapped in the wild and forced to remain Christian, moral, and

human among the animals of the wild. When Staden pleads to a boy to stop gnawing on the bone

of a slain enemy, he is attempting to appeal to the humanity of the natives,52 the only response to

Staden’s pleas are mocking and derision. In this narrative there is no humanity among the natives

that captured him, so any attempt that Staden made to appeal to the Tupinamba’s humanity fell

on deaf ears. In comparison, he finds sympathy abound in almost all the Europeans he comes

across, even those allied with enemy countries; for instance, when he pleads with the French

ships coming to trade with the tribe, he finds them sympathetic if ultimately powerless.53 Once

again the hierarchy is established and reinforced, demonstrating, that these natives did not have

the capacity for humanity. Given that they would not be able to perform or even understand acts

of civility or humanity, Staden argues they should not be afforded any should conflicts arises.

In his 1979 book The Man-Eating Myth, William Arens deconstructs the Staden story.

Arens questions how Staden was so unfamiliar with other European languages, but familiar

enough with the language of the Tupinamba natives that he could gather such specific detail

from what they were telling him during his capture.54 Staden would not have been promoting the

idea of the cannibal for direct colonial enterprise, but for book sales. Hans Staden had his

account published shortly after returning from Europe where it became a popular and enduring

story. Staden was able to use the idea of pagan jungle cannibal to find a level of fame and fortune

that would not have been available to him in his previous role of freelance sailor and soldier.

Arens suggests that Staden’s account of his time among the Tupi people may have actually been

52 Staden, Hans Staden’s True History, 76.53 Staden, Hans Staden’s True History, 95.54 William Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropography (New York: Oxford University Press,1979), 55.

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fictional, but was one of the most influential stories in regards to the behaviors of the natives of

the Americas.

The Main Course: The North American Cannibal

The English pattern of settlement in North America had less religious overtones that

influenced the early Spanish and Portuguese ideas of the Americas. While the settlements of the

Caribbean and Virginia were both for profit ventures, the Virginia Stock Company did not have

to win the approval of the Pope for legitimacy. When confronted by the natives of Virginia, the

English could not escape the influence of the cannibal narrative that had permeated through the

stories of the New World for a hundred and fifteen years before they colonized the area.

The Virginia Company sent out a party for colonization of North America in late 1606,

and these new colonists already had an idea of what the indigenous people of this land were like.

George Percy was a leading figure in the early colonial period of Virginia, and he wrote of his

experiences on the way to North America in Observations gathered out of a Discourse of the

Plantation of the Southerne Colonie in Virginia by the English. En route to settling in Virginia,

the fleet had stopped at the West Indies, and Percy wrote of the natives there, “These people and

the rest of the Ilands in the West Indies, and Brasill, are called by the names of Canibals, that

will eate mans flesh; these people doe poyson their Arrow heads, which are made of a fishes

bone: they worship the Devill for their God, and have no other beliefe.”55 Percy had never

encountered any Native Americans. He was leaving England for the Americas for the very first

time during this voyage. Percy’s writing made a direct reference to both Staden’s True History

55 George Percy Observations gathered out of a Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie in Virginia by the English, 1606, Virtual Jamestown Project. Accessed January 3, 2015 http://www.virtualjamestown.org/VVD4SJBL.html.

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and the Mundus Novus, and Percy’s report revealed that the cannibal narrative already had a

strong effect on the perception of natives by Europeans.

John Smith had believed at one point that the Powhatan engaged in acts of cannibalism,

or so he claimed. In his Generall Historie of Virginia, Smith recounted the time he was captured

by the Powhatan and almost executed, only to be saved by the chief’s daughter Pocahontas.

Before he was to be executed, Smith described the unusually good treatment bestowed on him by

his captors, stating in the third person, that they fed him so well, “made him thinke they would

fat him to eat him.”56 Smith had no reason to believe that the Powahatans wanted to eat him,

having made no earlier reference to cannibalistic rituals performed by the indigenous people of

Virginia. This assumption made by Smith that the Powahatans wanted to eat him came from

years of being told the natives of the New World were alien godless cannibals. Percy believed

this to be true in his letters, and the moment Smith was threatened; he assumed that he would be

devoured in much the same way that Staden had been threatened.

