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3 | Spit-roasts, barbecues and the invention
of the Brazilian cannibal
Cannibalism appeared on the first map of the Americas to illustrate the

region’s peoples, and was the most frequent motif for Brazil on maps
well into the seventeenth century.1 Yet travel accounts about Brazil
and the Caribbean Islands, from their earliest appearance, offered ample
discussions of peaceful activities. Most mapmakers in the first half of the
sixteenth century chose to represent in this region cannibal activities
that might discourage long-distance trade, itself a popular iconographical
theme on late medieval maps and a financial spur for things geographical
in the Renaissance. Given the appearance of both peaceful and man-eating
peoples in the earliest sources, how and why did cannibalism become
the signature motif, on maps, for the inhabitants of northeastern South
America, appearing frequently on maps produced for audiences in
Portugal, the German lands, Spain and the Low Countries?
The earliest cannibal iconography on maps, drawing on coastal
and insular accounts from the Columbian and Vespuccian voyages that
described Arawak-speaking Taíno and Carib peoples, constructed a mem-
orable but hypothetical people for the Brazilian interior. These maps
pre-dated, by almost half a century, writings by Hans Staden, André
Thevet and Jean de Léry that described cannibalism among some of the
numerous Tupi (Tupi-Guaraní speaking) and other tribes who inhabited
coastal areas of northeast Brazil. These travel accounts are widely cited for
their influence on visual culture, mapping and ethnographic writing, and
on European constructions of the Brazilians as eaters of human flesh.2
Until the 1590s, however, the vibrant illustrations in the accounts of
1
My sample of illustrated maps was drawn from over 2,000 maps of the Americas, world maps
and atlases c.1500–1650 consulted. Out of some 110 cartographic works illustrating
Amerindians c.1500–1625, some sixty-five depict cannibalism in northeastern South America, in
the region that would come be known as Brazil. The Brazilian cannibal motif continued in
subsequent decades.
2
See, e.g., Eve M. Duffy and Alida C. Metcalf, The Return of Hans Staden: A Go-between in the
Atlantic World (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); Alida C. Metcalf, Go-
Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500–1600 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press,
2005); Frank Lestringant, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from
Columbus to Jules Verne, trans. Rosemary Morris (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997). 65
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66 Renaissance ethnography and the invention of the human
Staden, Thevet and Léry had little direct influence on maps, which, none-
theless, continued to depict cannibalism in Brazil by drawing on sources
about the Caribbean islands and the coast of northern South America.
This chapter illuminates the processes by which European mapmakers
across different centres of production carefully positioned images and
descriptions of a man-eating people in a region they named Brazil. In so
doing, these mapmakers collectively constructed a coherent imagined com-
munity; their maps constitute the foundational works in the European
invention of the Brazilian as cannibal.3 I argue that neither the fact that
the region’s peoples were emblematized by cannibal savagery, nor the
precise practices associated with them, nor their location, was inevitable
given the source material in circulation. The use of images of cannibalism
to emblematize northeastern South America, far from being inherent or
self-evident, was constructed and maintained.4
Despite mapmakers’ careful consultation of various sources and their
desire to offer information that their audiences would consider to be accur-
ate and authoritative, the process of translating ethnography from the genre
of travel account to that of map led to the geographical translation of the
cannibals and an expansion of their terrain in European eyes. The ways in
which ethnographic map imagery was commonly read in the sixteenth
century – as emblematic of what all the inhabitants of a region had
in common – meant that mapmakers effectively associated all of Brazil’s
inhabitants with a practice that, in the eyes of colonial administrators of
the Iberian empires, constituted a justification for their enslavement.5
One might wonder whether scenes of cannibalism on maps can be
brought to bear on the thorny problem of the reality of cannibal peoples.6
3
For the concept of ‘imagined communities’ in the context of the rise of nationalism, see
Anderson, Imagined Communities.
4
A similar point in relation to displayed peoples in nineteenth-century exhibitions appears in
Sadiah Qureshi, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-
Century Britain (Chicago, IL and London: Chicago University Press, 2011), 4.
5
For indigenous slavery in the Spanish empire, see Van Deusen, Global Indios. For Brazil,
see Hal Lanfgur and Maria Leônia Chaves de Resende, ‘Indian Autonomy and Slavery in the
Forests and Towns of Colonial Minas Gerais’, in Native Brazil: Beyond the Convert and the
Cannibal, 1500–1889, ed. Hal Langfur (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press,
2014), 132–65; Stuart B. Schwartz, ‘Indian Labor and New World Plantations: European
Demands and Indigenous Responses in Northeastern Brazil’, American Historical Review, 83:1
(1978), 73–9.
