The Return of Hans Staden: A Go-between in the Atlantic World (review)

Hans Staden was one of the most famous of the sixteenth-century Europeans to travel to Brazil and leave a written account of his adventures. What made his work particularly noteworthy (at the time and later) was his prolonged captivity among the Tupí and his subsequent descriptions of them, especially their cannibalistic practices. As with other European descriptions of Amerindians at the time of initial contact, the accuracy of his accounts of cannibalism (as well as a great deal of other ethnographic information about the Tupí) has been widely discussed and debated by scholars. Staden's account, called the True History of the Land of Brazil, was first published in 1557. The authors trace the immediate and long-term impact of Staden's work on the popular and scholarly image of colonial Brazil in particular but also of a wider understanding in Europe of the New World and its peoples.

Another title for this insightful little book might be The Life and Times of Hans Staden, German Adventurer. I suspect, however, that the authors have deliberately used "return" in the title as an echo of the well-known work The Return of Martin Guerre (Natalie Zemon Davis, 1984). In that work, the protagonist leaves his hometown to fight as a soldier (as did Staden), only to return years later a very changed man. Are Duffy and Metcalf not suggesting that although the returning Staden is in fact the same man who left Germany (unlike Guerre), Staden returns radically changed as a result of his experiences with the Tupí in Brazil? Staden's tale is an incredible one—that of the ultimate survivor, someone who left his native Germany with the idea of traveling to India but instead made two voyages to Brazil. He learned how to operate in the Iberian worlds of Portugal and Spain, to survive a shipwreck, to live with the Tupí (where he was in constant fear of being killed and eaten), to engage and manipulate the Tupí with his fortunetelling (not to mention learning their language), and to endure the dangerous voyage home. This is a fascinating study of the larger forces at work around Staden and how he dealt with them and triumphed (by his own account) through the grace of God.

This work very nicely dovetails with a number of other divergent literatures. First and most obvious is that Staden was a sixteenth-century traveler to Brazil, and as such his account can easily be compared with that of other Europeans in Brazil and Spanish America during the same period, for example, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil (Jean de Léry, 1993), in which the Gentleman of Elvas tells the story of Cabeza de Vaca in Florida. Second, this work also belongs to a growing literature that might be called "Atlantic"—that is, the action takes places across the very broad backdrop of the Atlantic World and the main character moves back and forth from the Americas to Europe and Africa. Works such as the autobiographical The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), The Two Princes of Calabar (Randy J. Sparks, 2009), and Domingos Álvares (James H. Sweet, 2011) all come to mind.

More broadly, this study falls under the rubric of travel literature, with famous contemporaries such as A True Relation of the Lands of Prester John of the Indies (Francisco Álvares, 1540) and The Travels of Mendes Pinto (Fernão Mendes Pinto, 1990; first published in 1614). Lastly, since much of the story takes place at sea and involves a shipwreck, it joins maritime history, especially the well-developed subgenre of the shipwreck. The authors cite one of the most famous of such Portuguese texts, Brito's Tragic History of the Sea (Bernardo Gomes de Brito, 1735, 1736).

The work has a broad appeal...