SOURCE: MacKenthun, Gesa. “Books for Empire: The Colonial Program of Richard Hakluyt.” In Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492-1637, pp. 22-70. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997.

[In the following excerpt, MacKenthun argues that English adventurers and colonists, like the Spanish before them, became fixated on images of American Indians as cannibals to justify conquest, and perhaps, to even mask their own cruelty and savagery.]

My analysis of the Madoc story has shown the function of narrative in the historical legitimation of a national-colonial project, while my reading of the golden-age trope has traced its connections with the larger context of the colonial labor problematic. The present section examines the various mutations of the most prominent trope of colonial discourse in America—the trope of cannibalism—by connecting its appearance in the Principall Navigations to the larger discursive field of early European colonialism.¹ Its various adaptations to different colonial contexts, I argue, are always significant in the justification of colonial power relations even while carrying the traces of noncolonial European discourses.

Colonial discourse, as it is understood here, is not a static or homogeneous phenomenon: its power derives from its capacity to adopt different disguises and to enter strategic alliances with other discourses. We have seen such a process of discursive adaptation at work in the case of the golden-age myth, which at certain points in time merged with Christian millennialism and was later evoked in this hybrid form in a Protestant colonial context in the writings of Ribault and others. As Hakluyt's reluctance to preserve Barlowe's golden-age euphoria indicates, this specific ideological unit, or ideologeme, was on the decline in the English colonial context around 1600—a context that was decisively shaped by Hakluyt himself owing to his tireless work as editor and translator. His editorial decision ties in with another, that of eliminating from the second edition of the Principall Navigations the apocryphal Travels of Sir John Mandeville, as well as the “Relation” of an English sailor, David Ingram. Both texts, though once best-sellers of travel writing (especially Mandeville), were now apparently seen to disagree with contemporary policy and with Hakluyt's philosophy of textual faithfulness serving that policy.

Ingram's text introduces us to the topic of cannibalism and the ways in which that colonial trope relates to the justification of conquest. The “Relation” is the outcome of an interrogation of Ingram by several organizers of English colonialism, including Humphrey Gilbert, George Peckham, Francis Walsingham, and possibly Richard Hakluyt. It actually conveys more about the expectations of Ingram's interviewers than it does about his authentic travel experience. Obviously, Gilbert and the others were primarily interested in translating Ingram's story into a concrete plan for colonization. The questions are not recorded but can be inferred from the sequence and the contents of Ingram's replies. The evidence suggests that the sailor told the gentlemen what he thought they wanted to hear, and so it is not surprising that his text was apparently a public success. Of its first edition in 1583 no copy survives, and scholars assume that the “Relation of Dauid Ingram of Barking” was literally read to pieces.²

David Ingram had been marooned by John Hawkins with one hundred other sailors after the ruinous battle with the Spaniards at San Juan de Ulloa (Mexico) in 1568. He claims to have wandered, together with two other men, along the coast of North America all the way to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, in just one year. Naturally, the London promoters of colonialism regarded Ingram (his two companions had died) as an invaluable source of geographical knowledge on the as yet uncharted northern part of America. Ingram's “Relation,” the first account of an Englishman's experience on the North American mainland, is part sailor's tall tale, with clear debts to the popular fictions derived from Mandeville, and part ideological repertoire for possible strategies of conquest. These two aspects constantly interact in the text.

“This examinate,” as Ingram is occasionally called, claims to have found some of the wildest miracles of India. The “Kings” of “those Countries,” he says, wear rubies and other precious stones, a kind of crown jewels whose loss also entails the loss of their territories (Ingram 1589, 557). The Indians are so brutish that they use their women “in open presence” but so rich that they throw out their dust in buckets of “massie siluer” (558, 559). They use Welsh words such as penguin for a white-headed bird, and they honor the Devil, called Colluchio, who appears to them “in the likenesse of a blacke Dogge, and sometimes in the likenesse of a blacke Calfe” (560, 561). Ingram likewise claims to have seen elephants, and he describes several monsters that appear to be mixtures of bison and some of the monstrous races of Pliny.³ Most significant in our context, however, is Ingram's reference to the “Canibals or man eaters” who haunt the iron-using and crown jewel-bearing peaceful Indians: “The Canibals doe most inhabite betweene Norumbega, & Bariniah, they haue teeth like dogs teeth, and thereby you may know them” (Ingram 1589, 558). The text continues with a description of the peaceful Indians' buildings, which “are weake and of small force, their houses are made round like Doue houses.” Dogs against doves: the imbalance of power between native groups is metonymically inscribed in such attributes borrowed from the animal kingdom. The huts of the jewel-bearing Indians hardly seem able to resist the attacks of the fierce cannibals.

The signifiers of this passage connect Ingram's text with the earliest text about America, the Journal of Columbus, where we can find a similar strategy of distinguishing between peaceful and warlike inhabitants. The ideological function of such distinctions is in turn expressed in Sir George Peckham's “True Report of the Late Discoueries … by Sir Humphrey Gilbert,” which appeared in the same year as Ingram's “Relation” (1583) and was later also included in the Principall Navigations. Directly referring to the above passage, Peckham, whose text is the most important English propaganda tract of the period,⁴ suggests entering into a “league of friendship” with the tame Indians with the aim

that then the Christians from thence forth will alwayes bee ready with force of Armes to assist & defende them in their iust quarrels, from all inuasions, spoyles and oppressions, offered them by any Tyraunts, Aduersaries, or their next borderers. … For it appeareth by the relation of a countreman of ours, namely Dauid Ingram, … [that] the Sauages generally for the most part, are at continuall warres with their next adioyning neighbours, and especially the Cannibals, being a cruel kinde of people, whose foode is mans flesh, and haue teeth like dogges, and do pursue them with rauenous mindes to eate their flesh, and deuoure them. And it is not to be doubted, but that the Christians may in this case iustly and lawfully ayde the Sauages against the Cannibals.

(Peckham 1589, 706)

Peckham's strategy, based on the cultural text of the Christian knight defending the effeminate peaceful inhabitants against monsters who threaten the integrity of body and civility from abroad, is to bring the Christians into the possession of the land whose inhabitants they defend. They shall, says Peckham, “by [the Indians'] franke consents … easily enioy such competent quantity of Lande, as euery way shall be correspondent to the Christians expectation, & contentation, considering the great aboundance that they haue of lande, and howe small account they make thereof, taking no other fruit thereby then such as the ground of it selfe dooth naturally yeelde” (706). The denial of native agriculture at the end of the passage demonstrates the ease with which the Virgilian ideal could be translated into a good reason for conquest under the ideological banner of the Protestant work ethic—here, revealingly, put forth by a Catholic. The passage also shows Peckham's habit of piling different legitimizing tropes onto each other, with the rhetorical effect that the quantity of just causes may replace their juridical insufficiency and lack of empirical verification.

