Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History

If such cannibals continue to resist and do not wish to admit and receive to their lands the Captains and men who may be on such voyages by my orders nor to hear them in order to be taught our Sacred Catholic Faith and to be in my service and obedience, they may be captured and are taken to these my Kingdoms and Domains and to other parts and places and be sold.

This new position was given even more support by the Catholic Church several years later, when Pope Innocent IV decreed in 1510 that not only was cannibalism a sin, but that Christians were perfectly justified in doling out punishment for cannibalism through force of arms.

What happened next was as predictable as it was terrible. On islands where no cannibalism had been reported previously, man-eating was suddenly determined to be a popular practice. Regions inhabited by peaceful Arawaks were, upon reexamination, found to be crawling with man-eating Caribs, and very soon the line between the two groups was obliterated. “Resistance” and “cannibalism” became synonymous, and anyone acting aggressively toward the Europeans was immediately labeled as a cannibal.

In an effort to organize the cannibal pacification efforts, Rodrigo de Figueroa, the former governor of Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic), was given the job of making judgments on the official classification of all the indigenous groups encountered by the Spanish during their takeover. Testimonials and other “evidence” were used to place the cannibalism tag on island populations—and by a strange coincidence, the designations seemed to change with the priorities of the Spanish for the islands in question. Trinidad, for example, was declared a cannibal island in 1511, but the ruling was changed in 1518. Rather than relating to concerns over the welfare of the local people, though, the reclassification came about because of reports of gold in Trinidad and the Spaniards’ desire to maintain the local population for use in mining operations. It was more than coincidental, then, that once the Spanish mining efforts on Trinidad failed to produce any gold, reports began filtering in that the locals were cannibals after all. Soon after, the order was given to colonize Trinidad and to depopulate it of its remaining man-eating inhabitants. As a result, the pre-Columbian indigenous population in Trinidad (estimated to be somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 individuals) dropped to half that number within 100 years.

Even in places that hadn’t initially been designated as cannibal islands, populations dropped precipitously as the locals were either hauled off to toil as slaves, were murdered, or died from newly arrived diseases like measles, smallpox, and influenza (the latter may have been a form of swine flu carried by some pigs that Columbus had picked up on the Canary Islands during the early part of his second voyage). According to historian David Stannard, “Wherever the marauding, diseased, and heavily armed Spanish forces went out on patrol, accompanied by ferocious armored dogs that had been trained to kill and disembowel, they preyed on the local communities, already plague-enfeebled, forcing them to supply food and women and slaves, and whatever else the soldiers might desire.”

The diseases the Spaniards carried (the precise identities of which are still debated) spread with alarming speed through local communities, killing inhabitants in numbers that, according to one writer at the time, “could not be counted.” Stannard believes that by the end of the 16th century, the Spanish had been directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of between 60 and 80 million indigenous people in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America. Even if one were to discount the millions of deaths resulting from diseases, this would still make the Spanish conquest of the New World the greatest act of genocide in recorded history. These types of numbers, which are subject to considerable academic debate, are often overlooked during Columbus Day parades and related festivities.15

In the end, tall tales, especially those with bestial or cannibalistic angles, effectively dehumanized the islanders. Not only did this serve to justify Spain’s rapidly evolving slave-raiding agenda, but it also established a mindset toward the locals that came to resemble pest control. Leaving behind neither pyramids nor stone glyphs, the indigenous cultures of the Caribbean have all but disappeared.



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14 In Northern Australia, East Africa, and the Indian Ocean, some cultures do employ a family of sucker-backed fish called remoras (Echeneidae) to hunt for sea turtles. Remoras are renowned for attaching themselves to larger fish as well as turtles. The original behavior is a form of commensalism—a relationship in which one species (the remora) obtains a benefit (in this case protection and food dropped by the host) while the other species gains nothing but isn’t harmed.



15 Political scientist Rudolf Rummel estimates that, excluding military battles and unintentional (e.g., disease-related) deaths, European colonization killed between 2 and 15 million indigenous Americans, with the vast majority of deaths taking place in Latin America.





10: Bones of Contention


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