SOURCE: Dickason, Olive Patricia. “L'Homme Sauvage.” In The Myth of the Savage: And the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas, pp. 61-84. Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 1984.

[In the following essay, Dickason traces the development of the European view of Amerindians, arguing that the European view of Native Americans as savages discounts their cultural and political systems.]

Europe's discovery of the Amerindian is usually represented as affording her the first large-scale encounter with man living in a state of nature.¹ According to this view, that discovery was largely responsible for the development of the European idea of l'homme sauvage, the savage who could be either noble or debased, but who in any event was not civilized. Such achievements as the city-states of Mexico, Central America, or Peru were either overlooked or else were dismissed as being, at best, barbarous. An examination of the concept of savagery reveals that its origin is both more complex and far older than such a view would indicate. In fact, it involved the well-known Renaissance folkloric figure of the Wild Man; early Christian perceptions of monkeys, apes, and baboons; and the classical Greek and Roman tradition of the noble savage.²

Columbus's encounter with the Arawaks and Caribs did not introduce Europeans to a previously unknown kind of man; what it did was to add a new dimension to an already existing idea, that of l'homme sauvage, by revealing multitudes of people in the New World who appeared, to Europeans, to fit the concept, at least to some degree. Alternatively, Renaissance Europe applied the term “barbarian” to these new peoples, often as a synonym for “savage” but sometimes to indicate an ameliorated form of savagery. Eventually, the sheer weight of numbers of those they had so readily labelled “savage” caused Europeans to give new attention to their concept of l'homme sauvage, and consequently to the whole question of man in relation to his society. The idea of savagery had been around for a long time, but what exactly did it mean? How did it differ from civility?

A modern French definition of the word “sauvage,” that of Larousse, says that among other things it means not cultivated, tamed, or domesticated; that which frightens easily. Applied to man, it denotes a person who lives away from society, beyond the pale of its laws, without fixed abode; by analogy, one who is rude and fierce.³ Larousse introduces such definitions with the statement that in ancient French the adjective “salvage” or “sauvage” simply signified the forest habitat, and was a synonym for the Latin sylvaticus. The time boundaries implied by the word “ancient” are not specified; but it can be assumed that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are included. A survey of French writing during that period, however, does not support the thesis that at that epoch sauvage meant simply living in the woods. In that intensely religious age, the medieval habit of viewing man in moral terms was still far too deeply implanted for such a neutral use to have been anything but desultory, and highly individual. While shades of emphasis could and did vary from writer to writer, the general implication was always clear: to be savage meant to be living according to nature, in a manner “closer to that of wild animals than to that of man.”⁴ The beast far outweighed the innocent.

Sainte-Palaye said the word sauvage was used in this sense well before the Age of Discovery. He compiled his Dictionnaire historique during the eighteenth century; in it he traced the meanings of words from their origins to the time of Louis XIV. He listed eight meanings for sauvage, of which the first was “not tamed” and the last, “extraordinary.” In between are such definitions as solitary, uncivilized, ferocious, demented, and foreign.⁵ Richelet, whose dictionary was published in 1680, said the word applied to fierce persons who were the enemies of society and agreeable conversation.⁶ Furetière's Dictionnaire universel (1691) defined a savage as a man without regular habitation, without religion, law, or civility. Nearly all of America, he said, had been found peopled with savages, most of whom were cannibals. He added, “the Savages go naked and are shaggy, covered with hair.”⁷

The immediate reaction of Europeans had been to refer to New World men as cannibals; even Columbus had come to comply with that designation. He did not call them savages, except in the case of armed encounters.⁸ Neither did Vespucci, although he found some of them brutish and animal-like in their appearance, bad of faith and utterly savage in their manner of living.⁹ In general, however, Spaniards and Portuguese immediately adopted the term indios, although the Portuguese sometimes referred to nomadic hunters as selvagens, people whom the Spaniards usually called indios bravos. The French initially referred to New World men as hommes, gens, habitants, indigènes, or most likely, cannibales. The Germans, interested but not so directly involved, opted for indianer.

It is nonetheless evident from early voyage accounts that the French, as well as Europeans in general, had quickly equated New World men with savagery. This is indicated, for example, by Cartier's comment, reporting on Amerindians he met on his first voyage in 1534: “This people may well be called savage, for they are the sorriest folk there can be in the world, and the whole lot of them had not anything above the value of five sous, their canoes and fishing nets excepted.”¹⁰ Cartier did not explain what he meant by savage beyond the lack of material possessions and a consequent style of living, which he did not consider acceptable. This equation of New World men with savagery is also evident in those early illustrations that attempted to depict la frayeur subite (sudden fear), which Amerindians initially experienced at the approach of Europeans.¹¹ One of the definitions of sauvage considered above was “that which frightens easily.” However, the term sauvage does not appear frequently in print until the middle of the sixteenth century: by the third quarter, it was in general use in French and English; in Spanish and in Portuguese, the term indios became hardly less pejorative. During the seventeenth century, French and English writers were calling all the inhabitants of the New World savages, whether they were descended from the court poets of the city-states of Central and South America, or were nomadic hunters following caribou in the austere north.

In his benign aspect, the savage was represented during these two centuries as living in the “infancy of nature” or, more ideally, in a Golden Age, that concept from classical antiquity that had never ceased to haunt Europeans' minds. “They are, in effect, happy with so little”;¹² or, in the words of Vespucci, “they live content with what nature gives them.”¹³ In his adverse aspect, the savage was “a statue of flesh and blood, an artificial man who could only be moved by the use of force.”¹⁴ He was without heart for his natural responsibilities, had no eye for the beauties of nature, did not even have names for painting and sculpture; he could not appreciate music or fine perfume, and ate his food raw, bloody, and alive. Solitary and alone in the midst of others, he was indifferent to suffering and cruelty, as he was without natural affections.¹⁵

Such representations, while graphic, were not considered satisfactory explanations of savagery, even at the time. How was it to be defined? First of all, it was far removed from reason. In the words of d'Avity, “One must consider barbarous those whose manners and customs are far removed from true reason.”¹⁶ The belief of the day held that this was a natural consequence of a lack of knowledge of God, the knowledge considered to be a prerequisite for mental activity, according to St. Augustine. That it had long been held to be applicable to Amerindians is indicated by the commission Cartier received for his third Canadian voyage from François I, which refers to the people of Canada as living without knowledge of God and without use of reason.¹⁷ La Croix wrote, “I rank with beasts those savage peoples who do not use reason.”¹⁸ Oviedo's view of the mindless savage was equally unflattering: “The bones of their heads are so hard, so strong and thick, that the principal care of Christians, when they are fighting with them, is not to hit them on the head for fear of breaking their swords.”¹⁹ According to such opinions, the contemporary savage was a retrograde figure; the first man, living off acorns and chestnuts, was more polite and polished than he.²⁰ This position, however, was not so clear to Antoine de Montchrestien (c. 1575-1621), dramatist and economist, who found that Amerindians were

subtle enough mentally, but ignorant of our arts, whether of peace or of war. They do not believe that land belongs to individuals, any more than does the light of the sun. They only labour and cultivate enough to provide for their sustenance. … They are totally given to liberty, and are not very industrious. They value bravery above all. … In short, if it were possible to remove from them their faults, replacing them with our virtues without our vices, they would be worthy men.²¹

In other words, it was not so much lack of reason or even retrogression that made them savages, but rather that they were not like Europeans.

