Insatiable Appetites

Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World

Kelly L. Watson

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780814770740
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A comparative historyof cross-cultural encounters and the critical role of cannibalism in the early modernperiod. Cannibalism, for medieval and early modern Europeans, was synonymous with savagery. Humans who ate other humans, they believed, were little better than animals. The European colonizers who encountered Native Americans described them as cannibals as a matter of course, and they wrote extensively about the lurid cannibal rituals they claim to have witnessed. In this definitive analysis, Kelly L. Watson argues that the persistent rumors of cannibalism surrounding Native Americans served a specific and practical purpose for European settlers. These colonizers had to forge new identities for themselves in the Americas and find ways to not only subdue but also co-exist with native peoples. They established hierarchical categories of European superiority and Indian inferiority upon which imperial power in the Americas was predicated. In her close read of letters, travel accounts, artistic renderings, and other descriptions of cannibals and cannibalism, Watson focuses on how gender, race, and imperial power intersect within the figure of the cannibal. Watson reads cannibalism as a part of a dominant European binary in which civilization is rendered as male and savagery is seen as female, and she argues that as Europeans came to dominate the New World, they continually rewrote the cannibal narrative to allow for a story in which the savage, effeminate, cannibalistic natives were overwhelmed by the force of virile European masculinity. Original and historically grounded, Insatiable Appetites uses the discourse of cannibalism to uncover the ways in which difference is understood in the West.

1. Inventing Cannibals: Classical and Medieval Traditions

In a famous and gruesome tale from ancient Mediterranean mythology, the god Kronos (Saturn in the Roman incarnation) swallowed his children out of fear that he would lose his power at the hands of his son, as had been prophesied by his parents. Prior to eating his offspring, he had also castrated his father, Uranus, in a fit of jealous rage. After watching Kronos consume all but one of their children, Kronos’s sister-wife, Rhea, tricked him into eating a stone instead of their son Zeus. Later, as predicted, Zeus took revenge on his father and freed his brothers and sisters from Kronos’s body.1 Thus from acts of castration and cannibalism the leader of the Olympic Pantheon rose to power. Centuries later, in the 1820s, the Spanish artist Francisco Goya would memorialize this fateful event in the painting Saturn Devouring His Son. This story is only one of many mythological tales of cannibalism that have lasted the ages.

While humans consuming other humans has likely occurred since time immemorial, the Western idea that there are certain peoples who are prone to consuming other humans and that man-eating is directly related to other “savage” characteristics finds its origin in the ancient Mediterranean world. From these ancient traditions medieval genres like travelogues and bestiaries emerged. Thus by the time that Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, he carried nearly two thousand years of discursive cannibal history with him. Before jumping into an analysis of cannibalism in the late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Caribbean, we must first understand the intellectual tradition inherited by early modern Europeans. Explorers, soldiers, settlers, and priests brought with them evolving traditions about how to interact and engage with difference. They inherited the belief that peoples who inhabit the far reaches of the world and people unlike themselves were often man-eaters. This chapter traces ideas about cannibalism from Ancient Greece to medieval western Europe through a survey of some of the most influential texts.

The Origins of Anthropophagy in the Ancient Mediterranean

In Herodotus’s Histories, he describes several types of man-eating practiced by both Greek and non-Greek peoples, including acts of vengeance cannibalism, starvation cannibalism, and ritualized man-eating. The first of these tales of cannibalism, in book I, is an act of vengeance by a group of Scythian hunters angered by the harsh treatment they received at the hands of Cyaxares, the king of Media, when they returned empty-handed from a hunt. Herodotus writes, “They [the Scythians] felt that this treatment from Cyaxares was unwarranted, and they decided after consideration to chop up one of their young pupils, prepare him for the table in the way they had usually prepared wild animals, and serve him up to Cyaxares.”2