In Smith’s letters to Queen Anne where he told her the story of his capture, he made no

reference to the fear of being eaten by the natives of Virginia. He did mention the power of the

English as a civilizing force, praising Pocahontas for having adapted to English culture

wholeheartedly after saving him from potential execution, writing “and at last rejecting her

barbarous condition, she was married to an English Gentleman, with whom at this present she is

in England…”57 To the English imperialists this was a great victory for their mission of

colonization. The daughter of a barbarous chief, one that had once been presented by Smith as a

fierce cannibal, could give up her pagan savage ways and become a part of English culture.

56 John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia (Charlotte, NC: University of North Carolina Library, 2008), 46.57 John Smith, “A Letter to Queen Anne of Great Britain.” Documenting the American South, Accessed November 2, 2014, http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/smith/smith.html

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The migration of Europeans to North America also brought with it the migration of

certain tropes of the cannibal story itself. In Hans Staden’s account of his time as a prisoner of

the Tupinamba people in Brazil, he wrote about the ritual aspects of the Tupi act of cannibalism.

The natives would gather a root and grind it into a drink they called Kawi.58 This same ritual

drink would be duplicated a hundred and forty-two years later by a tribe in Florida in the account

of Jonathan Dickinson. Dickinson was a Quaker merchant travelling with his wife and baby from

the Caribbean to Philadelphia when his ship ran aground and he was forced to swim for land.

Dickinson and his family were captured by the Jaega Indians shortly after making landfall.59

After the tribe had captured Dickinson and his family, the familiar pattern of de-humanization

had emerged, the natives stripped Dickinson and his family of their clothes, beat them,

mistreated them, and regarded them like cattle. 60 The Jaega tribe that had captured Dickinson

prepared a special root drink for a feast, and Dickinson assumed that the Indians were preparing

them to be eaten.61 This preparation would be a very similar process to Staden’s Tupi captors,

and Dickinson feared that his family would suffer the same fate that Staden narrowly escaped.

Dickinson’s story illustrates just how influential the cannibal narrative had become.

Europeans were very aware of the legend of the native cannibal living in dense tropical jungles.

By the time that North America had been settled by the English in 1607, the stories of the native

cannibal were ingrained into popular culture. Dickinson had no idea what the Jaega were going

to do to him and his family, but when he saw them preparing a special root drink for their feast,

he immediately assumed that the Jaega were going to eat their prisoners. This association

between the root drink and the native tropical cannibal share distinct similarities with Staden’s

58 Staden, Hans Staden’s True History, 60.59 Jonathan Dickinson, Gods Protecting Providence, Early American Imprints. Series 1 Number 836 (Original publication 1699), 6.60 Dickinson, God’s Protecting Providence, 8.61 Dickinson, God’s Protecting Providence, 12.

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story. It was only through pleading with other Europeans who regularly traded with the Jaega

were Dickinson and his family released.

The French settlers in Canada had begun to use the native cannibal as one of many

reasons why the expansion of French presence in the Americas was so urgently needed. The

Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune made a direct plea for further colonization of Quebec when he

utilized the cannibal narrative and the need to spread Catholicism to North America. In the

opening of his 1635 letter, Le Jeune wrote:

Shall the French, alone of all the Nations of the earth, be deprived of the honor of expanding and spreading over this New World? Shall France, much more populous than all the other Kingdoms, have Inhabitants only for itself? or, when her, children leave her, shall they go here and there and lose the name of Frenchmen among Foreigners?62

Le Jeune was concerned about the lack of colonial effort that the French had engaged in

compared to the rest of Europe in the Americas. The French government was not as interested in

long-term settlements, so France’s presence in Quebec in the seventeenth-century was relegated

to trading outposts just outside long-standing native communities.63 Le Jeune sought to shift the

colonial priorities of the French government with a series of arguments as to why France

expanded French colonialism was necessary.

First, Le Jeune promoted the economic benefits of expansion. Le Jeune knew the primary

reason behind colonial campaigns, so when he wanted to convince government officials of the

importance of expanding further into Canada, he wrote “Why cannot the great forests of New

France largely furnish the Ships for the Old? Who doubts that there are here mines of iron,

copper, and other metals?”64 These were commodities that other colonial powers had great

62 Paul Le Jeune, Relation of the Jesuits, 1635 Creighton University, Accessed 9 November, 2014, http://puffin.creighton.edu/jesuit/relations/relations_08.html, 11.63 Alan Greer, The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century America (Boston: Bedford St. Martins Press, 2004), 10.64 Le Jeune, Relation of the Jesuits,1635, 11.

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success in gathering with their expansions deeper and deeper into the New World. The Spanish

crown had gained greater autonomy from its nobility in the 16th century from the wealth

provided by the precious metals mined from Central and South America, and the by the time of

Le Jeune’s 1635 letters, the English had established profitable centers for timber and tobacco in

New England and Virginia.