Peckham's intertextual reference to Ingram's “Relation” is limited to the account of cannibals. The ideological reason for this interest in the existence of Native American man-eating is quite simply that anthropophagy, together with sodomy and occasionally idolatry, was generally regarded as a sin against nature in the legal discourse of the sixteenth century. As such it provided a just reason for conquest—or rather, for “intervention” in defense of the victims of the inhuman aggressors (see Fisch 1984, 188). Interestingly, Peckham seems to have felt more secure by combining the argument of native cannibalism with others. This mixed argumentation is indeed a common trait of colonial propaganda tracts, which betray a general insecurity about the exclusive validity of any of the arguments they use.

Peckham's presentation of the North American natives as defenseless victims of external aggressors, victims who would gratefully trade in their territorial rights for the mercenary service of the English knights, can be traced back to the Journal of Christopher Columbus, which likewise inaugurated the justification of conquest with reference to native cannibalism. The remainder of this chapter follows the itinerant signifier cannibal through a number of colonialist texts on its constant quest for a signified. The existence of a referent, it may be said at the outset, must remain a matter of guesswork. All the evidence we have, no matter how “hard” it may seem at first, acquires a second-degree status after some critical scrutiny. The purpose here is thus to provide a sense of the ways in which a specific ideologeme of colonial discourse operates by adapting to a changing set of political needs and interests and not to speculate about any real practice of man-eating among Native Americans.

Just as in Ingram's text, Columbus's meeting with peaceful Indians is associated with his search for gold and riches. Showing a few jewels to some of the older inhabitants of Cuba on 4 November 1492, Columbus receives the information that

in a place that they called Bohío there was a vast amount and that they wore it on neck and in ears and on arms and legs; and also pearls. Moreover, he understood that they said that there were big ships and much trade and that all of this was to the southeast. He understood also that, far from there, there were one-eyed men, and others, with snouts of dogs, who are men, and that as soon as one was taken they cut his throat and drank his blood and cut off his genitals.

(Columbus 1989, 133)

The elders, according to Columbus, provide him with three separate pieces of information: they tell of an island where much gold is to be found, where great merchant ships are cruising, and they mention the one-eyed monsters and dog-mouthed man-eaters who live a little further off.⁵ On 23 November, when Columbus decides to sail to Bohío (later called Hispaniola), the distance between the gold island and the gruesome monsters has shrunk considerably, and now they are accompanied by the species that was to become so famous throughout the texts of discovery: the Indians “said [that Bohío] was very large and that there were people on it who had one eye in their foreheads, and others whom they called cannibals, of whom they showed great fear. And when they saw that he was taking this route, he says that they could not talk, because the cannibals eat them, and that they are people very well armed” (Columbus 1989, 167).

It is important to realize that Columbus at this point does not believe the natives' tales, as he is convinced that the great ships mentioned earlier are those of Cipangu (Japan). Armed people, according to his logic, could only be the soldiers of the Grand Khan. That these “cannibals,” unlike the innocent natives of Cuba, are armed, leads Columbus to the conclusion that they must be “people of intelligence” (167) who had probably enslaved a few of the natives. This was an activity quite common to civilized nations, as Columbus himself repeatedly demonstrated by kidnapping Indians, either to use as interpreters or to take back to the Spanish court as living evidence. In addition, these peaceful Indians had initially taken the Spaniards for man-eaters as well (167). That the armed and civilized people of Bohío should be in possession of the treasures would be only reasonable. Together with the mentioned trade ships, this information very much tied in with Columbus' expectations.

Thus, at the very moment of its inception, the myth of the man-eating cannibals is heavily doubted by its perpetrator himself, who apparently regards the stories of the natives as fantastic outgrowths of their simple minds. The name Caniba (according to Columbus's informants; the territory of the caníbales) could to him only mean “the people of the Grand Khan [Gran Can].” The term cannibal has at this point no reference to the custom of eating human flesh at all; it is fully occupied by what Peter Hulme calls the semantics of oriental discourse, connoting “Eastern civilization” instead of “Western savagery” (cf. Hulme 1986, 22).

But, as Hulme has shown, the discursive politics of the Journal are more complicated. From 30 October onward, Columbus runs into increasing interpretive difficulties because the geography of the islands he discovers cannot be made to correspond with his mental map of India. Accompanied by a spectacular series of wrong assessments of his position, which has caused intense debate among historians, the semantics of orientalism begin to dwindle. Even while the oriental discourse does not abruptly vanish from the Journal, Columbus on 6 November actually gives up his search for “Quinsay,” “Cipangu,” and the Grand Khan and changes his course to southeast, the opposite direction, with the explanation that he wants to search for gold and discover new lands (Columbus 1989, 141). Thus, while Columbus's language is still associating the Caribbean islands with the imaginative map of India, his actions stand in virtual opposition to his rhetorical assertions. Psychologically, this is a difficult moment, which can perhaps best be expressed in terms of paradox; the wrong assessments of the position served to support the change of direction, which resulted from what Hulme calls “unconscious deliberation.”⁶

To add to the confusion, from the beginning Columbus was looking not exclusively for India but also for undiscovered islands in the Atlantic Ocean. In the official document authorizing his first voyage, the Capitulaciones, there is no mention of India but only of islands and mainlands to be discovered and acquired (Sale 1991, 25). The possibility of looking for “savage” lands should the search for India prove fruitless existed from the very beginning.

The shift of Columbus's direction is thus accompanied by an imaginative shift as well. With the disappearance of civilized India (Cathay) as destination, the Plinian monsters who were thought to inhabit the wild hinterland of India and whose existence Columbus had so far rather doubted, become “real” New World creatures. The signifier cannibal, which had so far stood for “people of the Grand Khan,” gradually adopts a new signified, “ferocious man-eaters.” Its migration is accompanied by a gradual displacement of the signifier gold as well. At about the same time that cannibal arrives at its final destination, the connotations of gold have changed from “oriental” to “savage,” that is, from the state of artful refinement in the Indians' jewelry to its raw condition in rivers and mines (Hulme 1986, 33).

