In contrast to such idyllic representations, a very different image – that of the Indians as cannibals – was emerging as emblematic of the way they lived. The spectre of cannibalism had haunted the European imagination since the Middle Ages, albeit with no specific location. The first place where the practice was known to occur was in Columbus’s Antilles; its people were still listed as such in Diderot’s Encyclopaedia.63 In 1540 an edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia64 included a map by Sebastian Münster,65 which had the single word ‘cannibals’ written across the whole of Brazil, from the Amazon Basin to the River Plate. The Indians were said to be ‘dogs who kill and eat each other’, evoking Renaissance images,66 particularly that of Rabelais: ‘Cannibals, monstrous people in Africa who have faces like dogs and bark instead of laughing.’67
The French later provided two different interpretations by creating the crucial semantic distinction between ‘cannibalism’ and ‘anthropophagy’. Even though both terms referred to the custom of eating human flesh, in the case of the latter the practice was only adopted when the motive was highly ritualized vengeance. The idealization of the Brazilian Indians in eighteenth-century humanist France and by the Romantic Indianist School in nineteenth-century Brazil68 was based on this concept, which emerged in sixteenth-century thinking.
Michel de Montaigne’s 1580 essay ‘The Cannibals’, one of France’s most celebrated humanist texts, and which uses the Tupinambá as a model, is a fine example of this strand of thought. The philosopher said the ideas for his essay had come to him after speaking to Indians who had settled in France after the fête brésilienne in Rouen. His essay is an exercise in relativity, in which he finds more logic in the Tupinambá methods of waging war than in those of the Europeans: ‘Now, returning to the subject, I don’t see anything barbaric or savage about these peoples; except that everyone considers barbaric that which is not practised in his own country.’ There have been many interpretations of Montaigne’s famous essay. Perhaps what is most important to keep in mind, however, is that he expressed a more laudatory view of the native peoples, especially against the backdrop of the religious wars that assailed Europe in the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, he concludes: ‘In plain truth these men are very savage in comparison to us; of necessity, they must either be absolutely so or else we are savages; for there is a vast difference between their manners and ours.’69 But here were the beginnings of a humanist vision that questioned not so much the Indians’ values as those of the Europeans.
Philosophical considerations were far from the only interest. A large number of the French reports from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were more concerned with France’s attempts to create a colonial settlement in Brazil. In flagrant disregard of the Treaty of Tordesillas, which they refused to accept, the French made a number of incursions into the colony, of which two were more lasting. The first project for a colonial settlement – France Antarctique – was undertaken by Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon, who disembarked in Rio de Janeiro in 1555 accompanied by a large number of soldiers and artisans. However, the following year Villegaignon wrote to John Calvin, one of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, who had been his fellow law student in Orleans, asking him to send a contingent of believers of the new faith to control the rebellions that were undermining the colony. Thus in 1557 fourteen Calvinists arrived in Rio de Janeiro. It soon became clear that their presence only made the conflicts worse. When the antagonism came to a head the Calvinists were forced to flee the island in Guanabara Bay and take refuge among the Tupinambá.
Several accounts of the experience, describing the land and its people, survive. Villegaignon himself, who stayed in Brazil from 1555 to 1558, left a number of letters describing the region. In a letter dated 1556, signed N. B. (Nicolas Barré, one of the Calvinists sent from France), Villegaignon is full of praise for the natural beauty of Brazil but describes the ‘Brazilian savages’ with slight suspicion: ‘They walk around naked with their bows and arrows, ready for making war.’ The letters contain a mixture of religious and philosophical considerations as well as plans for exploring the country. Barré said he was certain they would find precious metals, ‘because the Portuguese [had] found silver and copper fifty leagues upriver’.
