Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

1. The Classical Heritage

CHAPTER I The Classical Heritage "What is new usually wins its way by disguising itself as ald." -C. S. LEWIS WHEN ((A CERTAYNE CARAVELLE sayling the West Ocean ... was driven to a land unknowne, and not described by any Map or Carde of the Sea," medieval conceptions of savagery began slowly to lose their hold on the European mentality. For it was not so much that a Genoese sailor became the discoverer of new lands across the Ocean Sea, or that a little band of European seamen looked for the first time on the Red Men of America. It was rather that for once savagery was seen, at least in a measure, through eyes unblurred by medieval fantasy , and that it was described with calm, expressive realism. One of the most arresting features of the Columbian account of the indigenous peoples of the New World is its friendliness, freshness, and modernity. Writing in the Journal of his first day ashore on a Carib-bean isle, the Admiral noted with composure and photographic detachment that the people who came swimming to his ships had very handsome bodies and good faces; that they wore their hair down over their eyebrows; that some were painted black, some white and red; that some bore spears tipped with fishes' teeth. Though he found them deficient in everything that made life worth while for Europeans, he was delighted with their generosity and ingenuity. They brought presents of 17 18 Early Anthropology in the 16th and 17th Centuries parrots and balls of cotton thread to his shipmates; when they came again, it was in boats made out of hollowed tree trunks, richly carved, and propelled with paddles not unlike a baker's shovel. Later on, the sailors came upon "a man alone in a boat," carrying a piece of the Indians' bread, "about as large as a fist," and a basket of their own make. Judging from homely details such as these, it seemed to Columbus that all the inhabitants of the several islands possessed the same language and the same manners, except that some were better bargainers. When his sailors ventured into their houses, they found them thoroughly swept and dean, with beds and coverings like nets of cotton. Nets of palm fiber, horn fishhooks, and bone harpoons were in use. Though it was impossible to determine whether or not land was held privately or in common, all Carib men seemed to be content with one wife, and, having no "creed," they seemed promising subjects for conversion to Christianity. A man by no means well informed or given to original ideas, the Admiral was none the less profoundly impressed with the moral and intellectual qualities of these good-natured savages. He noted their ignorance of the use of iron and of many other European customs, but he also remarked "the kindness with which they were ready to give away their whole property and their childish pleasure in receiving the trash distributed among them," the hawks' bells and colored beads given by their visitors.' Despite the researches of scholars who have read and analyzed the Admiral's marginal annotations in the r mago mundi of Pierre d'Ailly, in the Cosmographia of Enea Silvio Piccolomini, in Marco Polo and Pliny, there is little to suggest that he was greatly influenced in his description of the islanders by any of these popular sources of medieval ethnology. Here and there, to be sure, are a few descriptive phrases or epithets reminiscent of an older body of ideas. The unvisited island of "Quaris," for example, was said to be the habitat of a people The Classical Heritage 19 Hairy Amazons, from the Borgia Map drawn in the fifteenth century, before the great discoveries. who had a taste for human flesh.' There were hesitant references to Amazons and to a tribe devoid of hair. In a remote part of western Cuba, tailed men were said to live: It seems also to be true that after the later voyages, when the Admiral's position at home had become less secure, he retreated to an easily recognizable medieval mysticism. Though he himself was never wholly convinced, he referred then to the string of Caribbean Islands, thought falsely to be off the coast of China, as the site of that Paradise which was preached with resonant and apocalyptic overtones by all fifteenth-century theologians: Whether his remarks on the presence of Amazons...