by Bill Schutt
This somewhat-less-than-friendly response led the locals to initiate some self-preservation-related finger pointing, designed perhaps to send their new pals off on a quest to enlighten somebody else. Although no one is quite sure who was doing the translating, soon after his initial arrival, the Arawaks reportedly told Columbus that the Caribs inhabited certain of the southern islands, including those that would eventually be called St. Vincent, Dominica, Guadeloupe, and Trinidad. Columbus was informed that the Caribs were not only infamous for brutal raids against their peaceful neighbors, but also for the annoying habit of eating their captives. But pillaging and people-eating weren’t the Caribs’ only vices. Every year they took a break from their mayhem-related jobs in order to meet up with a tribe of warrior women. These fighting females were reportedly “fierce to the last degree, strong as tigers, courageous in fight, brutal and merciless.”
With more than a fleeting resemblance to a race of fictional characters dreamed up by the Ancient Greeks, these warrior women lived on their own island (Martinique) and killed any men they encountered . . . except, that is, for the Caribs, who got a yearly invite to drop by for some feasting and debauchery. Possibly the invitations stemmed from the fact that the Caribs were renowned for their cooking ability—preparing their viands by smoking them slowly on a wooden platform. It was a setup the Spanish began referring to as a barbacoa. After manning the grill and servicing the gals, the Caribs returned home, taking with them any newborn males who had shown up nine months after the previous year’s party. Female babies would, of course, remain behind with their moms to be raised as warriors.
In retrospect, it is difficult to determine where Arawak tall tales ended and Columbus’s vivid and self-serving imagination kicked in. What is known is that European history and folklore were already rich with references to encounters with bizarre monsters and strange human races. Although most of the stories emerging from the New World were greeted with enthusiasm back in Seville, some of Columbus’s patrons expressed skepticism after hearing that the Caribs also hunted with schools of fish. These had been trained to accept tethers and dispatched with instructions to latch on to sea turtles, which could then be reeled in for butchering.14
Easier to accept, perhaps, were Columbus’s claims that some Caribs had doglike faces, reminiscent of the Cynocephali described nearly 1,400 earlier by Pliny the Elder, the Roman author and naturalist. Still other New World locals were said to possess a single, centrally located eye or long tails—appendages that necessitated the digging of holes by their owners so that they might sit down. These creatures were considered anything but a joke, since as late as 1758, Linnaeus’s opus Systema Naturae listed three species of man: Homo sapiens (wise man), Homo troglodyte (cave man), and Homo caudatus (tailed man).
But whether or not these strange savages had tails (and even if they were supported by trained fish and Amazonian girlfriends), plans were soon being formulated to pacify the Caribs, who were now being referred to as Canibs. According to scholars, the transition from Carib to Canib apparently resulted from a mispronunciation, although in light of stories describing locals as having canine faces, I agree with Yale professor Claude Rawson that “Canib” may also be a degenerate form of canis, Latin for “dog.” Eventually canib became the root of “cannibal,” which replaced anthropophagi, the ancient Greek mouthful previously used to describe people-eaters.
But whatever the locals were called, and however the term cannibal may have originated, the first part of Columbus’s grand plan centered on relieving them of the abundant gold he “knew” they had in their possession. One reason for Columbus’s certainty on this point was the commonly held belief that silver formed in cold climates while gold was created in warm or hot regions. And considering the heat and humidity of the New World tropics, this could only mean that there would be plenty of the shiny stuff around.
Unlike his first voyage, which consisted of three ships and 120 men, Columbus’s second visit to the New World had the look of a military occupation force. Accompanying him were 17 ships and nearly 1,500 men, many of them heavily armed. Although he had begun to look at slave raiding as a means to finance his voyages, his prime directive was to find gold—lots of it. To facilitate the collection of what Columbus assumed would be a massive treasure, he levied tribute on those living in regions like El Cibao in what is now the northern part of the Dominican Republic. His orders stated that every male between 14 and 70 years of age was to collect and turn over a substantial measure of gold to his representatives every three months. Those who failed at what quickly became an impossible task had their hands hacked off. Anyone who chose to flee was hunted down—the Spaniards encouraging their vicious war-dogs to tear apart any escapees they could track down.