With both the inhabitants and the gold having turned from a civilized to a savage state, Columbus introduces his new policy. After a dinner with one of the “kings” of Hispaniola on 26 December, he declares that something should be done about the people of Caniba, “whom they call Caribs,” and that the king and queen of Spain have ordered their destruction (Columbus 1989, 286-87). From now on, the notion of the man-eating Caribs takes full possession of Columbus's discourse and actions, and it becomes inseparable from his desire to find gold. His first encounter with Caribs (who are actually Ciguayos) on 13 January is belligerent, and although the natives disappoint the Spaniards' expectations by running away and not eating human flesh, their ferocious appearance alone leaves no doubt about their identity. One of them is described as extremely ugly, painted, long-haired, and naked: “The Admiral judged that he must be from the Caribs who eat men” (329). Even their cowardliness is now used as evidence for their cannibalism (330).

But by now the claim that the Caribs were man-eaters has become a “fact” itself and is no longer in need of empirical evidence. The Caribs soon turn out to be the reason for Columbus's difficulties in obtaining gold and copper: “on the island of Carib and in Matinino there was much copper although it will be difficult in Carib because those people, he says, eat human flesh” (15 January: 339). Finally intending to visit the island of the Caribs the next day, the Spaniards somehow cannot manage to reach it and suddenly take a northeasterly route back to Spain, which leaves the problem of the cannibals conveniently unresolved (341-43). Columbus's first visit to the Caribbean thus terminates with the “irony that desire and fear, gold and cannibal, are left in monstrous conjunction on an unvisited island” (Hulme 1986, 41).

The textual process I have described is the emergence of the Caribs as the New World equivalent of Herodotus's Anthropophagi—with the important difference that the cannibals of early modern colonial discourse are much more aggressive and thereby practically force the Christian soldiers to rush to the defense of the gentle and peaceful Arawaks.⁷ Columbus's “tale of distinction” between Arawaks and Caribs (Hulme) soon became a “scientific” fact, leading to the myth that Arawaks and Caribs belonged to separate ethnic groups. As Peter Hulme has shown, this theory does not stand critical evaluation. The name Carib probably had several meanings among the indigenous inhabitants, all of which tie in with one another but none of which encourages the view that there were two different ethnic groups. Linguistically, Carib seems to have been an Arawakan sociolect, a male jargon, while Kari'na was at the same time used as a lingua franca for trading in the whole Caribbean (Hulme 1986, 63, 76). The term cariba might also have been used as a general term for strangers or alien groups—which were, however, not ethnically or linguistically different, but rather socially (63). More specifically, it probably referred to the inhabitants of autonomous smaller islands who resisted incorporation into one of the chiefdoms (or protostates) emerging in the area at the time of Columbus's arrival (77). The latter explanation suggests that the Spaniards unwittingly reproduced the matrix of an existing ideology from the chiefdoms while enriching it with European notions of savagism and aligning it with the categories of European aesthetic perception (“ugliness” becoming an indicator of cannibalism).

An important shift in the Journal is the substitution of the missing “cannibalistic” evidence with aesthetic judgments. Cannibalism here merges with the more familiar concept of savagery, which is connected with unfamiliar food and sexual practices as well as unfamiliar dress, hairstyle, and makeup. As Hulme has shown, the further development of the discourse on the Caribbean hinges on this dependency of ideological distinctions on differences of cultural behavior. The opposition between good and defenseless Arawaks and aggressive and man-eating Caribs, an ideological move that allowed the Europeans to first imaginatively and then physically settle themselves in the Native American geography, still dominates much of the vocabulary and scientific discourse of contemporary anthropology (see Hulme 1986, chapter 2).

As can be seen in Columbus's Journal, the Caribs—protectors of the desired gold—provided a legitimate impulse for colonial aggression (now “defense”) as well as a justification for the failure to obtain the desired object (due to the danger of being eaten). The Columbian distinction between ferocious Caribs and peaceful Arawaks proved to be quite helpful to official colonial policy: in 1503 Queen Isabella issued a decree that restricted the right to enslave the inhabitants of the New World to “a certain people called Canniballs”—for the practical reason that the “good” Indians were dying too fast. And since the term cannibal was by now no longer limited to any specific group (although still mostly associated with the Caribs), the edict “was interpreted as a license to enslave any Indian from any of the islands suspected of cannibalism,” that is, any Indian who showed signs of resistance (Honour 1975, 56). Through a complex discursive maneuver, an uncertain myth of dog-faced man-eaters had come to provide the rationale for a legal document justifying enslavement.⁸

In keeping with the discursive rather than empirical existence of cannibalism, we look in vain for reliable evidence of it in the texts about the Caribbean. We find abundant indirect evidence, however, consisting in hearsay and the presumed leftovers of cannibal feasts. Diego Alvarez Chanca's report about Columbus's second voyage encapsulates this process: having landed on Guadaloupe, Columbus “made his way to the houses, in which he found their inhabitants. Directly they saw our men, they took to flight.” The admiral, however, entering their houses, “found their possessions, for they had taken nothing away, and there he took two parrots, very large and very different from any that had been seen. He found much cotton, spun and ready for spinning, and articles of food, of all of which he brought away a little. Especially he brought away four or five bones of the arms and legs of men. As soon as we saw this, we suspected that those islands were the Carib islands which are inhabited by people who eat human flesh” (Chanca 1988, 26). The suspicion expressed in the last sentence indicates the mental process by which the encountered facts were interpreted in the light of previously acquired “knowledge.” Chanca's knowledge of the Caribs' cannibalism is of course derived from the reports on the first voyage of Columbus (Hulme 1994). The certainty with which Dr. Chanca assumes the presence of cannibals without having seen any himself was to become a central feature of the European discourse of cannibalism, and human bones were the most common index of cannibalism in both Spanish and English colonial accounts far beyond the Caribbean itself.

The trope readily entered some of the accounts collected in the Principall Navigations as well. The English merchant Henry Hawkes, for example, writes that he found the leftovers of cannibals in Mexico, the native population of which he describes as extremely cowardly, partly because they were kept in great subjection by the Spaniards. But there “remaine some among the wild people, that vnto this day eate one another. I haue seene the bones of a Spaniard, that haue bene as cleane burnished, as though it had bene done by men that had no other occupation. And many times people are carried away by them, but they neuer come againe, whether they be man or women” (Hawkes 1589, 552). The skepticism expressed earlier by Columbus about similar stories is now replaced with undivided belief, and contradictory evidence counts little. One could easily surmise that the missing Indians had simply run away to escape bondage, that the “cleane burnished” bones were the leftovers of the vultures, of which “there is such aboundance … that they eate all the corrupt and dead flesh which is in the Countrey” (551). But even for the pragmatic English merchant with his strong sense of efficiency, the ideological power of the symbolic representation prevents any attempt to draw logical conclusions.