To d'Avity, the non-use of reason was the most important of five “degrees of brutality.”²² By using the term “degrees” he imparted a hierarchy to brutishness, a concept congenial to the Renaissance ethos. The second level of savagery he found in the manner of procuring food-hunting and gathering, living like beasts off the land, rather than practising agriculture. There was also the nature of the food to consider. The Amerindian diet contained elements that in the eyes of Europeans could at best be considered “savage.” Herrera said of the people of Cuba that they ate “many filthy things, as large Spiders, Worms breeding in rotten Wood and other nasty Places, and Fish half raw, for as soon as taken, before boiling, they pull'd out their eyes, and eat them, which things any Spaniard would loath.”²³

This concern with the diet of the Amerindian was the logical consequence of the widespread belief that we are what we eat.²⁴ The implication of this, for the Renaissance mind, was that “savage food necessarily produces a savage nature and temperament.”²⁵ Amerindians made similar observations concerning Europeans. A shaman accused Hennepin of eating serpents and poison, adding that such folk as he also ate thunderbolts.²⁶ Amerindians also shared the European belief that one develops the characteristics of the food one eats. A hunter, for instance, who ate of a slow-moving animal risked losing his speed;²⁷ and as is generally accepted in the case of cannibalism, eating the heart of a brave enemy was motivated by the desire to acquire his courage. Lack of regular meal hours was also cited by Europeans to prove Amerindian savagery. Even worse, Amerindians took their food from the ground, without napkin or any other cloth, eating out of earthen pots or calabashes.²⁸ According to one unsympathetic Recollet missionary, they often ate “crouched like dogs,” and generally behaved like animals.²⁹

Nudity was d'Avity's third degree of “brutishness,” indicating “a complete absence of a sense of morality when persons do not cover even their shameful parts.”³⁰ In fact, held d'Avity, it was a sense of shame that distinguished men from animals. His fourth level concerned types of habitation: the most barbarous people lived in caves and trees, although nomads living in tents were not much better. Lack of government was fifth: “They are entirely barbarous who live without any laws and without chiefs in times of peace, only accepting them during wars.” On this point, however, d'Avity conceded that some New World peoples, such as those of “Tlascalla & Chilolla” and New Spain, had what qualified by European standards as government. Peruvians even had a form of civility, although they did not have the arch; but their ingenuity in building bridges up to 300 feet long over very deep gorges had to be admired.³¹ Others were not so prepared as d'Avity to grant that the Peruvian government could be classed as civilized. Acosta, for one, found it to be tyrannical, and therefore barbarous, because it treated the people as beasts and the rulers as gods.³²

Other attempts at defining brutishness included lack of writing³³ and the “elusive” or even “defective” structure of languages that impeded the communication of Christian doctrine.³⁴ Without the letters “f,l,r,” how could Amerindians have “foy, loy et roy”?³⁵ This linguistic characteristic, first reported of Brazilians, was found to apply to Canadians as well.³⁶ A favorite word for describing their languages was baragouin, gibberish.

These efforts at definition were based on the assumption that if savagery were a condition, it must have certain characteristics that would make it recognizable as such. From this point of view, d'Avity's list is as interesting for what it leaves out as for what it contains. Contemporaries would have been struck by the fact that the cosmographer did not include lack of order in sexual matters, although this had been widely reported of New World peoples. This indicates some independence of judgment on his part, for although it was being realized that these reports were exaggerated, to say the least, they were still generally believed.³⁷ Neither did d'Avity include cannibalism as such, but rather as a manifestation of the lack of reason. Cannibals, he wrote, must be considered as enemies of humankind, or else as maniacs who must be first rendered capable of reason and humanity, and then instructed in virtue and the Christian faith.³⁸

D'Avity also omitted dirtiness, which came to be used by latter-day writers as one of the characteristics of savagery, Amerindian or otherwise. But during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans were struck by the frequency with which Amerindians bathed. It was told of Moctezuma (“the chief who shoots to heaven when he is angry”) that he bathed every day, “were it ever so cold.”³⁹ Léry considered it worth reporting that the Tupinambá of Brazil washed their mouths and hands before eating.⁴⁰ European standards were not as high. Erasmus (1466?-1536), in his tract entitled De civilitate morum puerilium (1530), said that it was necessary to wash hands before sitting down at the dining table. Among European upper classes, this was done by extending the hands so that a page could sprinkle them with perfumed water.⁴¹ There is no indication, in Erasmus or elsewhere, however, that such refinements were suggested for the masses. Generally speaking, Europeans were of the opinion that bathing could be followed by colic, fevers, headaches, and vertigo, and that therefore the best course of action was to consult a physician before indulging in what was regarded as a pleasure rather than a health measure. In any event, it should be done only in summer and not in winter.⁴² As European standards of cleanliness developed, so did criticisms of those Amerindians who were found not to wash their hands before meals, nor the meat nor even the pot before cooking.⁴³ However, one could wonder upon what standards such comments were based, and whether the authors were comparing a certain group of Amerindians with a comparable group of Europeans, if such inquiry would have been feasible or even possible.

An even more striking omission from d'Avity's list is that of cruelty, particularly as historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been at great pains to “prove” the savagery of Amerindians because of their war practices. Apart from their cannibalistic aspects, these practices were not considered in the days of d'Avity to be more cruel than those of Europe. Quite the contrary, in fact, as far as torture was concerned. Sixteenth-century accounts are dominated by reports of Spanish torture of Amerindians, especially during the early part of the century, when decimation of the New World peoples was at its height. The description “very cruel,” which Renaissance Europeans so often applied to New World men, was a label habitually tagged onto unfamiliar people as well as onto enemies in war, and did not usually point to specific practices.⁴⁴ However, in the case of Amerindians, it often referred specifically to their cannibalism.⁴⁵

Cardano did not consider cruelty a particular characteristic of savages, as he noted that such people were often very gentle. Observing that they could be more humane than many Greeks and Italians,⁴⁶ he went on to say that they were neither immoral nor lacking in intelligence. Their savagery lay, rather, in a psychological instability: “Before a matter is understood they begin to rage and after they have become excited it is very difficult to quiet them.”⁴⁷ This lack of emotional control made them liberty-loving and seditious; it also left them vulnerable to being imposed upon.

WILD MAN OF THE WOODS⁴⁸

When he wrote his description, Cardano thought he was depicting men of the New World, among other “savages.” In fact, both his description and the definitions were strongly influenced by one of the most familiar of the folk figures of this period, the Wild Man of the Woods. In much of the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century writing on savagery, the influence of this figure is evident. Found in folklore throughout Europe, but particularly in the northern and central regions, he was known by such names as Wildemann in Flanders and Germany; Wild Man, wodewose, or woodhouse in England, Ireland, and Scotland; and l'homme sauvage in France. He was also known as Pilosus, Orcus, Schrat, and Ogre; or perhaps as homo sylvestris or homine agreste. All of these terms were more or less synonymous with savage, satyr, or faun. Wodewose derived from the Old English wode or wod, meaning furious or in a state of insanity. Like Odin or Wodin, the great God of the northern nations who presided over war and feasted on the slain, wode expressed the rage of battle. It also had implications of unrestrained sensuality and of the demonic. A glimpse of forerunners of wodewoses or wild men is provided by Pausanias, who during the second century told of satyrs attacking a woman from a Greek ship and treating her “in such a way as we will not venture to describe.”⁴⁹

The Wild Man appeared in a theatrical play in Padua as early as 1208, and was first pictorialized during the mid-thirteenth century in grotesques decorating manuscript margins.⁵⁰ His period of popularity began during the latter part of the fourteenth century, reaching its peak during the Renaissance; after the seventeenth century he went into a decline. His origins can be traced back to classical antiquity or even to Babylon and Uruk, as well as to the ancient Hebrews. In Roman mythology, he was descended from the Titan Saturn whose reign was described as a Golden Age of innocence and purity, although Saturn himself was a monster who ate all but three of his own children: Jupiter (air), Neptune (water), and Pluto (earth, underworld). Orcus, also descended from Saturn, carried the dead to the underworld. Saturn has certain similarities to the Greek Cronos, the son of Gaea and Ouranos (Earth and Heaven), two aspects of the same identity before they were separated by their son. Although associated with the Golden Age, Saturn symbolized life-devouring hunger and insatiable desire. Incapable of allowing his people to evolve, he was emasculated by his sons and returned to the heavens.⁵¹ The Wild Man's physical resemblance to the satyr Silenus has frequently been noted,⁵² and he has also been identified with Hercules. For the Hebrews, the Wild Man was represented as a spiritual rather than as a physical condition: he was a rebel against the Lord, insane, accursed, and destructive.⁵³