In the end, very little of the precious metal was turned in. Presumably the island residents, under the very real threat of losing their limbs or being eaten alive by giant dogs, quickly ran through any gold they might have had on hand. Since it played only a small role (or no role at all) in their traditions, in all likelihood the locals just didn’t know where to find it—especially in the quantities demanded by the Spanish invaders.
Deeply disappointed at the meager results, Columbus penned a letter to his royal supporters in Spain in May 1499. In it he wondered “why God Our Lord has concealed the gold from us.” There is no record of a response but Columbus soon refocused his efforts toward the collection of a resource that was available in great supply—humans.
In 1503, this bloodthirsty new take on the exploration of the New World got a significant boost when the self-proclaimed Admiral of the Ocean Sea received a royal proclamation from Queen Isabella. In it she stated that those locals who did not practice cannibalism should be free from slavery and mistreatment. More significantly, though, she also instructed Columbus and his men about what they could do to them if they were determined to be cannibals:
If such cannibals continue to resist and do not wish to admit and receive to their lands the Captains and men who may be on such voyages by my orders nor to hear them in order to be taught our Sacred Catholic Faith and to be in my service and obedience, they may be captured and are taken to these my Kingdoms and Domains and to other parts and places and be sold.
This new position was given even more support by the Catholic Church several years later, when Pope Innocent IV decreed in 1510 that not only was cannibalism a sin, but that Christians were perfectly justified in doling out punishment for cannibalism through force of arms.
What happened next was as predictable as it was terrible. On islands where no cannibalism had been reported previously, man-eating was suddenly determined to be a popular practice. Regions inhabited by peaceful Arawaks were, upon reexamination, found to be crawling with man-eating Caribs, and very soon the line between the two groups was obliterated. “Resistance” and “cannibalism” became synonymous, and anyone acting aggressively toward the Europeans was immediately labeled as a cannibal.
In an effort to organize the cannibal pacification efforts, Rodrigo de Figueroa, the former governor of Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic), was given the job of making judgments on the official classification of all the indigenous groups encountered by the Spanish during their takeover. Testimonials and other “evidence” were used to place the cannibalism tag on island populations—and by a strange coincidence, the designations seemed to change with the priorities of the Spanish for the islands in question. Trinidad, for example, was declared a cannibal island in 1511, but the ruling was changed in 1518. Rather than relating to concerns over the welfare of the local people, though, the reclassification came about because of reports of gold in Trinidad and the Spaniards’ desire to maintain the local population for use in mining operations. It was more than coincidental, then, that once the Spanish mining efforts on Trinidad failed to produce any gold, reports began filtering in that the locals were cannibals after all. Soon after, the order was given to colonize Trinidad and to depopulate it of its remaining man-eati
ng inhabitants. As a result, the pre-Columbian indigenous population in Trinidad (estimated to be somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 individuals) dropped to half that number within 100 years.
Even in places that hadn’t initially been designated as cannibal islands, populations dropped precipitously as the locals were either hauled off to toil as slaves, were murdered, or died from newly arrived diseases like measles, smallpox, and influenza (the latter may have been a form of swine flu carried by some pigs that Columbus had picked up on the Canary Islands during the early part of his second voyage). According to historian David Stannard, “Wherever the marauding, diseased, and heavily armed Spanish forces went out on patrol, accompanied by ferocious armored dogs that had been trained to kill and disembowel, they preyed on the local communities, already plague-enfeebled, forcing them to supply food and women and slaves, and whatever else the soldiers might desire.”