The ideologeme of cannibalism gains a new quality in the report of George Best on Martin Frobisher's second voyage to Newfoundland in 1577. The English find a tomb with the bones of a dead man and by using signs ask their Inuit captive “whether his countreymen had not slain this man and eat his flesh so from the bones,” but he makes “signes to the contrarie, and that he was slain with wolves and wilde beastes” (Best 1867, 136). The same dumb show is repeated at another occasion (139). Eventually the English, trying to catch a few Inuit to show them at the English court and learn their language, pursue a group of them. The natives take to flight with their canoes, are forced to land, and try to prevent the English from landing by shooting all their arrows at them, even those shot at them before by the Englishmen,

yea, and plucking our arrowes out of their bodies, encountered afresh againe, and maintained their cause, until both weapons and life utterly failed them. And when they founde they were mortally wounded, being ignorant what mercy meaneth, with deadly furie they cast themselves headlong from off the rocks into the sea, least perhaps their enemies shoulde receive glory or praye of their dead carcasses; for they supposed us be like to be canibales, or eaters of mans flesh.

(142)

What else could they have expected from the strangers' actions and unequivocal sign language? The behavior of the Europeans would hardly seem fit to have inspired any sense of their code of honor or of their concept of “mercy.” Adding the final twist to his display of colonialist logic, Best explains the sudden flight of the Inuits and their “desperate manner of fighting” with their feeling of guilt at having captured five English sailors the previous year: “And considering, also, their ravenesse and bloudy disposition in eating anye kinde of rawe flesh or carrion, however stinking, it is to be thoughte that they had slaine and devoured oure men” (143). Thus the similarity between the Europeans' own deeds and those of which they accuse the Inuits (kidnapping) is explained away with the affirmation that the English are utterly unlike these savages when it comes to table manners. The “savagery” of the Inuits, now completely unlike the “civil” and “honorable” behavior of the Englishmen, justifies colonial violence; the responsibility for aggression is displaced onto its victims. Such acts of projection may be regarded as one of the central strategies of colonial discourse (Hulme 1986, 85). For the English, to admit any responsibility for the mass suicide of the Inuits would have produced a conflict with the overriding interest to settle in their lands. Following this interlude, the English take what they find in the deserted tents.

Cannibalism, far from relating to any distinct ethnic group, is here allied with the ideology of savagism, the medieval set of ideas and images for defining cultural otherness along the lines of strange clothing, eating habits, and so on (see White 1978, chapter 7; and Pagden 1982). And again, as in Chanca, the assumed cannibalism of the natives provides a free ticket for stealing their possessions.

The passages from both Dr. Chanca and Best exhibit another trait of the mixing of different ideologemes within the same discursive strategy: not only is the idea of cannibalism now attached to those people who presumably eat their enemies, as it was in Columbus, but it also refers to the practice of eating one's own dead. At the same time, Best echoes Columbus in emphasizing the ferocity (the “ravenesse … disposition”) of the Inuits' food practice. His account seems to be inspired by both the Caribbean ideologeme of cannibalism and the semantic tradition of the older trope of anthropophagy, which was still current in Europe as a just reason for conquest even as cannibalism began to absorb and replace it.⁹ The change of ideological practice becomes apparent from comparing Best's account with Edmund Spenser's tract in support of English colonial policy in Ireland, A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596). As has often been noted, the colonization of Ireland was in many respects the precursor of that of North America. Spenser writes about the Irish rebels who after a famine came “[out] of euerie Corner of the woods and glinnes. … Crepinge forthe vppon theire handes for theire leggs Coulde not beare them, they loked like Anotomies of deathe, they spake like ghostes Cryinge out of theire graues, they did eate the dead Carrions, happie wheare they Coulde finde them, Yea and one another sone after, in so muche as the verye carkasses they spared not to scrape out of theire graves” (Spenser 1949, 158).¹⁰

Eating the cadavers of one's own dead countrymen counted as the worst offense against Christianity and civility. And the savagery of civility's enemies traditionally provided the primary justification for appropriating their lands. As the examples have shown so far, distinct qualities of Irish anthropophagy (especially eating of the dead) that cannot be found in Columbus were later added to its Caribbean variant.¹¹

That variant has left its imprint in further English texts about America—again exclusively in the form of “common” or secondhand knowledge. Thus John Sparke, reporting on Hawkins's 1564 slave-trading trip to the Caribbean, writes that the fleet “came to an Island of the Cannybals, called Sancta Dominica” (Sparke 1589, 529). Apparently well read in Spanish texts, he comments: “The Cannybals of that Island, and also others adiacent, are the moste desperate warriers that are in the Indias, by the Spaniards report, who are neuer able to conquer them, and they are molested by them not a little, when they are driven to water there in any of those Islands.” In the margin we find Hakluyt's advice: “Cannybals exceeding cruell, and to be avoided” (529). Sparke knows gruesome stories of a Spanish caravel that landed in Dominica, was set upon by the “Inhabitants, who cutte their cable in the halser, whereby they were driuen a shoare, and so taken by them, and eaten.” A French ship had to fight against cannibals for two days on “Granado.” And if Hawkins's crew had not landed “vpon the desertest place in all the Island, we could not haue missed, but should haue bene greatly troubled by them, by all the Spaniards reportes, who make them Deuils in respect of men.”

The inhabitants of the adjoining island are of the very opposite character (“gentle and tractable”), whereas the next island, Tortuga, is haunted by the worst of all, a group of “Caribes [who] were very importunate to haue [the English] come a shore.” But fortunately Hawkins did not have any more trifles to trade with, “for these were no such kinde people as wee tooke them to bee, but more diuelish a thousand partes, and are eaters and deuourers of any man they catche, as it was afterwardes declared vnto vs at Burboroata” by the Spaniards. These also tell of a caravel whose crew was called ashore by the Caribs. Baited by the “cannibals,” who lured them ashore with gold “with the which the Spaniardes [were] mooued, suspecting no deceite at all,” a few of the Spaniards were taken “and were presently eaten” (530-31). The Caribs, Sparke concludes, are “bloudsuckers both of Spaniards, Indians, and all that light in their laps, not sparing their owne countrymen if they can conueniently come by them.” The greatest trouble is that they “haue more abundaunce of gold then all the Spaniards haue.” But once in two years the Spaniards “get a piece [of gold] from them, which afterwards they keepe sure inough” (531).

Throughout these passages Sparke combines diligence in copying Spanish cannibalistic lore with an unfailing capacity for exposing its ideological dimension. His text embodies—more than any of Columbus's—the intricate relationship between the discoverers' material greed and their paranoia of being eaten. Like the account of Best, Sparke's reference to the Spaniards' lack of “deceit” contains a reversal of the colonial relationship: after all, it was the Europeans who deceived the Indians with bells and toys in order to kidnap or enslave them and to acquire their gold.