Such traditions merged, more or less under the influence of Christianity, to produce the Renaissance wodewose or l'homme sauvage. He was a minor figure representing the negation of the Christian ideal, a folk version of Antichrist. In the days of courtly love he was the embodiment of brute sensuality as opposed to the chivalrous love of the knight. He was usually depicted as covered all over with hair, except for knees, elbows, and face; and he had a full beard. His hairiness symbolized the enormous strength on which he depended as he stood alone against all, even his own kind. This strength was suggested also by his habit of carrying a knotty club or an uprooted tree. Unable to speak, he shunned man and was devoid of knowledge of God, an indication that he did not have the use of reason or that he did not possess it.⁵⁴ He was intimately acquainted with nature's secrets, which he sometimes shared with peasants; at times he would tend their cattle or would heal a wounded knight with herbs. But his closest associates were bears and devils; unable to control his passions, he assaulted lone women in the woods.⁵⁵

In Edmund Spenser's vivid imagery, this being was outsized, “all overgrowne with haire … With huge great teeth,” he “fed on fleshly gore, The signe whereof yet stain'd his bloudy lips afore.” This unprepossessing figure lived on the “spoile of women,” whom he raped and then ate. He had already caught and eaten seven by the time he appeared in The Faerie Queene.⁵⁶

A gentler version of the Wild Man in the same work, Satyrane (his father was a satyr) rescued ladies instead of preying on them. Whether the hairy man was presented as fierce or gentle, his portrayals were remarkably uniform, reflecting his lack of personal development, and consequently, of individuality.

This solitary homme sauvage, “black and hairy, like a chained bear,” owed his origin to more than the mythologies of classical Greece, Rome, and the Middle East. He also contained elements from early reports of anthropoid apes, usually described in the Renaissance as speechless human beings, homines sylvestres. According to Pliny,

the Choromandae are a savage and wild people; distinct voice and speech have they none, but in steed thereof, they keepe an horrible gnashing and hideous noise: rough they are and hairie all over their bodies, eies they have red like the houlets and toothed they be like dogs.⁵⁷

There is now no doubt that Pliny was actually describing a troupe of large monkeys or gibbons. The Medieval and Renaissance tendency was to transform these animals into quasi-human beings by exaggerating their human aspects. The Spanish, for instance, were reported to regard baboons as a race of people who refused to speak so that they would not be forced to live in subjection.⁵⁸ Similarly, the great apes and orangutans were said to be descended from people who had grown weary of work and the restraints of village life, and so had retreated to the forests and an animal-like existence. They were supposed to have been the products of miscegenation between women and animals.⁵⁹ Albertus Magnus saw apes as being intermediate between man and beast, similtudines hominis, an early version of the missing link.⁶⁰ Men could even turn into apes: “of the Poets, it is fained that there were two bretheren most wicked fellowes, that were turned into Apes.”⁶¹ Prester John's list of wild creatures, dated 1164, included homines agrestes,⁶² which Cardano said resembled Wild Men.⁶³ As late as the mid-eighteenth century, an Englishman published an illustration of a “man in the wood,” complete with his gnarled stick, and labelled him “The Satier, Savage, Wild-Man, Pigmy, Orang-outang, Chimp-anzee, etc.”⁶⁴

From such hesitations and confusions, it had not been a long step to the idea of dual creation, of the Devil acting in competition with God but being capable only of producing a distorted version of the original being that had been divinely created. This concept was firmly established in Christian folklore: horse and ass, lion and cat, sun and moon, day and night.⁶⁵ An ape, as imperfected man, symbolized carnal desire; the apple-eating ape was seen in very much the same perspective as the sexually unrestrained Wild Man. The ape was also believed to remember injuries and to harbor hatreds for a long time.⁶⁶ Thus, men who were of a vengeful disposition or who nursed the desire for revenge were acting in the manner of apes rather than as fully fledged human beings. In describing Amerindians (with more or less truth) as people who never forgot an injury, who were so vengeful that they even ate the lice that tormented them, and who had no order in their sexual relations, Renaissance writers were putting them into a context popularly associated with apes and Wild Men.

The positioning of l'homme sauvage between man and animal meant that he could act in concert with beasts as an intermediary between human beings and the underworld. In Renaissance Flanders he was included with the wild animals who guarded the fountain of life in the forest, represented as a giant covered all over with hair, with eyebrows meeting over his nose, and armed with a large, uprooted sapling. He had the power of granting or refusing entry into heaven.⁶⁷ Near the forest was the Nobiskrug, where passports to the other world were obtained; its insignia was a hairy giant. In this capacity as intermediary the Wild Man was known as Orcus.⁶⁸ In Rouen during the sixteenth century, this figure was frequently placed above doors of houses, and appeared as a fireplace guardian⁶⁹ against the underworld. He is found on the North Portal of Rouen Cathedral, and guards the principal entrance to San Gregorio in Valladolid in Spain, as well as that of Casa de Montejo in Yucatán, built in 1549. In his demonic aspect he appears on tombs, particularly in northern and central Europe, where he is usually being trampled underfoot by the commemorated figure.

An extremely ancient version of the Wild Man, Enkidu, was the embodiment of natural innocence. Seduced by a harlot, and consequently rejected by his former companions the wild animals, he had no recourse except to go to the city and become civilized. He bewailed his fate at his death.⁷⁰ Among French names for l'homme sauvage or similar beings are found “Ankou” and “Annequin,” the latter approaching Hellekin or Harlequin.⁷¹

In Renaissance France the prankish side of l'homme sauvage prevailed, and he became identified with the Germanic comic devil, Hellekin, leader of the Wild Horde. Hellekin was particularly strongly entrenched in the north; his marriage to the mythical Luque La Maudite in Rouen during the thirteenth century is said to have resulted in a spree that caused considerable damage to the city.⁷² When animal skins and feathers were not available for the costuming of Hellekin in pageants, rags were substituted, and eventually became stylized into the diamond design associated with his theatrical descendant, Harlequin.⁷³

Although the first record of a theatrical play featuring a wild man dates back to 1208 in Padua, it was in pageants and spectacles where he was most in evidence, particularly those of Carnival and Twelfth Night. Here his disguise was regarded as a licence for rampaging violence.⁷⁴ At one point he even took part in tournaments, challenging knights. One of the best-known incidents involving a wild man masquerade occurred on 28 January 1392 at an event that later became known as the “Bal des Ardents,” Ball of the Burning Men, at the court of Charles VI (“the Mad”) of France, when several revellers dressed as Wild Men burned to death.⁷⁵ Sometimes the carnival Wild Man, girdled and crowned with feathers, pretended to feed only on raw meat, which was handed to him on the end of a stick.⁷⁶ In Quercy the first Sunday of Lent was formerly called “lou dimenge dei Salvagi,” Sunday of Savages, which the youth celebrated “by imitating Satyrs.”⁷⁷ In the pageant celebrating the entry of Charles V into Bruges, Wild Men were shown as the city's earliest inhabitants.⁷⁸ At other times they prefigured Amerindians, as in the entry of the “Damoiseulx de Valenciennes” into Lille in 1438, when masqueraders were dressed as Wild Men, some of them in animal skins, others in feathers.⁷⁹ In 1564, Charles IX was welcomed into Troyes by a troupe of savages and satyrs mounted on goats, donkeys, and a horse masquerading as a unicorn.⁸⁰ Jesuit Paul Le Jeune (1591-1664), seeing his first Amerindians with painted faces at Tadoussac in 1632, remarked, “I saw those masks which run about in France at Lent.”⁸¹

Le Jeune could not have foreseen that the tradition of carnival masquerades would cross the Atlantic with the settlers. Jacques-René de Brisay de Denonville, governor-general of New France in 1685-89, noted that such practices had reached the point where his predecessor, Joseph-Antoine Le Febvre de La Barre, had had to suppress them. However, he had not entirely succeeded:

A way of dressing up like savages, stark naked, not only on carnival days, but on all days of feasting and debauchery, has been treated as a nice action and a joke. These manners tend only to maintain the young people in the spirit of living like savages and to communicate with them to be eternally profligate like them.⁸²

From pageantry the Wild Man retired into heraldry, where he is still seen today as a supporting figure at times difficult to distinguish from Silenus. Such a position, in heraldic terms, indicates subjection. More than two hundred European families have the subjected Wild Man in their crests,⁸³ and he is on the coat of arms of Charles V on a building in Tlaxcala.⁸⁴ In a pose similar to his heraldic stance he also occasionally appeared on the title pages of books.⁸⁵

