Cannibalism in the New World

The Explorers Who Ate People While Accusing Others of Cannibalism

In 1492, Christopher Columbus landed on an island in the Caribbean. He wrote in his diary about the people he found there. They were gentle, he said. They were generous. They would be easy to convert to Christianity. They would be easy to enslave. He also wrote about another people, the Caribs, who lived on other islands. The Caribs, he said, were cannibals. They ate their enemies. They raided the peaceful Arawaks. They were savages. They had to be subdued.

Columbus never saw the Caribs eat anyone. He heard stories. The stories were useful. They justified the conquest of the Caribs. They justified the enslavement of the Caribs. They made the Spanish feel that they were doing the right thing by killing people who ate people. The stories of cannibalism were repeated by other explorers. Cortés repeated them about the Aztecs. The Spanish repeated them about every indigenous group that resisted. The stories were often exaggerated. They were sometimes invented. They were always useful.

What Everyone Knows

The stories of cannibalism in the Americas are well known. The Aztecs, the Caribs, the Tupinambá—all were described by European explorers as cannibals. The descriptions were used to justify the conquest. The indigenous people were savages. They needed to be civilized. They needed to be converted. They needed to be controlled. The cannibalism was the proof.

What is less often emphasized is that the Europeans who wrote about cannibalism were also people who sometimes ate people. The expeditions that crossed the Americas were often starving. They ate their horses. They ate their dogs. They ate the leather from their shoes. Sometimes they ate each other. The diaries record it. The histories do not always mention it.

What History Actually Shows

The Aztec practice of human sacrifice was real. The Spanish who witnessed it were horrified. They wrote about it. They used it to justify the destruction of the Aztec empire. The accounts were not false. They were also not complete. The Spanish did not describe the scale of their own violence. They did not describe the people they killed, the cities they burned, the cultures they destroyed. The cannibalism of the Aztecs was a fact. The cannibalism of the Spanish was also a fact. The Spanish did not write about it the same way.

The expedition of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, which crossed what is now the southern United States in the 1520s, was reduced to eating its own dead. The survivors wrote about it. They did not write about it as a crime. They wrote about it as a necessity. They were starving. They had to survive. The cannibalism was a fact. It was also something they did not want to remember.

The expedition of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, which crossed the Southwest in the 1540s, also resorted to cannibalism. The records are fragmentary. The stories were suppressed. The Spanish who ate people to survive did not want to be known as cannibals. They wanted to be known as conquerors. The people they conquered were the cannibals. The Spanish were not.

The Part That Got Buried

The cannibalism of the European explorers is not a secret. It is in the records. It is in the diaries. It is in the histories that were written by the survivors. But it is not in the narrative that was passed down. The narrative that was passed down is the narrative of the savage native. The cannibal is the other. The European is the civilized one. The European does not eat people. The European eats people only when there is no other choice. The native eats people because he is a savage. The distinction is not in the act. It is in the telling.

The explorers who wrote about cannibalism were writing for an audience that wanted to hear that the people they were conquering were savages. The audience did not want to hear that the explorers were also savages. The audience wanted to hear that the conquest was justified. The explorers gave them what they wanted. They wrote about the cannibals. They did not write about themselves.

The Ripple Effect

The stories of cannibalism in the Americas shaped the way Europeans thought about the New World. The indigenous people were not just different. They were monstrous. They were not just people who had different customs. They were people who ate other people. The difference was absolute. It justified everything that followed: the conquest, the enslavement, the destruction. The cannibals had to be conquered. The savages had to be civilized. The stories made it possible to do what the Europeans were already doing.

The stories have persisted. They are taught in schools. They are repeated in documentaries. They are the foundation of the narrative of European expansion. The cannibals are the ones who were conquered. The Europeans are the ones who conquered them. The story is simple. The story is not complete.

The Line That Says It All

The European explorers who wrote about cannibalism in the Americas described the indigenous people who ate their enemies as savages—and they did not describe themselves, the men who ate their horses, their dogs, their leather shoes, and sometimes each other, because they were not writing about themselves; they were writing about the people they had come to conquer, and the story they told was the story that made the conquest possible, not the story that made it true.