These letters were to influence future reports, such as those of André Thevet (1516–1590/2), a Franciscan friar who, after travelling around the East and some of the Mediterranean islands, disembarked in 1555 with Admiral Villegaignon to found the colony of France Antarctique. Thevet only spent three months in the colony in Guanabara Bay, alleging that he was ill and returning to France in June the following year. In Europe, where there was great curiosity about the New World, he saw an opportunity for a work combining humanism with a voguish account of recent discoveries. In 1577 he published Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique,70 which was highly successful within his lifetime. Thevet’s text is long, rambling and frequently interspersed with rather self-serving observations intended to show his erudition. Despite its extravagant style, this is the first detailed description of Brazil’s natural beauty and, more importantly, of the Tupinambá Indians, who, although they fought alongside the French, Thevet described as ‘cannibals – naked and feathered’. Discussion of Brazil is found starting in Chapter 27, with a paridisiacal description of the land. Once again, however, Thevet has a very different opinion of the peoples. In fact, his comments on the Indians are on the whole distinct from those of a previous work, Cosmographie, where he sympathetically described them as ‘these poor people, living without religion or law’. In Les Singularitez de la France antarctique he expresses outrage at ‘their noxious religions, magic and witchcraft’ and the never-ending wars between these ‘unbelievably vengeful’71 savages who practised the ‘barbarity of cannibalism’.
Two other writers who lived among the Tupinambá during this period – one as an ally, another as an enemy to be devoured – were to end up as enemies of Thevet. Hans Staden, an artillery soldier from Hesse, was imprisoned by the Indians and narrated his experience in a book that was published in 1557 and ran to four editions in a single year. Jean de Léry’s book,72 Histoire d’un Voyage Faict en la Terre du Brésil, written in 1563 but only published in 1578, was equally well received. In the two books Brazil became famous as the ‘other side of the world’. Both works were republished in France in 1592 as part of the Great Journey series, illustrated by Théodore de Bry, a goldsmith, engraver and Huguenot propagandist who had never been to the Americas but nevertheless became the most famous painter of the period to portray them.73 What the eye could not see the imagination invented.
Jean de Léry’s Histoire d’un Voyage Faict en la Terre du Brésil74 ran to five editions after its publication in 1578, and to a further ten, in both French and Latin, by 1611. According to the author, the aim of the book was to correct the ‘lies and errors’ contained in Thevet’s account. Léry, a minister of the Church during the initial phase of the Reformation, was a shoemaker and student of theology in Geneva when Villegaignon requested Calvinist reinforcements. In 1558, Léry set out to join the founders of France Antarctique with a group of Protestant ministers and artisans. He witnessed the disintegration of the French colony and during the rest of his time in Brazil he lived with the Tupinambá. It was the ‘difference’ of the Indians, rather than their ungodly practices, that interested this sixteenth-century traveller, who became the most widely known and imitated commentator on the newly discovered land of Brazil.
Opposing other reports, Léry shows that the wars waged by the ‘caraíbas’ were based on internal rules and that vengeance was a shared value among them: ‘There is a different manner of thinking here, very different from that of the fables that have been spun so far.’75 Despite the enormous impact of the natural beauty of the country, with its parrots and monkeys, multicoloured birds, butterflies, giant turtles, caymans, armadillos and coatis, the impression the Indians left on him was even greater. He described how the ‘savages’ prepared flour, made bread, produc
ed wine and dried meat.
Léry went to great lengths to understand the role of war and vengeance among the Indians and how their ‘rules’ prevailed over ‘gluttony’.76 On his return to Geneva, he learnt of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day, when, on 24 August 1572, Catholics murdered Protestants in France, initiating a brutal civil war that was to divide the country and immerse it in bloodshed.77 Jean de Léry did not believe the wars waged by the Indians and their practice of cannibalism were motivated by the need for food. Rather, they represented forms of internal communication, and were symbolic of exchanges of values and goods.78 Thus a new chapter in this story of conflicting opinions about the New World began.