There was also a Wild Woman, but she never attained the importance of the Wild Man. This may have been partially because the church tolerated the latter, albeit reluctantly, whereas the rituals of the Wild Woman called for offerings. She was far more closely connected with the old religions, which the church was still engaged in stamping out. In Spain, for example, dancing in the disguise of Orca could draw a year's penitence.⁸⁶

The frequent reports throughout this period of hairy men in far-off places indicate that the Wild Man was thought actually to exist. Pliny, for example, had told of such creatures in India.⁸⁷ The Borgia Map, drawn in the fifteenth century before Columbus's voyage, is illustrated with hairy Amazons.⁸⁸ Occasionally, hairy men appear in Renaissance voyage accounts, such as those of Pigafetta.⁸⁹

Most Europeans who sailed to the New World must have been aware of the Wild Man, who was as familiar a figure to them as Santa Claus is today; indeed, in their facial representation, they were not unlike, both being bearded and having gentle expressions. From the very first, Europeans compared Amerindians with Wild Men. Columbus referred to West Indians as “wild” but suitable for slavery; an observer, describing the New World men brought to Lisbon by Corte-Real in 1501 (who have been variously identified as Inuit, Naskapi, Beothuk, or Micmac), said they had most gentle countenances but most bestial habits and manners, “like wild men.”⁹⁰ The seven Amerindians brought to Rouen in 1509 were described as homines sylvestres.⁹¹ Shakespeare's Caliban, whose name is considered by some to be an anagram of “cannibal,” is more Wild Man than Amerindian, although he is regarded as representing a New World native.⁹² He was in fact a depiction of the Wild Man in which the demonic aspects prevailed. This fusion of concepts can be seen in a map illustration in a Ptolemy geography of 1522, in which Terra Nova is decorated with a cannibal scene.⁹³ As already noted, cannibals were stock items in pre-Columbian geographies, and were usually located in the Orient. The Ptolemy cannibals have feather skirts, similar to those of the 1505 Augsburg woodcut. The figures are smooth-skinned, but have the heads and “gentle countenances” of Wild Men. Thus Ptolemy's scene could reflect simply the belief that the new-foundland was part of Asia; far more likely, however, it also indicated that the people of the New World were believed to be like Wild Men:

the Savages of America, cruel men of no reason, whom our fishermen are obliged to hunt as if they were beasts because, besides showing ferocious traits, their bodies are covered with hair and armed with nails remarkably long and hooked.⁹⁴

That the Wild Man had become confused in the popular mind with Amerindians is evident from not only such obviously misinformed reports, but from the repeated efforts missionaries and colonial officials made to discredit the notion that New World men were hairy.⁹⁵ Such efforts were unavailing. The first published denial appears to be that of Thevet in Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique (1557). In the chapter entitled “Against the opinion of those who believe that Savages are hairy,” Thevet asserted that those who insisted that Amerindians were hairy had obviously never seen them, for the truth was the opposite; they took great care to remove all body hair.⁹⁶ Later he theorized that the custom of the northern Amerindians of wearing furs had given rise to the erroneous belief.⁹⁷ Léry felt strongly enough about the matter to deny it repeatedly. “I reserve the right to refute the error of those who would have us believe that the savages are hairy,” he first wrote. Later, he was even more specific: “In spite of what some believe and others would like to make us believe, that they are covered with hair, the fact is that they are no hairier than we are.”⁹⁸ He speculated that the belief had arisen from the custom of the Tupinambá of glueing themselves all over with down or little feathers, which gave them a furred appearance,

so much so that in that state they appeared to be covered with down like newly hatched birds. Thus if Europeans, just arrived and without knowledge of these people, first see them when they are adorned in this fashion, they will spread the rumour that the savages are furred. … It is a falsehood that is too easily believed.⁹⁹

This line of reasoning was also repeated by Lescarbot after his year in Canada.¹⁰⁰

The Recollet missionary Gabriel Sagard (fl. 1614-36), who visited Huronia in 1623-24, noted that “our savages are not as hairy as some might think.” Referring to a well-known incident when the Admiral Hanno had brought what were believed to be two hairy women's skins from Gorgades Islands and had placed them in the Temple of Juno, Sagard continued, “hence the belief that all savages are hairy, although this is not so, and one very seldom finds that they are.”¹⁰¹ “Artists make a big mistake when they represent them as hairy,” wrote Jean de Laon, Sieur d'Aigremont, who had taken part in the colonizing attempt in Guiana in 1652.¹⁰² “There is no occasion to think of them as half beasts, shaggy, black and hideous,” complained Father Francisco Gioseppe Bressani (1612-72): “They are without a beard … [and are] more healthy than we.”¹⁰³ A generation later the same point was still being made: “The Hurons are neither furred nor misshapen as artists capriciously represent them, and except for their long hair and olive skins, most of them are as well made as the people of Europe.”¹⁰⁴ Army officer Lahontan (1666-c.1716) tersely corroborated this: “Those who represent Savages as hairy as bears have never seen them”; but added to the confusion by referring to Amerindians on another occasion as “real satyrs and fauns, true inhabitants of the woods,” who were inured “to jumping from rock to rock, being pierced by brambles and underbrush as they race through thorns and thickets as if in open country.”¹⁰⁵ Such descriptions only confirmed eighteenth-century Europeans' impression that Amerindians were hairy, as satyrs and fauns were thus depicted.

Missionaries were the most assiduous in their efforts to disabuse the European public of its image of hairy Amerindians. Recollet Chrestien Le Clercq (c.1641-1700) was particularly stern:

There is one error which is only too common, and of which it is desirable to disabuse the public. It is necessary to admit that some persons in our Europe are persuaded too easily that the peoples of North America … preserve of the nature of man nothing but the name of wild man, and that they have none of those finer qualities of body and of spirit which distinguish the human species from the beasts of the fields. And they even believe these people to be all hairy, like the bears, and more inhuman than the tigers and the leopards … as a matter of fact our Gaspesians have less hair than the French.¹⁰⁶

According to Dominican Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre (1610-87), “at the simple word Sauvage most people envision cruel and inhuman barbarians, without reason, misshapen, as huge as giants, hairy as bears … whereas in reality our Savages are savage only in name. … For the rest, they are neither hairy nor malformed.”¹⁰⁷

Two centuries after Thevet had denied that Amerindians were furred, an officer in the French and Indian War wrote, “The Savages of Canada are very different from the idea commonly held of them in France. Far from being hairy, as is believed, they are much less covered with hair than we are.”¹⁰⁸ As long as the Wild Man existed in folk imagination, he influenced the European conception of the Amerindian.

FROM WILD MAN TO LE BON SAUVAGE

The blending of European folklore with New World accounts produced a mythology of its own. An illustration of this is a theatrical success of eighteenth-century Paris, Arlequin Sauvage, first presented at Théâtre des Italiens, 17 June 1721. The play, by Louis-François de Lisle de La Drévetière (1682-1756), concerns Arlequin, whose name suggests the Wild Man, but who in this instance is an Amerindian brought to Europe. Like the Wild Man, Arlequin is unformed in his personality; he proceeds to run afoul of the law, both written (in an encounter with a merchant, when he mistakes proferred goods for a gift) and unwritten (his amatory adventures with Violette). Arlequin's simple truthfulness eventually prevails over social considerations and he wins Violette. This tale of the triumph of le bon sauvage reflects the later transmutation of the Wild Man into a “paragon of virtue lost in unfolding civilization.”¹⁰⁹ The purging of l'homme sauvage of his bestial and demonic aspects resulted in his apotheosis into le bon sauvage, a destiny he shared with the Amerindian during the eighteenth century. This provided a folkloric counterpart of Christianizing the New World peoples, “formerly savage but now evangelized.”¹¹⁰

The idea of “the noble savage” is, of course, as ancient as that of the Wild Man, as it is another aspect of the same general concept. Bernheimer theorizes that its development indicated the uneasiness of Europeans with their own civilization, particularly its organized violence. Another type of mythic transformation can be discerned in The Faerie Queene. During the woodland episodes, Hellenore deserts her husband to go and live with bagpipe-playing satyrs; Amoret is snatched by a Wild Man; and finally, Serena is captured by Salvages who “live of stealth and spoile,” depriving poor men of the fruits of their labor. These Salvages are preparing to make a cannibalistic sacrifice of Serena when she is rescued by Sir Calepine. In this presentation of evolutionary development, the animal satyrs are dominated by their sensuality and are given to dancing and festivities; the Wild Man combines sensuality and brute cannibalism; and the Salvages, although inclined to eat Serena on the spot, are persuaded by their priest to sacrifice her to their God instead; she would still have been eaten, but as part of a sacred ritual. And so bestial sensuality is transformed into a blood sacrifice to the Gods.