The second story of cannibalism in The Histories also involves vengeance. Astyages, the son of Cyaxeres, had a dream that his daughter Mandane would bring great danger to his kingdom. So, in order to preserve his power, Astyages married her to an inferior nobleman, a Persian named Cambyses. Soon Mandane became pregnant, and Astyages had another dream, which foretold that her offspring would rule in his place. Once the child was born, Astyages called upon a trusted relative named Harpagus and asked him to kill his grandson. Harpagus had no choice but to agree, but he was unable to complete the task himself, so he passed it on to a herdsman named Mitradates. Rather than kill the boy, Mitradates and his wife, who had just given birth to a stillborn child, passed him off as their own and put their deceased child in his place as evidence of the deed. Years later Astyages discovered that his grandson, called Cyrus, was still alive and brought Harpagus before him to answer for his crime. After pretending to be happy with this turn of events, Astyages told Harpagus to invite his own son to greet Cyrus. “However, when Harpagus’ son arrived, Astyages murdered him and dismembered him. He baked some of his flesh, stewed the rest and prepared it all for the table.” After Harpagus had eaten, Astyages asked him if he enjoyed the feast and called the servants to bring in a platter containing the boy’s head, hands, and feet. Rather than recoil in terror or grief, Harpagus told the king that he could do no wrong and returned home with his son’s remains. Years later, at the urging of Harpagus, Cyrus rebelled against his grandfather and ruled in his place, thus fulfilling Astyages’ dream premonition. In another story of cannibalism in the sordid, sad tale of the kingdom of Media, troops under Cyrus’s father, Cambyses, resorted to cannibalism in the face of starvation on an ill-fated attempt to conquer Ethiopia. Cambyses had been warned that this mission was foolhardy, but it took the desperate cannibalistic acts of his soldiers to finally convince him of this.3

While the Scythians are implicated in the revenge cannibalism of book I of The Histories, it is in book IV that they receive greater scrutiny and become the paradigmatic cannibals. Herodotus begins by describing the conquests of the Scythians and Darius’s plan to seek vengeance on them for their acts of aggression against the Medes. He then relates several different versions of the origins of the Scythian people, one of which traces their descent to the offspring of Heracles and Echidna, a snake-human hybrid. Much of book IV is taken up with a detailed description of the people and places in the region of Scythia. But despite the anthropophagous reputation of the Scythians, it is in fact their neighbors that Herodotus accuses of institutionalized cannibalism: “North of this agricultural region there is a vast uninhabited area, and then there are the Cannibals, who have their own distinct way of life and are not Scythian at all.”4

There are other people Herodotus accuses of occasionally committing acts of cannibalism, but the Cannibals are the only group to be defined by these acts. For example, he describes the funerary practices of the Issedones, who prepare a special feast on the occasion of a father’s death made of sacrificial animals and the dead man’s body.5 Herodotus is actually quite careful to distinguish among types of man-eating. He passes only minimal judgment on ritualized cannibalism, like that practiced by the Issedones. Acts of revenge cannibalism similarly are not judged as significantly worse than other acts of revenge, all of which bear severe consequences for those involved and their descendants. In other words, in tales of revenge cannibalism, it is not that a human being is killed and consumed that causes repercussions; more often it is the rashness and pride of the perpetrators that come back to haunt them. Thus Herodotus distinguishes between cannibalism (ritual, starvation, revenge) and Cannibals (people who actively seek to consume human flesh).

Throughout the Histories, Herodotus makes sure to give his reader all available information on a topic even if he does not find his sources very credible. For example, of the different versions of the origins of the Scythians that he relates, he indicates which he finds most reasonable. He is unconvinced by the version preferred by the Scythians themselves, which ties their origins to Heracles and Echidna. That does not mean, however, that Herodotus’s conclusions are always plausible. In his lengthy narrative on the regions surrounding Scythia, he describes a group of people living on the edges of the kingdom: “Far past this rugged region, in the foothills of the mountain range, live people who are said—men and women alike—to be bald from birth; they are also supposed to have snub noses and large chins, to have a distinct language, to dress like Scythians and to live off trees.” Beyond the lands of the bald people, Herodotus reports, he has only the sparest of evidence. He claims that the bald people tell of “goat-footed men living in the mountains, and that on the other side of the mountains there are other people who spend six months of the year asleep,” but he does not trust these reports. In fact in book III he offers a statement similar to that of Montaigne more than a thousand years later: “If one were to order all mankind to choose the best set of rules in the world, each group would, after due consideration, choose its own customs; each group regards its own as being by far the best.”6 Thus much more than most writers who followed him, Herodotus treats the act of cannibalism carefully and with a crude nod to cultural relativism.