The diseases the Spaniards carried (the precise identities of which are still debated) spread with alarming speed through local communities, killing inhabitants in numbers that, according to one writer at the time, “could not be counted.” Stannard believes that by the end of the 16th century, the Spanish had been directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of between 60 and 80 million indigenous people in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America. Even if one were to discount the millions of deaths resulting from diseases, this would still make the Spanish conquest of the New World the greatest act of genocide in recorded history. These types of numbers, which are subject to considerable academic debate, are often overlooked during Columbus Day parades and related festivities.15
In the end, tall tales, especially those with bestial or cannibalistic angles, effectively dehumanized the islanders. Not only did this serve to justify Spain’s rapidly evolving slave-raiding agenda, but it also established a mindset toward the locals that came to resemble pest control. Leaving behind neither pyramids nor stone glyphs, the indigenous cultures of the Caribbean have all but disappeared.
* * *
14 In Northern Australia, East Africa, and the Indian Ocean, some cultures do employ a family of sucker-backed fish called remoras (Echeneidae) to hunt for sea turtles. Remoras are renowned for attaching themselves to larger fish as well as turtles. The original behavior is a form of commensalism—a relationship in which one species (the remora) obtains a benefit (in this case protection and food dropped by the host) while the other species gains nothing but isn’t harmed.
15 Political scientist Rudolf Rummel estimates that, excluding military battles and unintentional (e.g., disease-related) deaths, European colonization killed between 2 and 15 million indigenous Americans, with the vast majority of deaths taking place in Latin America.
10: Bones of Contention
I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a history of inflation, usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of governments.
—Friedrich August von Hayek, Austrian economist (1899–1992)
Peter Martyr (1457–1526) was an Italian cleric who never set foot in the New World. Nevertheless, De Orbe Novo (On the New World), which was published in 1530, was an epic depiction of the first eight decades of Spanish rule in the West Indies. It became one of the most influential and popular works ever written on the subject. Without the benefit of firsthand knowledge, Martyr obtained the information for his book from interviews conducted with sailors, clergymen, and others returning from overseas. In Book One, which detailed the voyages of Christopher Columbus, the author included a section on the notorious cannibal hut described by Dr. Chanca during Columbus’s second voyage (and whose quote opened the previous chapter). Martyr, however, appears to have taken a bit of creative license with the physician’s account, expanding the incident and giving it a truly horrific tone. Instead of the single hut described by Chanca, there were multiple dwellings, each outfitted with a kitchen in which
birds were boiling in their pots, also geese mixed with bits of human flesh, while other parts of human bodies were fixed on spits, ready for roasting. Upon searching another house the Spaniards found arm and leg bones, which the cannibals carefully preserve for pointing their arrows; for they have no iron. All other bones, after the flesh is eaten, they throw aside. The Spaniards discovered the recently decapitated head of a young man still wet with blood.
Clearly, Martyr was instrumental in dehumanizing the Caribs, describing them as savages who treated their fellow islanders in the much the same way Europeans might treat sheep or cattle. Additionally, in keeping with his pro-Columbus stance, Martyr also used the threat of cannibals (now described as having nearly supernatural powers) as a thinly veiled justification for the overt military theme of Columbus’s third voyage, an expedition that became, in effect, a New World troop surge:
The inhabitants of these islands (which, from now on we may consider ours), women and men have no other means of escaping capture by the cannibals, than by flight. Although they use wooden arrows with sharpened points, they are aware that these arms are of little use against the fury and violence of their enemies, and they all admit that ten cannibals could easily overcome a hundred of their own men in a pitched battle.
So was there any real cannibalism going on in the Caribbean when Columbus arrived? Oxford-trained anthropologist Neil Whitehead suggests that while many reports of the behavior are examples of “imperial propaganda,” there are several reasons to think that the Caribs and other Amerindian groups did practice forms of ritualized cannibalism. Whitehead’s rationale is that, in addition to the self-serving allegations of man-eating from Columbus and his men, reports from other Spaniards placed Amerindian cannibalism into social contexts—as funerary rites or rituals related to the treatment of enemies slain during battle. For example, in the 17th century, Jacinto de Caravajal wrote, “The ordinary food of the Caribs is cassava, fish or game . . . they eat human flesh when they are at war and do so as a sign of victory, not as food.”