Until Amerindians became eligible for the honor, Europeans had cast several different Old World peoples in the role of the noble savage. At the time of the Age of Discovery, the Scythians were the favorites. According to Boas and Lovejoy, “From the fourth century b.c., the Scythians were to the ancients what the American Indians were to the primitivists of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in modern Europe.”¹¹¹ Christian Europe, remolding the ideal of the Golden Age into the vision of the Garden of Eden, had developed two traditions concerning the Scythians. One presented them as admirable, the other as detestable,¹¹² but in either case they were regarded as savage. With the emergence of Amerindians within the European range of vision, it was comparatively simple to fit them into existing perspectives, particularly as there seemed to be resemblances between the two “savage” peoples from the Old World and the New.

The inaccuracy of the view that Amerindians lived “as unreasoning beasts in a state of nature”¹¹³ was soon recognized by those associated with them. As Claude observed, “In truth, I expected to find fierce beasts, men totally rustic, rude and savage (as we call them), but I found that to be far from reality. Instead, I have never encountered any people with such perfection of their natural senses, whether exterior or in terior, and I have never heard of a nation which excels them in this.”¹¹⁴ Du Tertre and others agreed that Amerindians were savage in name only, and in the Jesuit Relations there are several assertions that the procedures of Amerindians were not those of brute beasts.¹¹⁵ But instead of convincing Europeans that Amerindians were not savage, such statements were regarded as a defence of le bon sauvage. The Jesuits, for instance, were sometimes accused of being more interested in proving that “savages” possessed a viable civility than they were in evangelizing them. Europeans, by transforming the Amerindian into an idealized and thus essentially unreal image, deprived him of his position as a fellow human, both as an individual and as a social being. Even such minor honors as being a credible hero in a first-rate drama was denied to him.¹¹⁶ At the same time, a use was soon found for le bon sauvage: he became a basic ingredient for various utopias.¹¹⁷

The classification of New World men as savage was reinforced by the speed with which even the most sophisticated American cultures were overwhelmed. The argument was that the Mexica and Inca empires could not have been very well civilized, or they would not have fallen so quickly: “How do you think it was possible for a hundred or so men to conquer so huge a country in such a short time? For so few to discomfit an army of innumerable barbarians on the field of battle?”¹¹⁸ One of the ironies of the situation was that the Inca and Mexica both shared with Europeans the belief that their forebears had once lived as beasts,¹¹⁹ and the Inca looked down upon the people of the Amazon as being savages. But that did not imply that any Amerindian was prepared to consider himself as savage at the time of Europe's invasion of the Americas. According to a seventeenth-century account, some were said to have retorted that as far as they were concerned, it was the French who were the savages, “because we [the French] do not live in their manner; they have their knowledge and we have ours, as if there were two ways of knowing reality.”¹²⁰ But the argument that counted in the end was that of force; might was equated with civilization. There could be sympathy for the defeated, but still they had been proven to be of an inferior order.

Another irony underlying Europe's confusion of the Wild Man with the Amerindian was in the latter's horror of hairiness. Both Columbus and Vespucci were struck by this, as was anyone who had anything to do with Amerindians during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To cite Vespucci, “they do not allow any hair to grow on their eyebrows nor their eyelids nor anywhere on the body (with the exception of the head), for this reason-because they deem it coarse and animal-like.”¹²¹ Jesuits in the Canadian missions observed that their charges were repelled by the hairiness of Europeans, and sometimes openly mocked them on the subject. But the crowning irony was that the Amerindians had a mythological hairy man of their own, who was also a forest figure. This personage, sometimes female, preyed on young children rather than on women, and lived in the forests of the east as well as those of the west. Among its better-known manifestations today is the Sasquatch of the Northwest Coast, who is as familiar to Canadians as Bigfoot is to Americans of the Pacific Coast.¹²²

So the processes of identifying Amerindians with savages operated on the level of ideology as well as on that of popular mythology. To Europeans, reports that Amerindians lived “by eating roots, both men and women totally naked”¹²³ implied not that they were living without rules at all, although that was how it was usually stated, but according to the rules of the non-human world around them. Such an image is much less securely held today, as no human society has ever been found that conforms to the conditions of animal life.¹²⁴ For instance, every human society ever studied has been found to have rules against incest; notions of what constitutes incest vary from culture to culture, but the idea of degrees of relationship within which marriage is prohibited is universal. This concept has not been found to be operating in the animal world although patterns of behavior may affect availability of mates.¹²⁵ The Stone Age men of America and Australia, of Melanesia and Polynesia, may have lived in close cooperation with the world of nature around them, but this does not necessarily imply an identification between nature's rules and those of human society.

On the contrary, it could well be that the hunting and gathering way of life, which prevailed during most of the Stone Age, provided the occasion for the development of the intellectual and social qualities that permitted the rise of agriculture, and eventually, today's technological explosion.¹²⁶ The powers of observation and evaluation, the social cooperation and sharing that made the Stone Age hunter successful are just as essential for the space-age scientist.

The line of demarcation between nature and human cultures, and when, if ever, one passes over into the other is not known.¹²⁷ It is being realized more clearly all the time that even the most technologically complex of human societies ignore nature at their peril. But in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, the world of nature was seen as having been created for man's benefit. It was the task of man, created in God's image, to reduce nature to human concepts of order. From that perspective, the man who cooperated with nature and who was thought to live within its framework was regarded as living according to nature in the manner of “brute beasts.”

Supported by such an ideology, Europe's belief in the hairy man was extremely persistent in folklore despite mounting evidence against his existence. It was easier to prove orthodoxy wrong about the habitability of the Antipodes than it was to dispel popular mythology. The first was a case of intellectual argument in which some glee was found in discomfiting authority; but the second was a type of belief that existed independently of scientific knowledge. The same phenomenon was illustrated by belief in the unicorn, the mythological animal that the Wild Man was able to overcome by sheer physical force, a feat which a pure young lady could match by love. Throughout the Age of Discovery, the unicorn was reported from various parts of the world, including Canada and Florida.¹²⁸ Thevet, in denying the existence of the unicorn, as well as that of dragons, sirens, and griffons, displayed some courage. Upon seeing a rhinoceros brought to Madrid in the sixteenth century, Mendoza observed, “no one wants to say it is a unicorn, but I am persuaded of it.”¹²⁹ But he was not successful in slaying the mythical beast; after all, Pope Clement VII presented François I with a unicorn horn three feet long on the occasion of the wedding of the latter's son, Henri d'Orléans, to Catherine de Medici in 1533. The gift, considered to be beyond price, was also useful, as it was believed to sweat if placed near poison. As the Jesuits said of the Huron, beliefs, no matter how apparently ridiculous, are hard to eradicate.¹³⁰

More importantly, however, Europe's belief in the savagery of Amerindians had profound consequences in the realm of practical politics in the New World. Equally important was the interplay of European attitudes with those of Amerindians, who far from being unformed savages in the “infancy of nature,” were the products of cultures that had evolved over many centuries.

Notes

1. The information in this chapter was published in a somewhat different form as an article, “The Concept of l'homme sauvage and early French Colonialism.”

2. Fenton discusses the concept of savagery in his introduction to Lafitau's Customs of the American Indians, li-liv, as does Jennings, The Invasion of America, 74-80.