When he wants to relate their trip to Florida (to witness the arcadian lifestyle of Laudonnière's people), Sparke is fully carried away by Spanish tales and now also reveals one of his sources: The “people of the cape of Florida,” he writes,

are of more sauage and fierce nature, and more valiant then any of the rest … and of theyr cruelty mention is made in the booke of the Decades, of a fryer [sic], who taking vpon him to persuade the people to subiection, was by them taken with his skinne cruelly pulled ouer his eares, and his flesh eaten.

In these Islandes they being a shoare, founde a dead man dried in a maner whole, with other heads and bodyes of men, so that those sorts of men are eaters of the flesh of men, as well as the Canibals.

(538)¹²

The trait that combines Sparke's different groups of cannibals, besides their common love for human flesh, is their fierce resistance to the conquerors' efforts to subject them. The signifier cannibal appears to have assembled various signifieds in the English colonial discourse of the late sixteenth century; it could at once refer to ethnic group, valiant warriors, and people whose dress and diet ranged on the negative side of the European aesthetic imagination. The eating of human flesh, we could say, was metonymically evoked by those other traits.

A fine example of this sort of displacement has been provided by Miles Phillips, a sailor who had been marooned together with Ingram by Hawkins in 1568. Writing about his adventurous trip through Mexico, Phillips relates how he and his comrades were “suddenly … assaulted by the Indians, a warlike kinde of people, which are in a maner as Canibals, although they do not feed vpon mans flesh as Canibals do. These people are called Chichemici, and they vse to weare theyr haire long, euen downe to their knees, they doe also colour their faces greene, yellow, red and blew, which maketh them to seeme very ougly and terrible to beholde” (Phillips 1589, 567). For Columbus, the “ugliness” of the Ciguayos, their long hair and painted faces, had still been an indicator that they were man-eaters. What makes the Chichimecs like cannibals are precisely the same qualities, their ferocity and fear-inspiring appearance. By 1589 the trope of cannibalism seems to have been so obtrusive that its application could not be resisted, even if it was negated at the same time. What the Chichimecs share with the Caribs is their warlike disposition and savage appearance.

Phillips obviously is confused, however, by other aspects of their behavior that makes them unfit for the category “cannibal.” Above all, they show great interest in the sailors' clothes—then important codes of a civilized cultural identity. They take away all the Englishmen's colored clothes, leaving only the black ones (Phillips 1589, 567). This small incident shows how an ideologeme makes its automatic appearance, as demanded by discursive dictate, only to be questioned at the same time—and to be completely undermined by the report of the Indians' actual behavior.¹³ With the quasi-cannibals clad in fanciful sailors' clothes and the Europeans continuing their march through Mexico naked or uniformly dressed in (ugly) black, the signifiers of civilization and savagery are reversed: a very troubling incident. Most significantly, however, the passage discloses the complicated semantics that were connected with the term cannibal from the very beginning: the comparison is evoked, if negatively, by the outward signs of the warlike disposition of the natives, not their food practice. Phillips's “stuttering” in fact pays tribute to the politics underlying the initial inscription of the term: the Spaniards' actual fear of native resistance and their unconscious fear of cultural disintegration translated into the ideology of native bestiality.

The ideological instability of the artificial distinction between cannibals and innocent Indians becomes most apparent where the natives are allowed to express their own version of this dichotomy. Dr. Chanca relates the words of some of Columbus's Carib prisoners who tell the Spaniards that the “peaceful” Indians, who do not know how to navigate by sea as the Caribs do, still “use bows as they do, and if by chance they are able to take those who come to raid them, they also eat them as do the Caribs” (Chanca 1988, 40). According to Spanish reports of the testimony of the cannibals themselves, then, cannibalism appears less to have been a culinary custom associated with any distinct ethnic group than perhaps a general native Caribbean ideological practice for defining cultural otherness—a practice not altogether dissimilar from that of the Europeans.

Nevertheless, the simplicity of the ideological distinction, based as it is on a logic of opposition, succeeded over any insight into the complexity of social reality. Its appeal can be traced throughout the European literature of travel and discovery, not even excluding twentieth-century scholarly texts. Samuel Eliot Morison, setting out in 1971 to relate the death of Giovanni Verazzano, describes in the manner of an eyewitness how the Italian discoverer approaches a Caribbean island: “Unfortunately, the island where he chose to call—probably Guadaloupe—was inhabited by no gentle tribe of Indians, but by ferocious man-eating Caribs.” Verazzano and his brother (on whose testimony the story is based) row to the shore: “A crowd of natives waited at the water's edge, licking their chops at the prospect of a human lunch. … Giovanni innocently waded ashore. … The Caribs, expert at murder, overpowered and killed the great navigator, then cut up and ate his still quivering body whilst his brother looked on helplessly, seeing the ‘sand ruddy with fraternal blood’” (Morison 1971, 315).

The quote is Ramusio's, based on a poem by Giulio Giovio, Storia poetica, which is in turn based on the report of Verazzano's brother (315). The licking chops and the quivering body, however, are Morison's additions. Morison does not hesitate to further romanticize the report on a colonial encounter, which is already based on dubious evidence. To speak of an “innocent” colonizer and natives “expert at murder,” moreover, is possible only by translating the story from the context of sixteenth-century colonialism into that of modern civil law. Morison subsequently somewhat doubts the veracity of the tale, but this does not prevent him in the end from trying to locate the exact place of the “tragedy” and pointing out several “shoal areas” where the “murder” may have been committed (325).

By way of summary we can say that the trope of native cannibalism was automatically deployed whenever natives resisted being “discovered,” and it was usually associated with other cultural traits such as “nakedness,” strange eating habits, painted faces, and unfamiliar burial customs. Rhetorically, it often appears in the vicinity of accounts of the Europeans' desire for gold and of European acts of aggression. In this regard David Ingram's garbled report, which forms the basis, or perhaps even the outcome, of Peckham's envisioned colonial strategy, is ideologically close to Columbus's Journal. But we have also seen that even the colonial texts themselves tend to betray, at least to a critical reader, the ideological instability of the trope once its direct use as legitimating practice was forgotten. It seems that Richard Hakluyt sensed the trope's built-in capacity for disintegration. In any case he omitted any reference to it in his own texts—unlike his compatriots George Peckham and Richard Hakluyt the Elder, who did not mind harping on the Spanish theme.