Competition with the English over who would control the resources of North America

was a primary concern for Le Jeune in the opening pages of his 1635 account. Le Jeune alludes

to competitive raiding and the capture of Europeans when he wrote, “if these Countries are

peopled by our French, not only will this weaken the strength of the Foreigner,—who holds in

his ships, in his towns, and in his armies, a great many of our Countrymen as hostages…”65

Much like Columbus in 1492, Le Jeune attempted to make an argument for a stronger military

presence in order to provide stability for potential beneficial operations.

Le Jeune understood another of the problems with Europe was population growth. One

of the benefits of the North American colonies for England was it provided a place to clear the

unemployed and unskilled from its cities. Le Jeune believed this to be a problem facing France

as well when he wrote, “Now as New France is so immense, so many inhabitants can be sent

here that those who remain in the Mother Country will have enough honest work left them to do,

without launching into those vices which ruin Republics,”66 Le Jeune theorized that this

overpopulation and idleness was the reason for crime and immorality in France, and that New

France was a unique opportunity for France to create a more civilized society at home and

abroad.

65 Le Jeune, Relation of the Jesuits, 1635 , 10.66 Le Jeune, Relation of the Jesuits, 1635, 10.

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Le Jeune’s own reason for being there was not primarily an economic one, but a religious

one. The Jesuits were there as part of a religious mission, and Le Jeune was concerned with the

conversion of natives. Convinced that divine favor would be bestowed upon France if the Crown,

Le Jeune argued for the conversion of natives, having wrote,

From this will result a good which will draw down upon both old and new France a great blessing from Heaven; it is the Conversion of a vast number of Savage Nations, who inhabit these lands and who are every day becoming disposed to receive the light of the Faith.67

Le Jeune’s missionary zeal is evident here, feeling that conversion efforts would bestow a

supernatural advantage in the political endeavors of the French in the North America.

Le Jeune thought the natives were willing and eager to convert to Christianity, but he did

not have full faith in their faculties. Le Jeune believed the best way to convince the natives of

New France to abandon their culture and adopt Catholicism was a showing of strength, wrote,

“The more imposing the power of our French people is made in these Countries, the more easily

they can make their belief received by these Barbarians, who are influenced even more through

the senses, than through reason.”68 Le Jeune thought the natives were capable and ready to

receive Christianity, but much like Staden, Columbus and Vespucci, he felt that they needed to

be domesticated in the same way one would domesticate dogs.

Unlike previous cannibal narratives, Le Jeune did not portray the natives as evil,

presenting instead an image of violent ignorance. In writing about the Huron capture of an

Iroquois warrior, Le Jeune reported that one of the Huron commented to the missionaries “I shall

67 Le Jeune, Relation of the Jesuits, 1635, 10.68 Le Jeune, Relation of the Jesuits, 1635, 10.

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really eat some Hiroquois."69 Le Jeune and his colleagues were mortified by this, and attempted

to speak to the tribal elder who

told us that this Hiroquois was one of those who the year before had surprised and killed three of our Frenchmen; this was done to stifle in us the pity that we might have for him, and they even dared to ask some of our French if they did not want to eat their share of him, since they had killed our Countrymen. We replied that these cruelties displeased us, and that we were not cannibals.70

This depiction of native cannibals differs from earlier ones by showing the natives to have been

unaware of the cruelty of their actions, as shown when they offered to share the meat from their

butchered prisoners with the missionaries, unaware of the priest’s revulsions of the custom.

Le Jeune portrayed these cannibals as savage certainly, but also ignorant. It is the fate of

this prisoner that is a key component of Le Jeune’s characterization of the Hurons. Le Jeune

reported that “He did not die, however; for these Barbarians, weary of the war, spoke with this

young prisoner, who was a strong man, tall and finely formed, about making peace; they have

been treating about it for a long time, but at least it is concluded.”71 These natives were shown to

be ignorant of the taboo of cannibalism that Europeans understood, despite this the natives were

portrayed as tired of their own customs and political conflicts. Le Jeune thus showed a people

ready for a change in the way their lives were organized. Here was a great opportunity to

introduce both Catholic religion and expand French rule in Canada.