3. Larousse (1817-75), Grand Dictionnaire Universel. Similar definitions are given by Oxford and Webster. The latter adds another meaning, that of “a man holding radical political views.”

4. Maffei, Histoire des Indes, 98. Münster, in his Cosmographie universelle (1556), placed barbarians, savages, and monsters all in the same category.

5. La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, Dictionnaire historique.

6. Richelet, Dictionnaire françois.

7. Furetière, Dictionnaire universel.

8. Columbus, Oeuvres.

9. Waldseemüller, Cosmographiae Introductio, 123-26.

10. Cartier, Voyages, 60.

11. Supra, 15. This “frayeur subite” was later presented as one of the reasons why the Spanish were able to conquer Amerindians so rapidly (Coréal, Voyages 2:132; Imhof, Grand théâtre historique 3, bk. 4, 176).

12. Martire, De Orbe novo (Gaffarel), 55.

13. Vespucci, Letters, 9.

14. Le Moyne, Les Peintures morales 2:620-29.

15. Ibid. Le Mercure François, France's official newspaper during the first part of the seventeenth century, described Amerindians thus:

    As for the behavior of the Savages, it is enough to say that it is altogether savage. From morning until night they have no other care than to fill their bellies. They are beggars if ever there were, yet they are inordinately proud … the vices of the flesh are frequent among them … one cannot speak of their cleanliness, as they are very dirty in their eating habits and in their cabins.

    (Treizième tome, 16)

    Jesuit Charles Lalemant had written to that effect from New France in 1625 (Thwaites, ed., JR 4:197-99). During the nineteenth century, Brinton was to theorize that a hunting culture bred a disregard for human suffering, a vindictive spirit, a tendency to sanguinary rites, and an inappeasable restlessness: “The law with reason objects to accepting a butcher as a juror on a trial for life; here is a whole race of butchers” (Myths of the New World, 21-22).

16. D'Avity, Estats, 315.

17. PAC, AC, C11A 1:10. The task of the missionaries was to render “the savages reasonable,” to enable them to become Christian and sedentary. See also C11A 3:210, Description du Canada, 1671.

18. La Croix, Nouveau Cynée, 26. In the Spanish colonies, the term gente de razón was reserved for whites and mestizos (Ricard, Spiritual Conquest of Mexico, 291).

19. Oviedo, L'Histoire naturelle, 68v.

20. The view of the savage as a retrograde figure was given scientific impetus by George Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-88), and reached its greatest popularity during the nineteenth century. For example, Pierre-Simon Ballanche (1776-1847) wrote: “The state of savagery is simply one of degeneration of which we do not know the cycles, but which is certainly neither natural nor primitive” (Essai, 224). It derives somewhat obliquely from Aristotle, who argued that although bestiality was not frequently found naturally in man, it could develop through habitual wrongdoing (Nicomachean Ethics 7.5.1-4).

21. Montchrestien, Traicté, 269.

22. D'Avity, Estats, 315.

23. Herrera, General History 1:58. The suspected connection of Amerindian diet with devils has already been noted (supra, 11).

24. D'Avity, Estats, 316. Recently, Baron James de Coquet in Lettres aux Gourmets, aux Gourmands, aux Gastronomes et aux Goinfres sur leur Comportement à Table dans l'Intimité (Paris, 1977), told of his mother, who was convinced that certain foods made gentlemen of little boys.

25. D'Avity, Estats, 316. This belief eventually faded before the necessity to adapt to Amerindian ways, including Amerindian diet, in order to survive in the New World. In 1687 an aide-de-camp to Denonville wrote that the Jesuits were hospitable enough “although the food is very bad, including neither bread nor wine nor meat, but only some ground maize boiled in water with a little fish” (Baugy, Journal, 181). The reader will recognize the Amerindian recipe for sagamité. The term “sagamité” is a French adaptation of the Algonkian tchi sagamiteou, “the broth … is hot” (Thwaites, ed., JR 5:97; 68:91). The role of the control of fire and of cooking in the development of man is a subject of speculation. See Leakey and Lewin, Origins, 131.

26. Hennepin, A New Discovery 2:84; see also Thwaites, ed., JR 19:97. The same accusations were used by the Huron against the French in an attempt to obstruct the efforts of Recollect Joseph de La Roche Daillon to establish a mission among the Neutral in 1626 (Le Clercq, First Establishment 1:267).

27. Thevet, Cosmographie (L'Huillier), 930.

28. Vespucci, Letters, 7. In the seventeenth century, the Jesuits, after smugly reporting that Amerindians had learned not to eat from the ground in their presence, later ruefully admitted that for “want of a table and household utensils, we sat on the ground and drank from the bark of trees” (Thwaites, ed., JR 5:101; 18:17).

29. Hennepin, Louisiane, 55. A Dominican reported that Amerindians of the Caribbean thought nothing of defecating while eating (Du Tertre, Histoire générale des isles, 429). Thevet, on the other hand, wrote of the Brazilians that they ate “very carefully,” not like Europeans, who devoured their food (Singularitez, 148). The Jesuits gave mixed reports for the people of New France (Thwaites, ed., JR 10:215; 5:99-101; 6:267).

30. D'Avity, Estats, 316-17.

31. Ibid., 317-18.

32. Acosta, Histoire naturelle et moralle, 287v-88. Acosta discerned three classes of barbarians: those who were not far from reason, had governments and cities (Chinese, Japanese); those who did not have writing but who still had government (Mexicans [sic] and Peruvians); those who lived in the woods without fixed abode (Caribs). The latter, Acosta believed, should be constrained to civility (Acosta, De procuranda salute indorum, proemium, 115-23).

33. It is now being speculated whether Amerindian pictography, based on sign language, was a precursor of writing. It was once used throughout North and South America, and was apparently universally understood, as it was associated with sight rather than sound. See Martineau, The Rocks Begin to Speak; and Jesuit Sebastian Râle's comments from Narantsouak (Thwaites, ed., JR 67:227). Fell claims to have detected a variety of Old World scripts in the inscriptions (America b.c., Bronze Age America). Alexander Marshack holds that the creation of a symbol system was at least as important as the development of tools in the rise of civilization (“The Message of the Markings”).

34. Thwaites, ed., JR 1:11, 13; 3:193-97; 20:71. For a Spanish view of this subject, see the letter of Friar Domingo de Betanzos, written in 1544, which argued that the limitations of Indian languages could easily lead to gross errors in explaining Christian doctrine. It is reproduced by Hanke in “Pope Paul III,” 102. Two centuries later, the same point was being argued. See Loskiel, History of the Missions, 20-21.

35. Maffei (Maffée) in Duret, Thresor de l'histoire, 945; Greenblatt, in Chiapelli, ed., First Images 2:568.

36. PAC, AC, C11D 10, Mémoire de Lamothe Cadillac, 1693. Also, Eckstorm, Old John Neptune. However, Jesuits reported that the Montagnais used “r” instead of “l” (Thwaites, ed., JR 7:31).

37. For instance, Frobisher's sailors, acting on the assumption that New World natives mated indiscriminately at first encounter, brought together an Inuit man and woman who had been captured separately, and watched in anticipation. The sailors were disappointed (Hakluyt, Principal Navigations 7:306-7).

38. D'Avity, Estats, 318.

39. Henry Hawks, in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations 9:397. Du Tertre noted in the Caribbean that as soon as the Amerindians awakened in the morning, they went down to the river to bathe (Histoire générale des isles, 421). Yves made similar observations concerning Brazilians (Voyage dans le Nord du Brésil, 106). Toward the end of the seventeenth century, Henry de Tonty was impressed with how successfully Amerindian mothers kept their babies “very clean, very neat,” without cloths (Dernières decouvertes, 25).

40. Léry, Histoire d'un voyage (1580), 118. Cortés was struck by the fact that Tenochtitlan streets were tended by squads of cleaners. In 1607 a Paris physician suggested that the plague could be reduced in that city by keeping the streets clean. Nothing came of the suggestion (Lewis, Splendid Century, 202).

41. Elias, Civilisation des moeurs, 78-83.

42. Thorndike, History of Magic 2:207-8. However, contrarily enough, medicinal baths were approved. And at least one Renaissance writer wondered if the superior health of Amerindians was not due to their habit of bathing frequently (Saint-Michel, Voyages des isles Camercanes, 175).