To return to Hans Staden, the artillery soldier was to write two books, the first entitled Two Journeys to Brazil and the second Brave Adventures in the Sixteenth Century among the Cannibals of the New World. Staden made two journeys to South America – one on a Spanish ship and the other on a Portuguese ship. While he was working in a small fort on the island of Santo Amaro,79 one of the most important captaincies at the time, he was captured by the Tupinambá, who were allies of the French and enemies of the Portuguese. They forced him to live in captivity for ten and a half long years of hardship. During his struggle to avoid being eaten by the Indians – pretending to be a witch doctor or using his medical knowledge to help cure an epidemic that debilitated the group – he found time to note down the daily life of the village and the Tupinambá who lived there, people who, in his own words, haunted him ‘with their hideous customs’.80
Very little is known about Staden’s life, despite the fact that Two Journeys to Brazil ran to over fifty editions in German, Flemish, Dutch, Latin, French, English and Portuguese. The attraction of the book was that the author had been a captive of the Tupinambá, not to mention its lurid wood engravings, designed under his supervision. The account is straightforward with Staden explaining the tricks he used to avoid being eaten. The writer, who had witnessed a number of massacres, lived with the ‘savages’ and treated their diseases, is only released in the final chapters of his book, when he was rescued by French traders aboard the ship Catherine de Vetteville.
Hans Staden corrected a number of Vespucci’s observations, providing information about the family structure of the Indians, their sexual life, material culture, spiritual beliefs, and their methods of classifying animals, fruits and flowers. All this is described in colloquial language, including the practice of cannibalism and cutting up human meat. He ends the book with an uncompromising declaration: ‘All this I saw and witnessed.’81 This was a way of conferring credibility on a book that might otherwise be construed as a fantasy. ‘Who is to blame?’ he asks, and concludes: ‘I have given you in this book sufficient information. Follow the trail. For those whom God helps, the world is wide open.’82 At one level Staden was of course entirely right: the world had never been closed.
A PORTION OF HUMANITY TO BE CATECHIZED OR ENSLAVED
There is still much controversy about the antiquity of the peoples of the so-called ‘New World’ (which was only ‘New’ because the Europeans thought of their own civilization as ‘Old’). Most traditional estimates consider their origins to go back 12,000 years, but more recent research puts this between 30,000 and 35,000 years. Very little is known of the history of these indigenous people, or of the innumerable peoples who disappeared as a result of what we now euphemistically call the ‘encounter’ between the Old World and the New. A massacre of genocidal proportions began at the time of a pacific first Mass: a population that was estimated at several million in 1500 was reduced to little over 800,000 – the number of Indians who live in Brazil today.83 There are several explanations for this catastrophe. First, these peoples had no immunity to European diseases, and were attacked by pathogenic agents that included smallpox, measles, whooping cough, chickenpox, diphtheria, typhus, bubonic plague, and even what would today be considered a relatively inoffensive cold. It was the opposite of what took place in Africa, where Caucasians died by the thousands, as if there were some sort of invisible poison thread running through them. In the Americas, in contrast, the natives died. But the lack of immunity is not enough to explain entirely the massive death rate. This biological cataclysm only had the effects it did because it occurred within a specific context with specific social characteristics, which up until then had been in balance.
Colonization led to the exploitation of Indian labour, which was a major factor in the massive mortality rates. The colonists also aggravated the wars between Indian groups. Although these enmities had already existed, they were now fuelled by the colonizers, who made strategic alliances with indigenous groups, then broke them at will. This frequently led to Indians in the villages being allied to the Portuguese, whereas those in the unknown interior (sertão) became their enemies. These two groups – ‘friendly’ and ‘savage’ Indians – were defined by law. The village Indians, the allies, were guaranteed freedom in their villages and put in charge of maintaining and protecting the borders. The process of making contact with the ‘friendly Indians of the villages’ was always the same: first they were ‘brought down’ from their villages to the Portuguese settlements; then they were catechized, civilized and thus transformed into ‘useful vassals’.84
The village Indians were also assigned the task of fighting in the wars waged by the Portuguese against groups of hostile Indians. The participation of both ‘the villagers and the allies’ – the latter, Tapuia Indians – is mentioned in virtually all colonial war documents of the time. They formed a line of defence to protect the sertão and block the passage of strangers. It was this contingent that was mobilized to expel Villegaignon and his men, who in turn joined forces with the Tupinambá, the allies of the French. And thus, if ‘liberation’ – meaning catechism – was the ‘reward’ of the allied village Indians, slavery was the destination of the enemy Indians.
