Cannibalism and Carnivalesque: Incorporation as Utopia in the Early Image of America

The majority of early modern accounts of discovery and travel narratives about America reflect a peculiar fusion of a utopian and paradise-like idyll of the new continent with cruel cannibalistic practices of the natives. This apparently paradoxical side-by-side of a benevolent Nature and obvious horror, which dates back to ancient and medieval texts, can be traced as a leitmotif in the travelogues of Columbus and Vespucci, as well as in many of the eyewitness accounts of the sixteenth century, not to mention literary adaptations in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels. The following analysis juxtaposes illustrative textual and pictorial examples of sixteenth-century travel narratives with ancient, medieval, and early modern texts, thus attempting to provide an explanation for the striking interdependence of cannibalism and utopian concepts in the first images of America.

The early myth of America is very much rooted in the tradition of ancient and medieval utopian projections in travel literature. Many utopias, such as Plato’s Atlantis myth, the widespread notion of the “insulae fortunatarum,” or the mysterious islands in the Atlantic according to the Irish abbot St. Brendan depict a utopian West beyond the known world. Parallel to these utopias of the West, ancient and medieval sources use the Far East to situate the Earthly Paradise. Marco Polo’s fourteenth-century travelogue and the fictional geographic fantasies of Sir John Mandeville are the most prominent advocates of these eastward projections. The westbound voyage of Columbus, which was supposed to lead to the East via the West made it possible to fuse both utopian traditions in the early image of America. The major gaps in the knowledge of the new continent could therefore be bridged by recourses to ancient and medieval utopian concepts of the East and the West.

A central aspect among these projections in the early image of America is the notion of a benevolent Nature which eagerly provides everything necessary for human life. ¹ This basically feminized concept of Nature as an alma mater or nourishing mother has a long tradition ranging from ancient notions of a Golden Age, the concept of a locus amoenus, and modern pastorals, to the first descriptions of America. Already Columbus characterizes the new continent through images that are reminiscent of classical utopias: “[T]he other islands of this region, too, are as fertile as they can be. This one is surrounded by harbors, numerous, very safe and broad, and not to be compared with any others that I have seen anywhere; many large, wholesome rivers flow through this land; . . . All these islands are most beautiful and distinguished by various forms; one can travel through them, and they are full of trees of the greatest variety . . . and I believe they never lose their foliage. At any rate, I found them as green and beautiful as they usually are in the month of May in Spain.” ² Vespucci introduces a similar topos of the “locus amoenus” tradition to describe the fertility of these islands: “The climate, moreover, is very temperate and the land fertile, full of immense forests and groves, which are always green, for the leaves never fall. The fruits are countless and entirely different from ours.” ³ The fertility of the Caribbean islands, for example, appears like a mirror image of the utopian Island of the Phaeacians in the Odyssey. ⁴ The most striking example of how classical utopian topoi are introduced is Columbus’s description of the alleged Earthly Paradise as a woman’s breast that makes indirect use of the alma mater topos. Columbus describes the earthly Paradise as a “prominence like a woman’s nipple, this protrusion being the highest and nearest the sky, situated under the equinoctial line, and at the eastern extremity of this sea,—I call that the eastern extremity, where the land and the islands end.” ⁵ Columbus’s constant references to gold, that is, the lack of iron, also situate the new continent side by side with ancient notions of the Golden Age as rendered by Hesiod and Ovid. ⁶

The uses of these ancient and medieval utopias in...