CW: Violence and cannibalism (obviously)
In 1557, a modest little book was published in Marburg by the printer and publisher Andreas Kolbe. It contained accounts of a stay in the Americas by a retired soldier named Hans Staden, and the “True Story and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-eating People in the New World, America” would go on to become one of the most influential works of ethnography in German history. Staden, a gunner, had traveled to America in Spanish service and later served the Portuguese in Brazil, where he was taken captive by the Tupinamba. He wrote his account after his escape and return to Europe.
I had drawn on Staden’s work before for descriptions of Tupinamba cooking, and it is generally accepted that his broad account of life there is true. However, the reason why people read his book was not his descriptions of fish flour or cassava stew, but the vivid tales of cannibalism. They were later included in a number of collected accounts, lavishly illustrated by Theodor de Bry, and considered reliable for centuries, though very likely they are anything but.
I don’t know whether the Tupinamba ate people or not, and it is not really very important here. What I want to look at is the descriptions that made their way into the imagination of German (and soon, other European) readers. Staden showed himself a careful observer of detail: In book I, chapter 40, he describes the fate of a war captive who is summarily beheaded by his captor. He
… singed the skin over the fire. Then he cut him to pieces and shared with the others as is their custom. They ate him except for the head and the guts which disgusted them because he had been ill.
Later, in book II, chapter 29, he describes the ritual sacrifice of another captive:
When the skin is all cut off, a man takes him and cuts off the legs above the knees and the arms by the torso. Then the four women come and take the four pieces, run around the huts and shout with joy. Then they cut off his thighs with the buttock and share it among themselves, but the women keep the innards and boil it and make a porridge from the broth called mingau which they and the children drink. They eat the innards and also eat the meat around the head, the brain, the tongue, and whatever else they can enjoy. They (also) eat the lungs. When all that is done, they each go home and take their part with them. …
We can easily envision this feast in all its gory detail, and artists did their part to help. The problem is that they are also very reminiscent of some fairly specific European traditions. The mode of slaughtering the unfortunate prisoners is very close to how pigs were processed, something almost everyone living in a German city or village at the time must have seen regularly. The skin is singed (or scalded and scraped), the trotters, forelegs, and hams removed, the internal organs boiled into a base for porridge. An account in the humorous Ulenspiegel tales printed earlier in the century even specifically recorded that this rich bread porridge was a treat for women and children. Fiddlier pieces of meat, the head, trotters, and organ meats, would be eaten first while the larger pieces of muscle meat were usually preserved by salting or smoking. Slaughtering a pig was one of the rare occasions when rural people enjoyed plenty of fresh meat and it was celebrated communally. Neighbours were invited to share or had pieces of meat brought to their homes. In more traditional parts of the country, Schlachtfest still is a living custom.
We have no way of knowing how (or whether) the Tupinamba cooked their prisoners. It is possible that Staden’s account is accurate. I find it at least slightly suspicious, though. Similarly, Jean de Léry, another European who spent some time among them, described their cannibal feasts noting that fat dripping from the roasting griddles was eagerly licked up by waiting feasters. This stands in rather stark contrast to the astonishment by European writers at the fact that Native American peoples throughout the Caribbean eschewed cooking with fats. European, of course, valued animal fats highly and were resourceful including the dripping in sauces or side dishes and storing it for later use.
Certainly, these tales fit European ideas and experiences well. A cannibal Schlachtfest, a Metzelsuppe served in the jungles of modern Venezuela, engaged their imagination very immediately. If we look at the images again, we can see something similar happening. The first is a woodcut from the first edition of 1557. This is the quality of illustration you would expect for a mass market product, and the illustrator clearly did not bother to read the text very closely. Staden, identified by his initials, is shown as the only person clothed, if that is the word, with a leaf while everyone else is naked, breasts and genitals on display. A skull is defleshed with knives, another rather diabolical-looking one, no doubt standing in for the entire person, is boiled in an enormous (and completely implausible) cauldron presided over by a large woman apparently pushing it into the boiling liquid. If we did not have the context of the publication, we might well think this is a witches’ sabbath, and that is no coincidence. Witchcraft and cannibalism were closely associated in the German mind and the accounts clearly shaded into each other. A German illustrator asked to produce cannibals in the 1550s had a limited set of tropes to draw on.
The second illustration is of another quality entirely. It is by Theodor de Bry, and when he produced in in 1592, Staden’s account had become a recognised classic. Again we have Staden positioned centrally, his differentness illustrated by his lighter skin and beard. All around him, naked, dark-skinned Tupinamba are shown killing, butchering, cooking, and eating human beings. Round-roofed huts (actually typical of the North American East Coast), a hammock, the by now famous boucan roasting griddle, and a paddle-shaped war club locate the scene in a vague, but clearly alien ‘America’. Though technically accomplished, it looks as sterile and static as a museum diorama, and that is exactly what it is meant to be. It shows the other kind of people who eat people – those who are far away, in alien places. In fairness to the illustrator it must be admitted that, unlike cannibalistic witch cultists, these probably actually existed.
Both the cannibalism of the evil witch, excluded from human society, though perilously present in disguise, and that of the distant savage, the ultimate other in all respects, could reassure the German reader that they, at least, were on the right side of this divide, their horror of consuming human flesh justified and natural. We will see soon enough that in actual reality, few assumptions could be farther from the truth.