Much has been written about the plausibility or implausibility of the existence of Herodotus’s Cannibals, but whether or not he is to be trusted on the topic, other classical writers followed his example and believed that Scythia and other regions on the edges of the “civilized world” were populated by man-eaters.7 Strabo describes the cannibalistic practices of the Celtic inhabitants of the British Isles, who are “more savage” than others in the region, practice incest, and are “man-eaters as well as heavy-eaters.” To shore up this claim, which he admits comes from less than trustworthy sources, he looks to the reputation of the Scythians for support: “And yet, as for the matter of man-eating, that is said to be a custom of the Scythians also and in cases of necessity forced by sieges, the Celti, the Iberians and several other peoples are said to have practiced it.” Thus, it is because the anthropophagy of the Scythians is so notorious that he finds the tales of Irish cannibalism to be somewhat credible. Furthermore, like Herodotus, Strabo maintains that there is a difference between resorting to cannibalism out of necessity and being a Cannibal, although he does seem to criticize acts of starvation cannibalism, as he asserts that only those on the fringes of “civilization” have resorted to it.8

Pliny the Elder echoes these sentiments in book VII of his Natural History. In the opening pages of this section, he discusses the authoritativeness of his work, pointing to men like Herodotus as his trustworthy sources: “We have pointed out that some of the Scythian tribes and in fact a good many, feed on human bodies—a statement that perhaps may seem incredible if we do not reflect that races of this portentous character have existed in the central region of the world, named Cyclopes and Laestrygones, and that quite recently the tribes of the parts beyond the Alps habitually practised human sacrifice, which is not far removed from eating human flesh.”9 Furthermore, Pliny argues, even if some of the things he describes may seem fantastic or dubious, given that humans tend to regard the unfamiliar with suspicion, they are all supported by the best sources that he could find. He presents himself as a skeptic who is naturally inclined to view evidence with measured suspicion. When describing parts of Africa for which his information is dubious, he refers to them as “imaginary.”10 And when he describes a litany of monstrous humans, he presents such specimens as real to the best of his knowledge, including people born with horse hooves; humans with ears large enough to cover their whole body; a race known as the Blemmyes who have no heads, only a mouth and eyes on their chest; and people with strap-like feet who must crawl instead of walk.11 In this way he assures readers that even if one or more of the claims he makes turn out to be false, the rest of the work should not be discredited as he was merely working from the knowledge of others.

In addition to physically monstrous humans, Pliny discusses humans whose cultural practices and traditions are the cause of their monstrosity. For example, the Gamphasantes “do not practice marriage but live with their women promiscuously” and “go naked, do not engage in battle, and hold no intercourse with any foreigner,” while the people of the Atlas tribe do not dream like other humans nor assign proper names to individuals, which have caused them to fall “below the level of human civilization.” The aptly named Cave-dwellers live in caves, eat snakes, and are unable to speak.12 Monstrous humans, then, are those whose bodies are well outside the normal range for humanity or whose cultures fail to meet the minimum standard for rationality and civilization as Pliny defines them.

In his descriptions of the various kinds of humans that exist in the world, Pliny specifies three places where monstrous humans are most likely to live: sub-Saharan Africa, the central Asian steppes, and Southeast Asia. In other words, monstrous humans reside in the places farthest from the influence of Mediterranean civilization. Out of all of these regions, it is the area around Scythia in the central Asian steppes that receives the most attention. Pliny lists the various tribes that fall under the general umbrella term Scythian. Some of these tribes he designates as civilized and others as savage. Those groups that inhabit the edges of the Scythian world are the recipients of most of Pliny’s condemnation. Some of the lands just beyond the “Scythian promontory” are too snowy to be inhabited, while others are “uncultivated because of the savagery of the tribes that inhabit it. This is the country of the Cannibal Scythians who eat human bodies; consequently the adjacent districts are waste deserts thronging with wild beasts lying in wait for human beings as savage as themselves.”13 The lands inhabited by the Cannibal Scythians appear to mirror the savagery of its supposed inhabitants. Savage people inhabit savage lands.

