Near a Thousand Tables (7 page)

TWO
 
The Meaning of Eating

Cannibalism is a problem. In many cases the practice is rooted in ritual and superstition rather than gastronomy, but not always. A French Dominican in the seventeenth century observed that the Caribs had most decided notions of the relative merits of their enemies. As one would expect, the French were delicious, by far the best. This is no surprise, even allowing for nationalism. The English came next, I'm glad to say. The Dutch were dull and stodgy and the Spaniards so stringy, they were hardly a meal at all, even boiled. All this sounds sadly
like gluttony
.

—PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR

I've always gotten my strength from two books—my cookbook and the Bible.

—HELEN HAYES IN THE 1952 MOVIE MY SON JOHN

I
t was official. The anthropophagi, humans who fed on human flesh, really existed. Long fabled, and long supported by hearsay, they were now reported as fact, backed by an incontrovertible weight of eyewitness corroboration from virtually the entire crew of Columbus's second transatlantic expedition. The shipboard physician wrote home with an account of Arawak prisoners, liberated from the man-eaters' power on the island now known as Guadeloupe.

We inquired of the women who were prisoners of the inhabitants what sort of people these islanders were and they answered, “Caribs.” As soon as they learned that we abhor such kind of people because of their evil practice of eating human flesh they felt delighted…. They told us that the Carib men use them with
such cruelty as would scarcely be believed; and that they eat the children which they bear them, only bringing up those whom they have by their native wives. Such of their male enemies as they can take away alive they bring here to their homes to make a feast of them and those who are killed in battle they eat up after the fighting is over. They declare that the flesh of man is so good to eat that nothing can compare with it in the world; and this is quite evident, for of the human bones we found in the houses, everything that could be gnawed had already been gnawed so that nothing remained but what was too tough to eat. In one of the houses we found a man's neck cooking in a pot…. When the Caribs take away boys as prisoners of war they remove their sexual organs, fatten them until they grow up and then, when they wish to make a great feast, they kill and eat them, for they say the flesh of women and youngsters is not good to eat. Three boys thus mutilated came fleeing to us when we
visited the houses
.

On his previous voyage, Columbus had misheard the Arawak word “Cariba,” and rendered it “Caniba.” The terms “cannibal” and “Caribbean” both derive from the same name.

Many similar accounts followed and as European exploration spread, reports of cannibalism multiplied. The cannibals encountered by Odysseus or reported by Herodotus, Aristotle, Strabo and Pliny gained credibility with each new find. The “Renaissance Discovery of Man” included the discovery of man as man-eater. The earliest editions of Vespucci's
Voyages
were illustrated with woodcuts of cannibal barbecues. The Aztecs, according to a sympathetic observer, who made strenuous efforts to gather his information at first hand, had feasts specially supplied with slaves purchased for the purpose and fattened “so that their flesh
should be tastier
.” The bellies of the Chichimeca were a “
sepulchre of human flesh
.” The Tupinamba were said to consume their enemies “down to
the last fingernail
.” Hans Staden's account of his captivity among them in the 1550s was a best-selling spine-chiller and cliff-hanger because of the way the author's own immolation at a cannibal feast kept getting postponed. His description of the cannibal ritual was menacingly memorable. The victim had to endure the women's boasts and tend the fire on which he was to cook. He was slaughtered by a blow which dashed out his brains. Then the women

scrape his skin thoroughly and make him quite white and stop up his arse with a bit of wood so that nothing may be lost. Then a man … cuts off the arms and the legs above the knee. Then four women carry away the severed pieces and run with them round the huts with shouts of joy…. The entrails are kept by the
women who boil them and make a thick broth called “mingau.” This they and the children drink. They devour the bowels and the flesh from the head. The brains, tongue and whatever else is edible is given to the children. When this is done all go home, taking their share with them…. I was there and have seen all this with
my own eyes
.

Toward the end of the century, scenes of human limbs butchered for the grill, or of cannibal women supping blood and biting entrails, enlivened many of Theodore De Bry's popular engravings of scenes from American travels. The seventeenth century produced little that was new in the tradition, for the horror was familiar and no major new cannibal peoples or customs came to light. Eighteenth-century Europeans, however, found their fascination revived, as more cannibals were encountered and philosophy strove to reconcile the practice with the emerging theory of the nobility of savagery. Even in the highly civilized Christian empire of Ethiopia, Europeans imagined specialist vendors of
human butcher meat
. In the Indian wars of eighteenth-century North America, a soldier of the Massachusetts militia was alarmed to discover that his adversaries roasted their enemies bit by bit “
at a most doleful rate
.” The greatest concentration of new cases arose during the exploration of the South Seas by ever more ambitious voyages. Melanesian cannibalism, of which many stories accumulated in the eighteenth century, seemed more practical than most: no edible organ of a captive foe was untasted, and the bones made good needles for sewing sailcloth. When Captain Cook first met Maoris, they mimed how to pick clean a human bone. His account was doubted by skeptics in Europe, but confirmed at the cost of captives' lives. Fijian cannibalism, in accounts made familiar in Europe by missionaries' reports in the early nineteenth century, seemed to exceed all previously known cases in depravity because of the scale on which it was reported and the routine nature of cannibal repasts, bereft of any culturally extenuating context, “not indulged in from a species of horrid revenge,” as Methodists averred in 1836, “but from an absolute preference for human flesh
over other food
.”