43. Saint-Michel, Voyages des isles Camercanes, 143; Hennepin, Louisiane, 53; Thwaites, ed., JR 6:261-69.

44. The casual use of the word “cruel” is illustrated by Dassié's comment, “The Iroquois are cruel, the Hurons [and] Algonquins are friends of the French” (Description générale, 253). A contemporary English ballad was entitled, “The crueltie of ye Spaniardes toward th[e] Indians” (Arber, A Transcript of the Registers 2:2086).

45. For instance, Bodin, in speaking about the cruelty of Brazilians, is referring to cannibalism and not to torture (Republique [1577], 528).

46. Later writers sometimes extended this, and reported that Amerindians were more humane than Europeans in general. Françoise Froger, for one, wrote that black slaves often preferred Amerindians to Europeans as masters for that reason (Relation d'un voyage, 148-49). An eighteenth-century missionary at Kaskaskia observed that “The Savages, especially the Illinois, are of a very gentle and sociable nature” (cited by Good, Guebert Site, 47). Such reports have been reinforced by the discovery in 1971 of the Tasaday, a small group of Stone Age people who had been living in isolation in southern Mindanao Island in the Philippines for six centuries. Their outstanding characteristic is a lack of aggressiveness; they have no words for weapons, hostility, anger, or was (L.S. Stavrianos, “Basic Myths of our Time,” The Globe and Mail [Toronto], 26 May 1976, 7). A report on these people by Kenneth MacLeish, “Stone Age Cavemen of Mindanao,” appeared in National Geographic, vol. 142, no. 2 (August 1972): 219-49.

47. Thorndike, History of Magic 5:577, citing Cardano (1506-76), De Rerum Varietate, bk. 8, chap. 40.

48. An exhibition, “The Wild Man: Medieval Myth and Symbolism,” was held by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art from October 1980 to early January 1981. Its catalogue, by Timothy Husband, recapitulates the history of this figure. In 1963, Hamburg's Museum für Kunst and Gewerbe held an exhibition on the same topic, entitled “Die wilden Leute des Mittelalters.”

49. Pausanias, Description 1.23.13. In another case reported the following century, a satyr caused panic among village women (Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius, bk. 6, chap. 27).

50. Janson, “A ‘Memento Mori’,” 248.

51. Chevalier, Dictionnaire des Symboles. See also Grimal, ed., Larousse World Mythology.

52. Silenus began as a woodland deity who presided over springs and running streams. According to Pausanias, Description 1.23, the name “Silenus” at one point was applied to all satyrs. In any event, he was shaggy and full-bearded, had horse's ears and was extraordinarily wise. In the sixth century he became associated with Dionysus.

53. White, in Dudley and Novak, eds., The Wild Man Within.

54. Bernheimer, Wild Men, 1-33.

55. Merlin, the master of nature, was descended from an incubus in the guise of Wild Man. See Robbins, Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, 462.

56. Spenser, The Faerie Queene 4.7. In the English folk imagination of the day, the hairy man was considered to be green, hair and all.

57. Plinius Secundus, Historia Naturalis, 156. Another candidate is China's golden monkey; the animals are known locally as “wild men” (Boris Weintraub, “Scientist believes ‘Wild Man’ of China really golden monkey,” The Globe and Mail [Toronto], 5 November 1982).

58. Janson, Ape Lore, 337.

59. Yerkes, Great Apes, 12; Janson, Ape Lore, 351 n. 47. In Greek mythology, the trickster figures known as cercopitheci (a term which has been applied to a genus of longtailed African monkeys), were bandits whom Zeus, in a moment of irritation, had transformed into monkeys. According to Chevalier, Trickster corresponds to the most primitive level of human life, having the mind of an infant and no control over his appetites. He is cruel, cynical, and insensitive, but capable of becoming human. Such figures are found in Algonkian myths-for instance, Nanabozho of the Ojibway. See Chevalier, Dictionnaire des Symboles. Mayan myths also characterize monkeys as men who were not satisfactory as human beings. Munro S. Edmonson, tr., Popol Vuh (New Orleans, La., 1972).

60. Janson, Ape Lore, 83, citing Albertus Magnus, De animalibus.

61. Topsell, History of Foure-footed Beastes, 2-3.

62. Bernheimer, Wild Men, 92.

63. Janson, Ape Lore, 270, citing Cardano, De subtilitate, bk. 10.

64. Yerkes, Great Apes, 18, citing George Edwards, Gleanings of natural history. … 3 vols. (London, 1758-64). Edward Tyson in 1699 published an essay in which he held that satyrs were monkeys or baboons, but not men (“A Philological Essay Concerning the Satyrs of the Ancients,” in Orang-Outang).

65. Janson, Ape Lore, 86. Buffon took the reverse view and saw the ass as a degraded horse, the ape as degraded man.

66. Ibid., 80, citing Thomas Cantimprensis, Liber de natura rerum, 1240.

67. Creeney, A book of Fac-similes, 21.

68. To this day, the sign “In dem Wildemann” is a favorite for inns and taverns in Belgium and The Netherlands.

69. Such a figure, cast in iron, is to be seen in the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles in Rouen.

70. Sandars, Epic of Gilgamesh, 60-92.

71. Van Gennep, Folklore 4:622.

72. Bernheimer, Wild Men, 65. Hellekin or Harlequin was also associated with la chasse sauvage, or, as it was known in Saintonge, la chasse-galerie. A bibliography of this mythical activity of the “wild horde” is found in Van Gennep, Folklore 1:632-41.

73. Bernheimer, Wild Men, 84. For an illustration indicating how this might have come about, see the Breugel woodcut reproduced in Bernheimer, fig. 16. According to Chevalier, Arlequin (Harlequin) symbolized a malicious buffoon of unstable personality, a being who was not yet individualized. He was a stock character in la commedia dell'arte.

74. Bernheimer, Wild Men, 51, 58.

75. Ibid. Also, Barber and Riches, Dictionary of Fabulous Beasts, 154.

76. Van Gennep, Folklore, 1:924.

77. Ibid., 923. This could have been a survival of the Bacchanales of classical times; ecclesiastical authorities banned the practice on several occasions during the seventeenth century.

78. Bernheimer, Wild Men, 120; Hale, Renaissance Europe, 174.

79. Van Gennep, Folklore 1:923. See also Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 70.

80. Cloulas, Catherine de Medici, 195. The previous year, 1563, Brazilians had been among the nations who welcomed Charles IX when he had formally entered Bordeaux (ibid., 207).

81. Le Dix-huitième tome du Mercure François, 59.

82. PAC, AC, C11A 7:90. Denonville au ministre, le 13 novembre 1685.

83. Bernheimer, Wild Men, 177. For a discussion of Amerindians as heraldic figures, see Swan, “American Indians in Heraldry.” Two of Canada's provinces, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, have Amerindians as supporting figures in their coats of arms.

84. Weismann, Mexico in Sculpture, 27, fig. 19.

85. For example, the colonization tract of Sir Robert Gordon of Lochinvar, Encouragements for such as shall have intention to bee Under-takers. It was reproduced in Lehner, How They Saw The New World, 151. The first book to be printed in French in Paris, Chroniques de France (1477), started with an account of how the French were descended from the Trojans, illustrating this with an illumination of a hairy man and woman holding banners.

86. Bernheimer, Wild Men, 43.

87. Plinius Secundus, Historia Naturalis 7.2.24.

88. Nordenskióld, Periplus, pl. 39.

89. Pigafetta, Voyage et navigation, sec. 11:54. Another contemporary reference is found in Molinet, Faictz et dictz, cvii.

90. Biggar, Precursors, 66: Letter of Pietro Pasqualigo, 18 October 1501.

91. Eusebius Pamphili, Epicscopi Chronicon, s.a. 1509. This chronicle had been begun by Eusebius Pamphili of Caesarea (260?-340?).