According to anthropologists, ritualized cannibalism can be differentiated into two forms: exocannibalism and endocannibalism. Exocannibalism (from the Greek exo—“from the outside”) refers to the consumption of individuals from outside one’s own community or social group, while endocannibalism (from the Greek endo—“from the inside”) is defined as the ritual consumption of deceased members of one’s own family, community, or social group.
With regard to exocannibalism, a number of historical accounts claim that the Caribs consumed their enemies—those killed in battle, taken prisoner, or captured during raids. The belief was that this form of ritual cannibalism was a way to transfer desired traits, like strength or courage, from the deceased enemy to themselves.
In other times and places, exocannibalism has been used as a way to both terrorize an enemy and feed the hungry. In the 1960s, anthropologist Pierre Clastres lived with the Ache of Paraguay and claimed that one of the four groups that he studied ate their enemies. Similar claims have been made about the Tupinambá of eastern Brazil, most famously by Hans Stadin, a 16th century German shipwrecked while serving as a seaman on a Portuguese ship. In his 1557 book, True Story and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-eating People in the New World, America, Stadin, who reportedly spent a year in captivity before escaping, described raids in which the Tupinambá killed and ate everyone they captured (except, apparently, him).
In the Pacific Theater during World War II, Allied prisoners of war described numerous instances in which their Japanese captors tortured and then ate their prisoners. Presumably with their supply routes interrupted by Allied submarines and bombing raids, the Japanese were on such short rations that they resorted to cannibalism. In postwar tribunals, survivors testified that their captors acted systematically, selecting one individual each day and hacking off limbs and flesh while they were alive and conscious. American soldiers also became even more insistent about removing the bodies of their fallen comrades from the battlefield after it was discovered that the Japanese sometimes
sliced off pieces of the dead with bayonets—a gory ritual some Americans began to practice as well.
The most famous wartime incident of starvation-related exocannibalism was the Chichi Jima Incident, in which Lt. Gen. Yoshio Tachibana ordered his starving men on the island of Chichi Jima to execute a group of downed American airmen who had been captured after carrying out a bombing raid. Medical orderlies were then instructed to cut the livers from the bodies, and the organs were cooked and served to the senior staff. Tachibana and several others were arrested after the war, but since cannibalism was not listed as a war crime, they were actually convicted and hanged for preventing the honorable burial of the prisoners the officer and his men had eaten. Later was it revealed that an American submarine had recovered one of the nine downed fliers, thus saving him from a similar fate at the hands of the starving Japanese. The lucky man’s name was Lt. George H. W. Bush.
There is no such element of terror involved in the practice of endocannibalism, although it can overlap with some aspects of exocannibalism in that body parts (in this case, from relatives or group members) are consumed for reasons that include transferring the spirits of the dead or their traits into the bodies of the living. Anthropologists have proposed that, much like Christian burial rituals or the administration of Last Rites, endocannibalism was undertaken by some groups in order to facilitate the separation of the deceased’s soul from its body. The Melanesians (those societal groups living in Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Papua New Guinea) reportedly practiced a form of mortuary cannibalism for this reason, consuming small tidbits from the bodies of their deceased relatives. This form of ritual cannibalism will be examined in detail in an upcoming chapter.
Anthropologist Beth Conklin studied the Wari’ from the western Amazonian rainforest of Brazil. She reported that until the 1960s, the Wari’ consumed portions of human flesh as well as bone meal mixed with honey. Having conducted extensive interviews with Wari’ elders, she said that the “Wari’ are keenly aware that prolonged grieving makes it hard for mourners to get on with their lives.” With the corpse being the single most powerful reminder of the deceased, the Wari’ believed that consuming the body eradicates it once and for all. Beliefs or not, though, they were forced by missionaries and government officials to abandon their funerary rites and to bury their dead in what these strangers believed to be the civilized manner. Conklin said that this was a ritual the Wari’ found to be particularly repellent, since they considered the ground “cold, wet and polluting” and that “to leave a loved one’s body to rot in the dirt was disrespectful and degrading to the dead and heart-wrenching for those who mourned them.”