Taken one by one, the veracity of all these reports was
open to question
. Cannibalism can be a useful source of the comfortable horrors which boost sales of an otherwise boring travelogue. In the late Middle Ages and, with diminishing force, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was an extremely useful attribute to ascribe to one's enemies; for cannibalism, like buggery and blasphemy, was classed as an offense against natural law. Those who committed it put themselves beyond the law's protection. With impunity, Europeans could attack them, enslave them, forcibly subject them and sequester property from them. Sometimes, the “man-eating myth” was a reciprocal fantasy: white enquirers were surprised to find
themselves suspected of cannibalism by “natives” who also regarded it with horror. Raleigh in Guiana was mistaken for a cannibal by his
Arawak hosts
. The Mani of the Gambia supposed that the apparently insatiable Portuguese demand for slaves was caused by their inordinate
anthropophagous appetites
. When George Vancouver entertained inhabitants of Dalco Passage to dinner in 1792, they refused his venison on the suspicion that it was
human flesh
. The Ku Waru of highland New Guinea assumed that their Australian “discoverers” were “people who eat other people. They must have come around here in order to kill us and eat us. People said not to go walking
around at night
.” Allegations of cannibalism should be discounted like any other crime statistic: some of them must be supposed to have been invented and others to have gained horror in the telling.

Nevertheless, the numbers of well-authenticated cases put the general question beyond a peradventure. Cannibalism existed. The reality of cannibalism as a social practice is not in any genuine doubt. To judge from archaeological evidence, moreover, it has been extremely widespread: human bones snapped for marrow seem to lie under the stones of every civilization. And as the tally of observed cases grew, the assumption that cannibalism was an inherently aberrant activity, abnormal or unnatural, became ever harder to sustain.

Of course, many stories concerned rogue cases which have arisen in Western society contrary to the accepted norms: what might be called “criminal” cannibalism, practiced with a conscious commitment to outrage. Here “Demon” barbers double as pie-men. Maniacal tyrants, seeking exquisite extremes of sadism, serve enemies at table with concoctions of the flesh and blood of their wives and children. There are even practitioners of cannibalism for kicks: individuals who get intellectual pleasure from transgressing convention, perverts who get sexual thrills from ingesting flesh. The most bizarre and ghoulish story is of the Rocky Mountain prospector who called himself “Alferd” Packer. In a notorious case in 1874, he split his companions' skulls open while they slept—except for one whom he shot in the back—before robbing their corpses and feeding on their remains: after eighteen years' imprisonment, he was released into a changed world, where he was welcome as a curiosity and even honored as “an old mountaineer.” Pilgrims still visit his grave and, with a kind of irony which some find appetizing, the Alferd Packer Memorial Grill at the University of Colorado in Boulder is
named after him
. Hannibal Lecter has other real-life predecessors, including “Liver-eating Johnson,” who targeted Crow Indians in revenge for the murder of his wife in 1847, and Isse Sagawa, “the cannibal of the Bois de Boulogne,” who disposed of an unwanted girlfriend by eating her in 1981. In 1991 in Milwaukee, Jeffrey Dahmer,
whose tastes comprised gay necrophilia and sadism as well as cannibalism, had a fridge full of human body parts when the police
came to call
.

Even in the modern history of the Western world, a form of social cannibalism has been recognized, practiced and, for a long time, licensed in law. In the extremities of siege or retreat, the quick
feed off the dead
. Not infrequently, living victims of shipwrecks and air crashes stay alive on the strength of dead comrades' flesh and sometimes end up,
in extremis,
drawing lots to sacrifice their lives to their comrades' hunger. In the early modern era, the age of long and perilous sea journeys under sail, survival cannibalism became a “socially accepted practice among seamen,” the “custom of the sea.” In 1710, for instance, survivors of the wreck of the
Nottingham Galley
turned “fierce and barbarous” after nourishing themselves from the corpse of the dead ship's carpenter. Further cases were reported at intervals during the nineteenth century. Géricault, included scenes of cannibalism in sketches for the most famous of all images of nautical disaster,
The Raft of the Medusa,
though in this instance the evidence was not conclusive. Fiction strove to exceed fact. Captain Ahab's obsession with Moby Dick was motivated by memories of the demoralizing experiences which followed the lash of the whale's tail: his story was based on the real-life saga of the wreck of the
Essex,
whose men drew lots to determine the order in which they ate each other after a similar incident in 1820. In 1835 the homonymous captain of the capsized
Francis Spaight
was rescued, allegedly “in the act of eating the liver and
brains of his apprentice
.” In 1874 a boat from the abandoned collier
Euxine
was rescued in the Indian Ocean, with the remains of the butchered carcass of a crewman in its locker. Conrad's sinister hero Falk had plenty of real-life counterparts. In 1884 “
the custom of the sea
” was at last outlawed when two survivors of the foundering of the yacht
Mignonette
were sentenced, to their genuine surprise, for killing a shipmate for food during twenty-four days without succor in
an open boat
.