92. Kermode, ed., The Tempest, xxxviii-lix; Fiedler, Return of the Vanishing American, 45-49. Fiedler says The Tempest represented Europe's judgment and rejection of the Amerindian. See also J.E. Hankins, “Caliban the Bestial Man,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 62 (1947):793-801. Other authorities feel that Caliban represents the fickle mob in any society (e.g., Jorgenson, in Chiapelli, ed., First Images 1:85). Incidentally, cauliban is a Romany word meaning “blackness.”

93. Ptolemy, Opus geographiae.

94. Le Mercure Galant, April 1681, 143. This could have been a reference to the Beothuk of Newfoundland or the Labrador Inuit, who had become hostile to European fishermen.

95. The confusion exists even today. When I encountered the hairy man while researching in Paris, my first reaction was to regard this figure as being somehow derived from early reports of Amerindians. A recent edition of the memoir of Nicolas Perrot, that of Editions Elysée, Montreal, 1973, has figures of the Wild Man and Wild Woman on its endpapers; obviously the editors were under the same impression.

96. Thevet, Singularitez, chap. 31. Amerindians practised depilation by using fingernails as well as certain shells. Metal pincers very quickly became an item Europeans offered in trade. Later, Thevet, in his Cosmographie, again stressed that Amerindians “do not have any hair except on the head” ([Chaudiere], 1001v). Exceptions to this hairlessness were to be found later among Amerindians of the Pacific Coast.

97. Thevet, Singularitez, 413.

98. Léry, Histoire d'un voyage (1580), 60, 97.

99. Ibid., 100. Theodor de Bry, who in 1592 published Léry's account in his series Grands Voyages, included among the illustrations a cannibal scene in which one of the Brazilians is covered all over with down as the author described. The idea of covering one's body with feathers or down was picked up in Europe and such masquerades were seen in pageants and carnivals until the nineteenth century (Van Gennep, Folklore 1:923). Claude Haton (1534-1605) noted in his Memoirs concerning Brazilians: “they are neither furred nor shaggy as are other types of Savages, who are covered with hair like beasts; but they are barbarous, eating one another, especially if they are enemies” (1:39).

100. Lescarbot, Nova Francia, 200.

101. Sagard, Long Journey, 138. The incident occurred in 530 b.c. (Hermann, Conquest by Man, 79-80). Le Clercq also referred to it (New Relation, 82). The Gorgades Islands are today's Arquipelago dos Bijagos off the coast of Guinea-Bissau.

102. Laon d'Aigremont, Relation du voyage, 90.

103. Thwaites, ed., JR 38:257.

104. Manesson-Mallet, Description de l'univers 5:280.

105. Lahontan, Voyages dans l'Amérique septentrionale 2:95 and 1:47. Lahontan's comment dismissing the European belief that Amerindians looked like bears was repeated word for word by Bruzen de La Martinière, Le Grand Dictionnaire géographique 2:88, s.v. “Canada.”

106. Le Clercq, New Relation, 92. Charlevoix in his turn observed, “the idea which was formerly held in Europe of Savages, when they were represented as hairy men, not only did not conform to reality, but actually represented their impression of us, because they believe that we are as hairy all over our bodies as we are on our chins and chests” (Histoire et description 6:17).

107. Du Tertre, Histoire générale des isles, 396, 398.

108. D'Aleyrac, Avantures militaires, 36. My thanks to Mme. Marie Gerin-Lajoie, Ottawa, for pointing out this reference to me. Another aspect of the European iconography of Amerindians drew much less attention, but indicated even more surely the identification of New World man with the Wild Man. This was the depiction of Amerindian women with sagging breasts, a characteristic of the Wild Woman. See Bernadette Boucher, La sauvage aux seins pendants (Paris, 1977).

109. Bernheimer, Wild Men, 102.

110. Chaulmer, Le Nouveau Monde, 8.

111. Boas and Lovejoy, eds., Documentary History, 289. Tacitus's descriptions of Germans as noble savages in Germania (first century a.d.), which follows a similar description by Caesar in De Bello Gallico (51 b.c.), is a well-known expression of this concept. However, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was the Scythians and Tartars with whom Amerindians were compared, not the Germans.

112. Boas, Essays on Primitivism, 137.

113. Thevet, Singularitez, 135. In the words of Jeremy Bentham, “If we suppose the least agreement among savages to respect the acquisitions of each other, we see the introduction of a principle to which no name can be given than that of law” (cited by Hallowell, Culture and Experience, 245).

114. Claude, Maragnan, 311-11v.

115. Du Tertre, Histoire générale des isles, 396-97; Thwaites, ed., JR 21:55; 50:171. Explorer Louis Jolliet and Jesuit Jacques Marquette, the first white men to encounter many of the tribes of the Mississippi Valley, found these people, on the whole, to be civil, liberal, and humane (Voyages et découverte, 20). This was echoed more than a century later by Louis Vivier, missionary to the Illinois: “Let us consider the Savages in particular. Nothing but erroneous ideas are conceived of them in Europe; they are hardly believed to be men. This is a gross error. … They have wit … as much, at least, as most Frenchmen. … I found in them many qualities that are lacking in civilized peoples” (cited by Good, Guebert Site, 47-48).

116. Bissell, American Indian in English Literature, introduction.

117. For one of the earliest examples of the use of the Amerindian bon sauvage as an instrument for criticizing European society, see Martire, Extraict ou recueil, 68v-69. Among the French writers who were inspired by Amerindians to create literary ideal societies were Fénélon, Les Aventures de Télémaque; Vairasse d'Alais, Histoire des Sévérambes; and Foigny, La Terre Australe.

118. L'Histoire de la Terre-Neuve du Pérou, preface.

119. Garcilasso de La Vega, Royal Commentaries 1:47; Acosta, Naturall and Morall Historie, 497.

120. Sieur de La Borde, “Relation des Caraibes,” in Justel, comp., Recueil de diverses voyages, 15.

121. Waldseemüller, Cosmographiae Introductio, 92-93.

122. Dr. Louise M. Jilek-Aall did a comparative study of European and Amerindian attitudes toward the Sasquatch in “What is a Sasquatch-or, the Problematics of Reality Testing,” in Canadian Psychiatry Association Journal 17 (1972): 243-347. Recent publications are those of Don Hunter with Rene Dahinden, Sasquatch (Toronto, 1973); and John Willison Green, The Sasquatch File (Agassiz, B.C., 1973). See also Halpin and Ames, eds., Manlike Monsters on Trial.

123. Thevet, Singularitez, 135.

124. Levi-Strauss, Structures, particularly the introductory section; and Hallowell, Culture and Experience, 248-49. Voltaire also did not believe that human nature was capable of the solitary, rootless life implied by the concept of l'homme sauvage (“Essai sur les moeurs,” in Oeuvres 11:19-20).

125. Levi-Strauss, Structures, 30; Leakey and Lewin, Origins, 162, 224-29. Similarly, tattooing, body painting, and rites of passage are uniquely human institutions. Yves, while recognizing that tattooing was practiced by “civilized nations,” thought that the custom must be founded in nature, as barbarous Brazilians “invented and practised it without being in contact with any civilized nations” (Voyage dans le Nord du Brésil, 44). See also infra, 94-96.

126. Leakey and Lewin, Origins, 148.

127. Levi-Strauss, Structures, 9.

128. Sightings included an eye-witness account from Mecca (Belleforest, Cosmographie universelle 1:279), although Boem held that unicorns were to be found only in India (Recueil de diverses histoires [1540], 65). Pilot Jean Alfonce wrote of Norumbega (New England): “And the Savages say there are unicorns” (“La Cosmographie” in Recueil de voyages, 497). Ogilby corroborated this by describing a wild animal to be found on the borders of Canada which he did not name but whose identity he indicates beyond doubt (America, 172). Sir John Hawkins, following his visit to the Ribault-Laudonnière colony in Florida, reported that the French had obtained pieces of unicorn horn from the Floridians, who wore them about their necks (Hakluyt, Principal Navigations 10:59).

129. Thevet, Cosmographie (Chaudiere), 19, 114; Mendoza, Histoire du grand royaume, 306. Atkinson's praise of Thevet as the only author to doubt the existence of the unicorn is thus overly enthusiastic (Nouveaux Horizons, 279).

130. Thwaites, ed., JR 12:181.