It is the latter who gives an acute delineation of colonialist logic in his promotional tract “Inducements to the Lykinge of the Voyadge” of 1584, and it should be hardly surprising for us that the manuscript of this text was found bound together with a manuscript copy of Ingram's “Relation” (Quinn 1979, 3:61). Hakluyt Sr. admonishes his readers:

Yf we fynde any kinges readye to defende their Tirratoryes by warre and the Countrey populous desieringe to expell us that seeke but juste and lawfull Traffique, then by reason the Ryvers be lardge and deepe and we lordes of navigacion, and they without shippinge, we armed and they naked, and at continuall warres one with another, we maye by the ayde of those Ryvars joyne with this kinge here or with that kinge there at our pleasure and soe with a fewe men be revenged of any wronge offered by them and consequentlie maye yf we will conquere fortefye and plante in soyles moste sweete, moste pleasaunte, moste fertill and strounge. And in the ende to bringe them all in subjection or scyvillitie for yt is well knowen they have bynne contented to submytte them selves and all that which they possesse to suche as hathe defended them againste there Enemyes speciallie againste the canibales.

(Hakluyt the Elder 1979a, 63)

With unparalleled ease Hakluyt moves from “lawfull Traffique” to unlawful conquest and plantation in sweet soils. The legal difficulty embedded in this rhetorical move can be solved only by drawing the cannibals out of the magic box of colonial myths in order to justify English presence by evoking the indispensible function of the avenging English knights (Hulme 1986, 165-66). English colonial logic, like that of the Spaniards, was a logic of “just defense” against native aggression. But the defense in turn rested on the previous “content submission” of another native party that was apparently incapable of defending itself. One of the main functions of colonial discourse was to produce two native groups—Caribs and Arawaks, “dogs” and “doves”—that would fit the ideological script of “just defense.”

A slightly altered version of Hakluyt's passage is found in his second set of “Inducements” (1585), but significantly the “canibales” are now dropped from the argument (Hakluyt the Elder 1979b, 65). But it should be remembered that Hakluyt's imperial plans were not drafted for public consumption. The general readership was served by the tracts of Peckham and Ingram, which, as we have seen, knew how to exploit the popular fascination with the topic of cannibalism.

George Peckham, who apparently did not want to run the risk of exclusively relying on the trope of cannibalism, also tried to imagine a colonial setting without cannibals. He considered the possibility that the “good” Indians might themselves try to repel the colonists from their shores. “Then,” he writes, “in such a case I holde it no breach of equitie for the Christians to defende themselues, to pursue reuenge with force, and to do whatsoeuer is necessarie for the attayning of their safety” (Peckham 1589, 706). If the English colonists' right to stay (which must have been acquired either by the Indians' acceptance of their chivalric gesture or by their rejection of it) should be questioned by the natives, the settlers may “by strong hand pursue [them], subdue them, take possession of theyr Townes, Cities, or Villages,” especially if the savages should choose to “returne to their horrible idolatrie … and continue their wicked custome of most vnnaturall sacrificing of humane creatures” (706). Peckham's disregard for geographical and ethnic difference pays handsome dividends here. While the possibilities of the Caribbean discourse of cannibalism have been exhausted at an earlier stage, those provided by the mainland Aztecs' religious customs are awkwardly drawn out of the sleeve to show that aggression is never the practice of the colonists but always that of the natives themselves.

Peckham's reference to human sacrifice introduces us to another intertextual field, which will be further examined in chapter 4. So far it can be said that the discourse of English colonialism was strongly indebted to its Spanish predecessor but also bore traces of the English discourse of the conquest of Ireland, and that the negotiation of the Spanish discursive model in English texts was complex and often contradictory, reflecting the complex political relationship between the two rivaling colonial nation-states. Thus, although by 1583 the continent, especially France and the Netherlands, was flooded with anti-Spanish propaganda, the English propagandists' attitude toward Spain was ambivalent—partly because Spain was not only regarded as a rival in colonial matters but also as an important precursor and a model of English colonial action and ideology.

Consequently, although Bartolomé de Las Casas's Brevíssima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552) was published in an English translation in 1583 as The Spanish Colonie, and although the leyenda negra that it initiated had made its course in Europe well before that date, their reception by English propagandists was quite divided (see Maltby 1971). Peckham's tract pays much attention to the history of the Spanish conquest but omits any reference to Spanish cruelties. Again and again, the deeds of Cortés, Pizarro, and Balboa are evoked with unconcealed admiration, and Peckham significantly establishes a direct link between the Spanish conquista and the conquest of Ireland in 1171 by the Welshman Richard Strongbow, “which history our owne chronicles do witnesse: And why should we be dismayed more then were the Spanyards in the maine firme land of America” (Peckham 1589, 715). But Peckham's own tortuous collection of just reasons for conquest shows best that reference to a medieval precedent no longer sufficed in the age of the emergence of international law. Thus the glimpse toward Spain as a model appealed to the Catholic Peckham, who refrained from anti-Spanish rhetoric not least because of his confessional ties.

Probably for diplomatic reasons, the leyenda negra was publicly exploited in England hardly at all in the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, it made an appearance in such unofficial documents as the younger Richard Hakluyt's private outline of English colonization to the queen, the “Discourse of Western Planting” of 1584. Contrary to the geographical vagueness of Peckham's text, on which it draws,¹⁴ the mapping of the “Discourse” is quite explicit: it concentrates on the area under Spanish control, Mexico and the Caribbean, which was also the main goal of English privateering voyages by Drake and Hawkins. Hakluyt's main argument is that the American gold could much more easily be acquired by replacing the Spaniards in the areas to be exploited than by more or less successfully pillaging their treasure fleets. He does not take any pains to resort to the rhetoric of cannibalism but makes extensive use of the trope of chivalry sketched above.

Hakluyt's tract is guided by considerations of realpolitik: by joining the Chichimecs and the Cimarrons (fugitive slaves from Africa who had formerly worked in the gold mines) against the Spaniards, England could easily obtain the rule over Mexico and the Caribbean islands. Since the Indians and the slaves were revolting already without English help, the English had better hurry up and “put a foote in that enterprise.”¹⁵ Once the Spaniards were overthrown, he argues, it would be a child's game to keep the former allies in check. Though operating with the ideologeme of chivalry, the “Discourse of Western Planting” does not draw any significant distinction between good and bad Indians. Hakluyt also studiously avoids the topic of cannibalism: quoting Ramusio, for example, he does mention Verazzano's unhappy end, but he omits the cannibalistic details that later inspired Morison's imagination (Hakluyt 1979, 104). Instead, the aggressor-victim dichotomy now applies to the relationship between Indians and Spaniards.