6
Indeed, this problem has been termed ‘the original anthropological question’; see Neil L.
Whitehead, ‘Guayana as Anthropological Imaginary: Elements of a History’, in Anthropologies of
Guayana: Cultural Spaces in Northeastern Amazonia, eds. Neil L. Whitehead and Stephanie
W. Alemán (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2009), 1–20, at 8.
Spit-roasts, barbecues and the invention of the Brazilian cannibal 67
Recent research in forensic archaeology, ethnohistory, anthropology and

other fields has revealed evidence that clearly corroborates certain accounts
of indigenous anthropophagy among some tribes.7 Illustrated maps of the
world or of the continents, however, rarely provide independent evidence
of anthropophagy because few mapmakers had travelled to the areas they
mapped. The illustrations on this type of map were largely based on the
writings and testimony of others, and thus their portrayals of cannibalism
do not constitute independent evidence of the practice.8
The focus in this chapter is on how mapmakers interpreted their
sources, why they composed images in particular ways, and how the
iconography of Brazilian cannibalism was likely to have been read in
the contexts of Renaissance knowledge-making and colonial expansion.
Questions explored here include: how representative of these sources was
the emphasis placed on cannibalism on maps? What light can we shed on
Renaissance mapmakers as makers of knowledge about human variety?
And what do these findings tell us about how early modern science was a
visual pursuit that was both shaped by and constitutive of colonialism?
‘Brazil’ in this book includes, but also exceeds, the boundaries of
modern Brazil. The term covers the Amazonian basin and the northern
and eastern coasts of South America between the Amazon and Rio de
la Plata estuaries. The term was first used in early sixteenth-century
Portuguese sources. I use the term ‘Brazilian’ sous rature to refer to the
region’s peoples as a whole, since what is under study are the processes
by which emblematic characterizations of the region’s inhabitants
emerged on maps and subsumed various peoples with semisedentary
and non-sedentary lifestyles.
7
See, e.g., Hans Staden, . . . True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil, ed. and
trans. Neil L. Whitehead and Michael Harbsmeier (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina
Press, 2008), XLIII–XLIV; Neil L. Whitehead, ‘Carib Cannibalism: The Historical Evidence’,
Journal de la société des Americanistes de Paris, LXX (1984), 53–74; Donald W. Forsyth,
‘Three Cheers for Hans Staden: The Case for Brazilian Cannibalism’, Ethnohistory, 32:1
(1985), 17–36. Three problems continue to fan the flames of the argument about the reality of
cannibalism in the colonial world. First, few scholars are fully conversant with the wide range
of research tools from the sciences, social sciences and the humanities that have been brought
to bear on the problem. Second, accounts about cannibalism survive for numerous settings
and periods, from New Guinea and New Mexico to southern France, adding further challenges
to the comparison of evidence. Third, the post-colonial turn in recent scholarship has made it
difficult for scholars to ascribe practices that deeply offend current sensibilities to colonial
settings when much of the evidence was gathered in colonial, imperial or other invasive
contexts. For an overview of approaches, see Cannibalism and the Colonial World, ed. Francis
Barker et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
8
One of the few exceptions is Jean Rotz’s 1542 manuscript atlas, which is discussed in Chapter 4.
To Carib or not to Carib? Language games and

imagined communities
The ethnic distinction made in travel accounts between peaceful Arawaks

and warlike Caribs was partly one of geographic locale and ritual practices,
but it elided a large number of native tribal identities while constructing an
artificial binary that served to legitimize the enslavement of native persons.
‘Carib’ became a colonial construct from the earliest encounters – an
ethnic group defined by the practice of cannibalism.9 Beginning in 1503,
Spanish royal edicts and laws denoted groups that practised cannibalism or
resisted evangelization as Carib (caribe) and defined them as ‘indigenous
insurgents’, and those who accepted Christianity as Arawak (aruaca) or
guatiao (taíno).10 ‘Caribs’ and ‘Arawaks’ were two groups with different
political relationships to the Spanish, but it was a colonial construct that
this was a fixed ethnic binary.