The Hurons of Le Jeune’s accounts only knew happiness from a base physical

understanding. Le Jeune described the state of mind of the Hurons he encountered as “It is the

highest state of happiness for the Savages to have something with which to satisfy their

69 Le Jeune, Relations of the Jesuits, 1635, 21.70 Le Jeune, Relations of the Jesuits, 1635, 23.71 Le Jeune, Relations of the Jesuits, 1635, 24.

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stomachs.”72 The Jesuit missionary made a connection between the natives happiness being

completely dependent on food.

Whereas Le Jeune and European Christians would associate faith and piousness with

ultimate happiness, Le Jeune creates the caricature of an Indian completely subsumed by his base

desires. This association between happiness and food allowed Le Jeune to depict the distress felt

by the natives when a famine struck the area, Le Jeune described the victims of the famine

coming to the village for aid, “a troop of these poor Barbarians came crying for pity at our

Settlement; the famine, which was cruel last year, has treated them still worse this winter, at least

in several places; we have heard a report that, near Gaspé, the Savages killed and ate a young

boy whom the Basques left with, them to learn their language.”73 Here Le Jeune depicted the

desperation of these tribes in order to justify their cannibalism. “

We have been witnesses to their famine at the three Rivers; they came in bands, greatly disfigured and as fleshless as skeletons, liking, they said, as well to die near the French as in their own Forests; the misfortune for them was that, as this Settlement was only in its first stages, there was not yet a storehouse at three Rivers, our French and we having brought from Kebec only the food necessary for the number of men who were residing there; we tried, however, to help them...74

Here, Le Jeune not only emphasized the native desperation, he offered as well a stronger French

presence as a solution.

The natives being driven to acts of cannibalism was the humanitarian argument Le Jeune

was making for French colonization. The 1635 Relations of the Jesuits speaks of the failure of

the native way of life in the wake of a famine. Le Jeune repeated reports of other French in the

area, “we have been witnesses to their famine at the three Rivers; they came in bands, greatly

72 Le Jeune, Relations of the Jesuits, 1635, 26.73 Le Jeune, Relations of the Jesuits, 1635, 28.74 Le Jeune, Relation of the Jesuits, 1635, 29.

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disfigured and as fleshless as skeletons, liking, they said, as well to die near the French as in their

own Forests; the misfortune for them was that, as this Settlement was only in its first stages,

there was not yet a storehouse at three Rivers,”75 Here Le Jeune implied that further French

colonization could save the lives of the natives of New France. He does not place the blame of

the French, saying that the supplies were not enough men and food when Le Jeune wrote that

“having brought from Kebec only the food necessary for the number of men who were residing

there; we tried, however, to help them, each on his side exercising charity according to his

means, or according to his inclinations; not one of those who came to us died of hunger.”76 This

is the plea that the natives could not be neglected any longer, and that French rule was not only

needed, but the natives of Quebec desperately wanted a stronger French colonial presence.

The ferocity of the native cannibal became a focus for the drive for French colonization

of North America. Le Jeune depicted the Hurons as an ignorant but innocent people who were

unaware of their own savagery, but Pierre Radisson wrote about the cannibalistic Iroquois as

savage beasts in the same way that the Spanish depicted the Aztecs. When a trading fort that

Radisson was in was attacked by Iroquois, Radisson recounted what the Iriquois did to their

prisoners in front of the besieged fort, reporting that “the prisoner was brought who soone was

dispatched, burned and roasted and eaten.”77 The French traders writing back to France would

have had their readers believe that the profitable forests of Canada were teeming with savage

man-eating natives, which could only be fixed by European enlightenment, religion, or force.

Dessert: The Civilized Cannibal

75 Le Jeune, Relation of the Jesuits, 1635, 29.76 Le Jeune, Relation of the Jesuits, 1635, 29.77 Pierre-Esprit Radisson, Pierre-Esprit Radisson: The Collected Writings, Volume 1: The Voyages (New York: Queens University Press. 2004), 217.

Blauberg 31

Natives of the Americas engaging in cannibalism was seen as evidence of their

inhumanity, but Europeans engaging in acts of cannibalism was justified in a series of ways.

When Europeans engaged in cannibalism, it was either from acts of desperation or medical

curiosity. While Europeans engaged in cannibalism, they always retained their civilized and even

sympathetic image, unlike the natives who were accused of similar acts.