What can be witnessed in Hakluyt's document is a tactical adaptation or translation of an earlier discourse: the Columbian dualism is now aligned with the new political landscape, and here the rhetoric of the leyenda negra comes in handy. Ironically, the passages Hakluyt quotes from the Brevíssima relación to shed negative light on the Spanish aggressors nicely tie in with the Spanish discourse tradition, which Hakluyt tries to escape. Quoting Las Casas, he writes:

Upon these lambes (meaninge the Indians) so meke, so qualified and endewed of their maker … entred the spanishe, incontinent as they knew them, as wolves, as lyons, and as Tigres moste cruell of longe tyme famished: … they teare them in peces, kill them, martir them, afflicte them, tormente them and destroye them by straunge sortes of cruelties. … They entred into Townes, Burroughes, and villages sparing neither children, nor olde men, noyther women with childe, neither them that laye in, but they ripped their bellies and cut them in peces as if they had bene openinge of lambes shutt upp in their folde. … They murdred commonly the Lordes and nobilitie in this fasshion, they made certen grates of perches laid on pitchforkes, and made a little fire underneathe to the intente that by little and little … they might give up the ghoste.

One time I sawe foure or five of the principall Lordes roasted and broyled upon these gredyrons: also I thincke that there were twoo or three of the said gredyrons garnished with the like furniture. … The serjeant would not have them strangled, but … put to the fire until they were softly roasted after his desire. … they taughte their houndes, fierce doggs, to tear them in peces at the first viewe, and in the space that one might say a Credo assailed and devoured an Indian as if it had bene a swine.

(Hakluyt 1979, 93-94)

The slaughterhouse imagery of Las Casas is so strong that Hakluyt thinks it wise to add in brackets who is meant by “these lambes so meke.” Figuratively speaking, the vehicle of the metaphor, stemming from the language of pastoralism, is in danger of devouring the tenor, the account of the torture of the Indians. The Brevíssima relación in fact abounds in such a “passionate but reductive shepherding,” as Mary Campbell calls it (Campbell 1988, 251). For us today, Las Casas's metaphorical practice may appear ironic in the face of his reputation as the defender of the Indians' human rights. Rhetorically, the similes and metaphors in this passage appear counterproductive to Las Casas's apparent intention to evoke compassion in his readers. His price for doing so is to dehumanize the victims himself.¹⁶

Most interesting, however, is the way in which the description of the Spanish tortures ties in with the imagery of cannibalism. Whereas the Spaniards prepare the “food” until “softly roasted after [their] desire,” it is the privilege of the dogs (who had before occasionally lent their teeth and faces to the cannibals) to devour the sheepish natives. Hakluyt, by relying on the metaphorical suggestiveness of his Spanish source (whether consciously or unconsciously is impossible to determine), could dispense with any further comment of his own that would demonize the Spaniards and inferiorize the Indians. Clearly, the passages from the Brevíssima relación have an ideological function in Hakluyt's text different from that in Las Casas's original. By being transported to a rhetorical context of colonial expansion, the original rhetoric of compassion for the victims of Spanish colonization has now mutated into an instrument of England's colonial policy.

Already in Las Casas's text, though, the Columbian dualism of good Indians and bad cannibals is replaced with the dualism of good and universally lamblike Indians and cannibalistic Spaniards.¹⁷ Hakluyt, always reluctant to tamper with his texts and preferring to let them speak for themselves, only had to remove the passage to its new ideological frame of reference. Thus one of the most important documents of early modern humanism came to serve the interests of early modern nationalism and colonialism. Hakluyt's borrowing from the Brevíssima relación, as well as his own exposition of a possible English colonial policy, reinforces the conclusion to be drawn from earlier texts: the Indians would be “lambs” to the English, as they had been to the Spaniards before.

It is one of the main interests of this book to show that the English, while condemning Spanish action (often in private), simultaneously regarded it as a model to be imitated. The difference between English colonial schemes and Spanish colonial practice was at this stage not significant at all—least of all from the natives' point of view. Regardless of their later techniques of colonization, which differed from those of Spain, the English ideologists were anxious to learn from their enemy's experience; this becomes evident in their intense use of Spanish written sources (see my discussion of Ralegh in chapter 3).

While rival European nations were thus engaged in rhetorically recasting the drama of dispossession to the other's disadvantage, the European play of identity and difference gave little room to the Indians for expressing their view of the matter. If native voices appear in European texts at all, they usually may at best be regarded as moments of instability within the monologue of the European masters of discourse. More often, as we will see in the following chapters, the “recording” of native voices was used as a rhetorical tool by colonial power to dissemble just conquest by native consent.

A fine example of ideological slippage may be found in the apocryphal Letter to Soderini attributed to Amerigo Vespucci (1504). As in other cases, the falseness of the document does not weaken but rather reinforces its function as an expression, but also a parody, of a European sense of identity:

Many people came to see us, and were astonished at our appearance and the whiteness of our skins. They asked whence we came, and we gave them to understand that we came from heaven, and that we were travelling to see the world, and they believed it. In this land we put up a font of baptism, and an infinite number of people were baptised, and they called us, in their language, Carabi, which is as much as to say, “men of great wisdom.”

(Vespucci 1894, 17)

After several weeks on the Atlantic Ocean, the travelers' skin was probably about as “white” as their origin was divine. Together with the importance given to the Christian ritual of baptism, these markers belong to a whole set of cultural codes by which Europeans distinguished themselves from non-Europeans and which here culminate in the highest expression of cultural superiority: the assertion of the Europeans' superior knowledge (“great wisdom”). The Indians' affirmation of the elevated intellectual status of the travelers is only disturbed by the native word they use for expressing it, Carabi, an anagram of Cariba. The greater the distance from the scene of action, it seems, the greater is the probability of discursive disintegration. Vespucci's “slip of the pen” evokes Montaigne's famous claim that the Europeans were by far the worse cannibals; it evokes as well the fact that the “people of great wisdom” symbolically devoured the body of their god each Sunday.¹⁸

In their aspiration to become godlike themselves—and to be received as such by the people to be subdued, as the following chapter shows—Europeans were haunted by the fear of their own bestiality, a fear that could be banned only by the constant production of barbarous others.

Notes

1. My use of the critical term trope is indebted to Hayden White and Harold Bloom, who regard it as the linguistic equivalent of a psychic mechanism of defense against a literal meaning that for some reason cannot be articulated (White 1978, 3). The reason, I assume, is ultimately political.

2. For editorial information see the foreword to the facsimile reprint of the 1589 edition (Ingram 1966) and D. B. Quinn's remarks on Ingram's text in the introduction to the facsimile reprint of the Principall Navigations (Quinn 1965, xxxii).

