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the encounter with the Americans was its scale, not necessarily its novelty.11

      Based on intellectual traditions of monstrosity and cannibalism, Columbus fully expected to encounter amazing and monstrous creatures when he arrived in the New World.12 The cannibals of Columbus’s day were part of the same family of monsters as dog-headed men, though today we consider the existence of cannibals as less dubious.13 While the cannibals of Europe’s imagination may have been considered among the monstrous and magical, this was no longer the case less than a century after discovery. Through an examination of the writing of Columbus, Vespucci, and others, the way the figure of the cannibal became disassociated with the realm of the imaginary and instead came to represent real, living people with disastrous consequences becomes clearer as well.

      The beginnings and ends of historical epochs are always fuzzy, and while there is no clear moment in which the medieval world ends, Columbus’s discovery of the Americas was a harbinger of modernity. In many ways he was a man straddling the medieval and the modern; he challenged conventional wisdom about geography (although, contrary to the prevalent American cultural myth, people of his time knew that the world was round), traveled widely throughout Europe and Africa, and opened Europe’s eyes to the vast lands to the west. At the same time, he was obstinate in his belief that he had discovered the western route to Asia and found evidence to confirm his belief without recognizing the glaring errors in his observations. Furthermore his way of understanding difference was shaped by medieval epistemologies.14

      First Impressions

      In a journal entry from November 4, 1492, Columbus mentions cannibalism for the first time, more than three weeks after the first sighting of land on October 12.15 This initial observation is often overlooked because it does not relate directly to “real” Indians, but it is nonetheless very important. The entry, as abstracted by Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, reads, “He [Columbus] understood also that, far from there, there were one-eyed men, and others, with snouts of dogs, who ate men, and that as soon as one was taken they cut his throat and drank his blood and cut off his genitals.”16 Columbus accepted the presence of wondrous creatures, like the fabled dog-headed men, albeit with a dollop of skepticism.17 He and his crew never encountered these creatures, although he did find a couple of mermaids who turned out not to be as beautiful as he anticipated.18 Despite that, he still insisted that they were in fact mermaids. Similarly he insisted that the islands of the Caribbean were actually India, in spite of the evidence to the contrary. He exhibited a curious combination of empirical observation coupled with confidence in his ability to interpret data based on a preconceived understanding of the outcome. Like most others of his time, he knew what he would find in the New World and simply looked for evidence to confirm his assumptions.19 Rather than letting his observations speak for themselves, Columbus insisted on the existence of truth in medieval and classical texts that he simply needed to confirm. In this way he was no great innovator or discoverer, for he was discovering only what he believed had already been proven to exist. His real discovery from his perspective, then, was the route that he took to get to Asia, not learning of new lands and new peoples.

      In his famous letter to Luis de Santángel, the finance minister who was instrumental in convincing the Crown to fund the voyage, Columbus remarked that because of God’s divine will the lands that had been “talked or written” about by men but were known only through “conjecture, without much confirmation from eyesight, amounting only to this much that the hearers for the most part listened and judged that there was more fable in it than anything actual,” had finally been observed and were now known to Christendom.20 In the past several decades, much doubt has been cast on the novelty of Columbus’s discovery, but that is not at issue here. It does not matter that he was not the first European to set foot in the Western Hemisphere, but rather that his actions started a chain of events that radically altered the course of history. Through his writings and their legacy he originated an idea of the cannibal that not only affected the way scholars and laypeople speak about indigeneity, savagery, and civilization but had real tangible effects on people’s lives.

      There are very few surviving records of Columbus’s voyages in his own words; the vast majority of what remains are summaries and abstracts of his work written by his contemporaries. Bartolomé de Las Casas abstracted and edited Columbus’s journal of his first voyage and published it as part of his larger work, Historia de las Indias. Las Casas’s book contains some of the actual language from the no longer extant journal, as well as editorial summaries of other portions. Ferdinand Columbus also abstracted and summarized his father’s journal in a biography about him that survives in a Latin translation from 1571.21 The state of the historical records makes it difficult to know where Columbus ended and the editorial hand began. In the passage quoted earlier, from Las Casas’s record of the journal of the first voyage, Columbus did not really doubt the veracity of the existence of dog-headed cannibals or men with one eye. However, in his widely published letter to Santángel, which was written in his own hand and published in Barcelona in April 1493, Columbus displayed a measured skepticism about the wonders of the New World.22 He wrote, “Down to the present, I have not found in those islands any monstrous men, as many expected, but on the contrary all the people are very comely.”23 Considering precedent, one might reasonably expect that men with dog heads would be considered monstrous.

      Columbus wrote that he had not obtained any information about the existence of monsters in the Indies except for an island that was inhabited by those who other Indians “regard as very ferocious, who eat human flesh.” The people, he reported, plundered the other islands in their canoes. These cannibals were “no more ill-shaped than the others, but have the custom of wearing their hair long, like women.” Their ferocity was starkly contrasted by the excessive cowardice that Columbus attributed to other Indians. Finally, he indicated that the cannibals consorted with the people of the Island of Matinino, which was populated only by women who “practice[d] no female urges,” a tale that bears a striking resemblance to one told by Marco Polo and legends of Amazons in general.24 In this description of the peoples of the Caribbean islands, he denies the existence of monsters in the West Indies but confirms the presence of cannibals and the Amazon-like women of Matinino, with whom the cannibals mated. According to his letter, Columbus did not doubt that the cannibals were indeed human; they may have behaved monstrously, but they were not actually monsters. While his journal contains the record of what occurred on his journey, including that the Natives told him of the existence of the fabled dog-headed people, his letter to Santángel was more careful and did not relate such tales as reflections of reality.

      After departing from Palos de la Frontera in Andalusia on August 3, 1492, the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María headed first to the Canary Islands, finally heading for the unknown west on September 6.25 Columbus and his crew explored the islands that we now call the Greater Antilles, including Hispaniola and Cuba. It was here that he encountered the Arawaks.26 His first written impressions of this group of Indians stressed their docility, generosity, and of course their nudity.27 During this initial contact he also learned that they were being terrorized by a fearsome neighboring tribe. Ferdinand Columbus reported, “Some Indians had scars left by wounds on their bodies; [we] asked by signs what had caused them, they replied, also by signs that the natives of other islands came on raids to capture them and they had received their wounds defending themselves.”28 Columbus’s journal contains a similar account of this fateful meeting.29

      Throughout these first travels in the Caribbean, Columbus claims to have heard often about the atrocities of the neighboring Caribs. He recorded on November 23, 1492, that the Indians expressed great fear of the island of Bohío, where well-armed one-eyed cannibals resided.30 He doubted what the Arawaks told him; he wondered if perhaps their people were simply taken captive and, because they did not return, were assumed to have been eaten. He remarked that they expressed the same fear about him and his men when they first encountered them. The Arawaks’ fear inspired him with the hope that based on their superior technology and organization, these Caribs might in fact be the same people of the Great Khan for whom he had been searching. Despite the number of times the Arawaks reportedly told him that the Caribs had one eye or the faces of dogs, he did not believe them, and his excitement to meet the Great Khan only increased. At one point he believed that he encountered some Carib individuals based solely on their hideous appearance. However, he did not record much of importance

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