In this context, the Portuguese Crown revived the old concept of a ‘righteous war’ – ‘Guerra Justa’ – that could be waged against peoples who had no knowledge of the faith and therefore could not even be treated as infidels. There were a number of causes that legitimized a ‘righteous war’: refusal to be converted, hostility towards Portuguese subjects and allies, breaking agreements, and cannibalism. Cannibalism was an ‘offence against natural law’; war against it was considered both a right and a duty in order to save the souls of those who would be sacrificed or eaten.
At the time, a heated debate took place between two religious men – Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda – over two ways of understanding the native people. Their difference of opinion generated distinct models of domination: for Las Casas, the natives were like herds that should be controlled; in Sepúlveda’s view, they were not yet human and should be forced to achieve humanity through baptism, and through work, to become men. Although war was considered a last resort by the Portuguese Crown, the settlers constantly resorted to it and used it as proof of the ‘enmity of these people’ and the ‘ferocity of the enemy’. The Crown itself was aware of abuses and made laws to control illicit enslavement, which did not, however, prevent the elimination of many indigenous peoples in what, according to European logic, were ‘righteous wars’. These wars, waged according to that logic, resulted in a random renaming of opponents, and the creation of both allies and enemies.
The concentration of the indigenous population in villages controlled by missionaries proved to be equally disastrous, as it led to the proliferation of diseases and epidemics. Catechism and civilization were central to the whole colonial project, the justification for confinement to missions near villages and for the use of Indian labour under a Jesuit administration. This system was first set in place by the Society of Jesus (Companhia de Jesus), founded by Ignacio Loyola in 1534 and a typical example of a religious order born in the context of the Catholic Reformation. Shortly prior, Pope Paul III had issued a papal bull in which he recognized the Indians as men, made in the image of God, and
thus deserving of catechization. In Europe the Jesuits were focused on the teachings of Catholicism, but the ‘discoveries’ saw them travelling the world, spreading the ‘true faith’ through catechism. They were eventually called ‘the soldiers of Christ’, and that is how they ended up, a veritable army of cassock-clad priests, fighting the Devil and at the ready to save souls.
As soon as Pope Paul III approved the foundation of the Order, the Jesuits set out for the Portuguese East, travelling as far as China and Japan. On the southwest coast of Africa they founded a Jesuit college in Luanda and translated Christian texts into Bantu. They arrived in Brazil in 1549 under the leadership of Manoel da Nóbrega, and by 1557 had established a plan to confine the Indians to missionary villages, which in effect meant transferring them to locations controlled by the Order. Missionary work in Brazil was seen as dangerous – after all Pedro Correia had been devoured by the Carijó Indians in 1554, and Dom Pero Fernandes Sardinha, known as Bishop Sardinha, had been eaten by the Caeté Indians in 1556 on the coast of the present-day state of Alagoas. The best thing to do was to indoctrinate these people, who, unlike the natives of the East, ‘lacked any faith or religion’. The Jesuits were instructed to achieve their conversion through kindness and good example, and to ‘adapt’ Catholicism to the local culture, adjusting terms and concepts to the realities of the region. An early example of this was the Grammar of the Tupi-Guarani Language written by José de Anchieta85 in 1556, which became mandatory reading for virtually every citizen in the colony.
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