3. For example, a “strange Beast bigger then a Beare” had “neither head nor necke: his eyes and mouth were in his breast”; the whole creature was “very ugly to behold” (560). The Herodotean equivalent of such a headless beast would be the Akephaloi, called Blemmyae by Pliny. See Mason 1990, 75, 78. On the monstrous human races, see Friedman 1981; Pagden 1982, chapter 2; Bernheimer 1952; and Dudley and Novak 1972.

4. D. B. Quinn calls Peckham's “True Report of the Late Discoueries” a “nationalistic manifesto in favor of an oppressive colonizing policy,” “an ambitious but somewhat prosaic set of headlines of Elizabethan imperialism” (Quinn 1979, 3:2).

5. One-eyed and dog-faced monsters (called Cyclops and Cynocephali by Pliny: both were believed to live in India) form an integral part of medieval European teratology, where they are at times depicted as carnivorous. Monsters like the ones described by Columbus also people the writings of Sir John Mandeville. It is impossible to say whether we are dealing with an exclusive projection by Columbus of a European tradition or whether the dog-men also formed part of a preexisting Caribbean discourse. Arguments in favor of projection would include the actual problem of communication between Columbus's crew and the natives, as well as his notorious search for Plinian monsters. Apart from this, any analysis of Columbus's journal of course faces the problem of the material status of this text, which survives only in a summary of Las Casas, who occasionally quotes from the lost manuscript. As with the origin of most myths, that of the dog-mouthed cannibals cannot be attributed to any individual, and the act of invention might turn out to be just another appropriation of an earlier discourse. For a critical assessment of the text of Columbus/Las Casas, see Henige 1991. For a detailed assessment of the influence of Mandeville and the European romance tradition on Columbus, see Campbell 1988, chapters 4 and 5, as well as Reichert 1988.

6. See Hulme 1986, 31. For a full account of this process, see 22-33.

7. My reference to the trope of chivalry is indebted to Hulme's analysis of it in Hulme 1994, which traces this discursive constellation back to the conquest of the Canary Islands.

8. Isabella's decree was abrogated in 1524 by King Charles I, who approved of the enslavement of all Indians provided the Requerimiento had been read to them (see Gerbi 1985, 149, n. 60).

9. See Hulme 1986, 78-87, on the different uses and implications of the terms anthropophagy and cannibalism. The main contrast is that cannibalism has strong connotations of violence and aggression, expressed in the claim of the ferocity with which the cannibals consumed human flesh (83-84). Another critical assessment of the theme is Arens 1979.

10. Many leaders of the colonization of America had been personally involved with the English conquest of Ireland. On the connections, see Canny 1973; Jones 1968, 167-75; and Carlin 1985.

11. This is not to deny the possibility that the starving Irish may in their desperation have put their hands on their dead. But the discursive dimension of Spenser's passage is apparent from the New World travelers' expectation of the “savages” to eat their dead, like the “wild Irish,” without having observed such an action. It did not take long for the European discourse of savagery to become enriched by the American variant in turn, as exemplified in a letter by Sir Henry Sidney in 1566 in which he refers to the Irish resistance leader Shane O'Neill as “That canyball” (Canny 1973, 587). After a while, the line between European and American forms of savagery certainly became quite blurred. As Canny's study shows, Europe's others could frequently be located around the corner and not exclusively in distant lands.

12. The intertextual reference is to Peter Martyr's Decades of the New Worlde, or West India, which indeed abounds in cannibalistic details. The dried bodies, as well as those found by Chanca's crew, are reminiscent of indigenous burial customs, in which the corpses of leaders were preserved on large scaffolds in a sort of mortuaries.

13. The Chichimecs were suspected of cannibalism by Spanish chroniclers, mainly because of their unsettled lifestyle and the subsequent difficulty of subjecting them (see Pagden 1982, 87). Chichemeca was the Nahua term applied to any nomadic or semisedentary tribe, including the Aztecs before they settled at Tenochtitlán. Like the Caribs, then, the Chichimecs were those groups who were not organized in chiefdoms or protostates. See Lockhart and Schwartz 1983, 55, 290-93.

14. The close relationship between Hakluyt's “secret” tract and Peckham's official one is hinted at by the running title of Peckham's text in the Principall Navigations, “Westerne planting.” Hakluyt's and Peckham's brotherhood in mind with regard to colonial matters is disturbed only by Peckham's explicit proposal to imitate Spanish action, whereas Hakluyt's proposal is more implicit. But their sympathy does not seem to have been impaired by their oppositional religious affiliations. In fact, Hakluyt propagates the usefulness of the pursuit of colonization for diverting the intellectuals' attention from unwholesome theoretical and theological debates. For him, national expansion was more important than religious sectarianism.

15. Hakluyt 1979, 92. Sir Francis Drake did not wait long for acting out Hakluyt's plan and sacked a few Spanish settlements in the Caribbean and on the Mexican coast in 1586 with the help of Indians and Cimarrons. It is to be doubted, however, that his motives for “liberating” the oppressed were purely born from humanist sensibility. Ten years earlier at least he had taken a leading part in the slaughter of the six hundred inhabitants of Rathlin Island, Ireland. See Morgan 1975, 34-35, and, on Rathlin Island, Dollimore and Sinfield 1985, 224. It is interesting that the successor of Coligny, Phillipe Duplessis-Mornay, entertained a plan similar to Hakluyt's in the same year. He suggested attacking Spanish settlements at the isthmus of Panama to intercept Spanish gold transports and prepare a descent to the Pacific Ocean, which would make the French masters of the spice trade. See Elliott 1970, 92-93.

16. On the discourses of pastoralism and colonialism, see Hulme 1994.

17. Next to the metaphorical cannibalism of the Spaniards, the Brevíssima relación contains accounts of the Spaniards endorsing, supervising, and capitalizing on the Indians' “cannibalistic” practice. Las Casas claims that in a slave camp in Guatemala, the Spaniards conducted “an ordinarie shambles of mans fleshe,” and that the Indians “killed and roasted children” in their presence. Instead of feeding their Indian slaves, Las Casas claims, the Spaniards “allowed” them to eat the prisoners of colonial warfare (Las Casas 1583, sig. F). In Theodor de Bry's illustrated edition of the Brevíssima relación, the passage is aptly accompanied by an engraving showing a Spanish butcher stand with human limbs and an Indian woman who exchanges her necklace for the meat of her compatriots. In his discussion of this passage, Tom Conley emphasizes the symbolic translation of native cannibalism into an economic paradigm (Conley 1992, 115-16).

18. French Protestants actually did functionalize the colonial discourse of cannibalism in their propaganda against the Catholics' literal understanding of the eucharist.

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