Book VII of Natural History is devoted to describing humanity’s various forms and capacities. A number of monstrous groups live in the lands just beyond the Scythians, including “people dwelling in forests who have their feet turned backward behind their legs”; people who “drink out of human skulls and use the scalps with the hair on as napkins hung round their necks”; and Albanians, who “are born with keen grey eyes and are bald from childhood.”14 These descriptions underscore an important element of the intellectual tradition that early modern Europeans would inherit: the conflation of physical and cultural “deformities” into a single category described variously as savage, barbarous, or monstrous. In this way an individual who looks like a “normal” human but turns out to be a cannibal is as far from “civilized” as physically divergent creatures like Cynocephali or Cyclopes.

Pliny spends the rest of book VII discussing human physiology, devoting considerable space to sex and reproduction. He links the earlier section on monstrosity with the section on physiology through the example of the “Hermaphrodites formerly called androgynes” and individuals who had transformed from female to male or vice versa. Thus individuals (and in some cases whole tribes) who are born with ambiguous genitalia provide the necessary link between variations of the human form and the “science” of sex and reproduction. Pliny reports that humans are the only species who indulge in procreative copulation all year round rather than during a fixed season. Human gestation, in his estimation, ranges from six to ten months. Pregnant women first feel the movement of the fetus on the fortieth day if it is male and on the ninetieth day if it is female. The birth of male children was reportedly easier for the mother. Together these beliefs about reproduction reinforce the notion of maleness as humanity’s default (and more “natural”) state.15

Like other classical writers, Pliny found the female sex both degraded and frighteningly powerful. Women’s bodies were believed to do mysterious things that could have a profound impact on the environment. Contact with menstrual blood, for example, “turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, seeds in gardens are dried up, the fruit of trees falls off, the bright surface of mirrors [in] which it is merely reflected is dimmed, the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory are dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and a horrible smell fills the air; to taste it drives dogs mad and infects their bites with an incurable poison.” Thus women were in some way always monstrous. Even in death, the corpses of men float on their back, while women float on their face “as if nature spared their modesty after death,” preserving the idea that women and men are fundamentally different in both form and capacity.16 Such sentiments were echoed often by early modern Europeans in their encounters with Indigenous Americans.

Early Christianity

At roughly the same time that Pliny was composing the Natural History, the religious teachings of Jesus and his disciples began spreading around the Mediterranean. The early years of Christianity were difficult for its adherents; they faced suppression and vilification for their beliefs, including accusations of anthropophagy. As evidenced by writers like Herodotus, Strabo, and Pliny, such claims about those who resided outside of civilization were not uncommon. The allegations against the Christians, however, remind us that one did not need to be geographically removed from the polis to be considered uncivilized or Other. Individuals whose cultural or religious practices differed from the masses, whose traditions remained mysterious, or who posed a threat to society as a whole could easily find themselves suspected of anthropophagy. Traditionally scholars have understood the accusations against the early Christians as a misinterpretation of the ritual of the Eucharist by the pagan majority. While this symbolic correlation seems obvious (and in fact will be deployed by English settlers against their French neighbors in America nearly a millennium and a half later), the Anglican theologian Andrew McGowan argues that this simplistic explanation fails to account for the fact that other groups were accused of cannibalism who possessed no such ritual.17

In the first century ce, Christians were accused of both cannibalism and incest. Much of the discussion about Christian practices among the pagan Romans centered on what transpired at their ritual meals. Pliny the Elder’s nephew, referred to as Pliny the Younger...