When white settlers found themselves committing the same acts they accused the natives

of committing, they justified them as acts of desperation or grim necessity. In the winter of 1609

the settlement of Jamestown Virginia was in the midst of a famine that drove them to

desperation. Without any food, the colonists had begun to die from starvation at such a rapid

rate, that survivors would later refer to the period as The Starving Times. It was under these

conditions that some of the Jamestown colonists resorted to eating their own dead.78 The settlers

had acted in desperation, and while unpleasant for them, they did not create the savage imagery

for each other that accompanied accusations of native cannibalism. John Smith wrote about the

desperate conditions when he recounted a story of a colonist killing and eating his own wife,

when he wrote in A Generall Historie, “one amongst the rest did kill his wife, powdered her, and

had eaten part of her before it was knowne; for which he was executed, as hee well deserved…”

While the killing of one’s spouse was certainly a serious crime that warranted execution, Smith

justified this as the act of a man driven mad by desperation and hunger. Smith’s ability to justify

the action of the man was such that he could even joke about it when he wrote, “now wether shee

was better roasted, boyled, or carbonado’d, I know not; but such a dish as powdered wife I never

heard of.”79 The act of murder was punishable, but Smith took a whimsical look at the idea of

78 James Stromberg, “Starving Settlers in Jamestown Colony Resorted to Cannibalism,” Smithsonian Magazine, April, 30, 2013, accessed November 4, 2014.http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/starving-settlers-in-jamestown-colony-resorted-to cannibalism-46000815/.79 John Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia (Wisconsin Historical Society Digital Archives. 2003) 295.

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eating the dead. Smith was not portraying these acts as savage and animal-like, but acts that

should invoke pity.

Cannibalism in late seventeenth-century North America had begun to be used for medical

purposes. Paracelsian medicine had arisen as a Protestant alternative to the more standard humor

based Galenic medicinal theories. In her article “Evidence of Medicinal Cannibalism in Puritan

New England: "Mummy" and Related Remedies in Edward Taylor's ‘Dispensatory,’” Karen

Gorden-Grube writes that “for Protestant Paracelsians of the period, medicinal cannibalism

fulfilled a substitute function to that of transubstantiated flesh and blood in the sacrament.”80 It’s

here that the uses of cannibalism as a propaganda tool become clear. While being performed by

the natives of the Americas it was used to describe a group of people who were more beasts than

men, and not considering on the same social, cultural, and intellectual level as Europeans.

Cannibalism while being performed by white Europeans could be excused as scientific or even

religious. Edward Taylor’s dispensatory, and Paracelsian medicine, clearly displayed how a

double standard had arisen.

Leftovers: The Conclusion

Colonization required the vilification and dehumanization of the indigenous people who

lived in the profitable New World. The Europeans exploring and hoping to exploit the riches of

the Americas had to create a savage image of the people who had already inhabited the lands the

Europeans wanted to settle. When Europeans wrote about their travels and experiences in the

Americas, they presented themselves as the heroes and protagonists of the narratives, and in

order to justify actions that could not be seen as heroic, relatable, or sympathetic in most

80 Karen Gordon-Grube, “Evidence of Medicinal Cannibalism in Puritan New England: ‘Mummy’ and Related Remedies in Edward Taylor's ‘Dispensatory,” Early American Literature, Vol. 28 No. 3 (1998), 185.

Blauberg 33

circumstances, their story needed a villain. The villain of the story of the colonization of the

Americas was the natives, and the natives’ most monstrous act was cannibalism.

The cannibal was a human being that had rejected its humanity in favor of senseless

animal behavior. This rejection of humanity was presented as a rejection of everything good

about civilization. To a European audience this rejection of civilized thought, behavior, and

society had meant the natives surrendered their rights to be considered on an equal footing with

the Europeans. Given the choice between humanity and savagery, to the Europeans writing about

the New World, the natives chose to revel in savagery, rejecting everything the Europeans held

dear.

In the development of the cannibal narrative in the New World, the cannibal became the

opposite of the European colonists telling the story. If the European was enterprising and loyal,

the cannibals were simple, disorganized, or cowardly. If the Europeans were pious explorers, the

cannibals were savage pagans who reveled in the bloodshed of Europeans. If the Europeans were

normal men caught in extraordinary circumstances, the cannibals were monsters who only found

joy in torturing them. If the Europeans were pious intellectuals, the cannibals were innocent and

ignorant savages not capable of understanding what they were doing.

The natives became whatever the colonists needed them to be in order to further their

economic and political goals. The role the Europeans needed them to be the most was anything

other than human. Cannibalism was the fastest way of stripping that humanity from the natives

of the Americas. By placing the natives in the role of furious monsters living in the forests just

outside European settlements, the Europeans found the best justification to expand those

settlements and overcome those monsters.

Blauberg 34

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