Indigenous ethnic and political groups did not remain the same over
time and, by the early sixteenth century, European attempts at conquest
and the consequent famine and disease had transformed native allegiances
and prompted migrations among survivors in the circum-Caribbean
region.11 Native groups made choices about whether to self-identify as
caribe or aruaca. Some capitalized on the Spanish construction of the
caribe as cannibal by directing the Spanish in search of slaves and booty
at their enemies.12 Into the nineteenth century, indigenous, Afro-Brazilian
and Luso-Brazilian groups accused one another of cannibalism in order to
consolidate their own territories.13 The Englishman Lawrence Keymis,
who travelled in Amazonia in the late sixteenth century, recounted that
the Moruga people accused the ‘Arwaccas’ (‘Arawaks’) of abducting
9
Neil L. Whitehead, ‘The Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies: The Caribbean
(1491–1580)’, in Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, ed. Frank Salomon
and Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 864–903, at 867, 870;
Neil L. Whitehead, Of Cannibals and Kings: Primal Anthropology in the Americas (University
Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 4–5.
10
Whitehead, Primal Anthropology, 6–12 and Document 4; Whitehead, ‘Guayana as
Anthropological Imaginary’, 7–9. For the 1503 edict, see Michael Palencia-Roth, ‘The
Cannibal Law of 1503’, in Early Images of the Americas: Transfer and Invention, ed.
Jerry M. Williams and Robert E. Lewis (Tucson and London: University of Arizona Press,
1993), 21–64.
11
Whitehead, Primal Anthropology, 6.
12
Ibid., 11–12; Whitehead, ‘Invaded Societies: The Caribbean’, 871.
13
Hal Langfur, The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence
of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750–1830 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 28–9,
53, 182–3, 194, 198, 243–5, 259–60, 273, 276.
their wives, a practice that Spanish voyages to the Caribbean islands had
identified with the Carib.14 There were soon ‘Black Caribs’ – escaped
African slaves who joined indigenous groups – and white cannibals –
Norman sailors who had gone native among the Brazilian Tupi and
participated in their rituals.15 European notions of these peoples came
from these complex interactions on the ground, mediated through Spanish
colonial writing that had its own purposes.
Similarly, Portuguese colonists oversimplified ethnic and political alle-
giances in northeastern Brazil, dividing the peoples into supposedly
nomadic, truculent Tapuia vs. village-based, tractable Tupi-Guaraní.
The Portuguese used the term ‘Tapuia’ to signify those who resisted colon-
ization. In fact, ‘Tupi’ covered a number of Tupi-Guaraní groups with
shared linguistic and cultural origins who engaged one another in constant
warfare, and the Tupi used the term ‘Tapuia’ to signify those who spoke
Arawak, Carib and other languages.16 While this chapter focuses
on the invention of Carib culture on maps, the following will examine the
case for Tupi culture.
In practice, peoples from the greater circum-Caribbean region encom-
passing the Antilles Islands and northern South America belonged to some
forty language families. Many belong to one of three main language groups:
Tupi-Guaraní, Arawak and Macro-Gê.17 But ethnic groups, be they tribes,
nations or peoples, far from being eternal, are constantly in a state of
change, are continually re-defined, and are constructed differently
by members and outsiders. Colonial Brazil was a setting of widespread
‘ethnogenesis’, or the emergence and categorization of ‘new peoples’.18
14
Lawrence Keymis, A Relation of the Second Voyage to Guiana (London, 1596), sig.C.2.v.
15
Neil L. Whitehead, ‘Black Read as Red: Ethnic Transgression and Hybridity in Northeastern
South America and the Caribbean’, in Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in
Colonial Latin America, ed. Matthew Restall (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico
Press, 2005), 223–43, at 229–30.
16
Hal Langfur, ‘Introduction: Recovering Brazil’s Indigenous Pasts’, in Native Brazil: Beyond
the Convert and the Cannibal, 1500–1900, ed. Hal Langfur (Albuquerque, NM: University of
New Mexico Press, 2014), 1–28, at 7–16.
17
John Monteiro, ‘The Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies: Coastal Brazil in the
Sixteenth Century’, in Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, ed. Frank
Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3 vols., III:i,
973–1023, at 976–7. For an introduction to the peoples of Brazil and their main language
families, see also John Hemming, ‘The Indians of Brazil in 1500’, in The Cambridge History
of Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell, 11 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1984–2008), I, 119–43.
18
See Schwartz, Stuart B. and Frank Salomon, ‘New Peoples and New Kinds of People:
Adaptation, Readjustment, and Ethnogenesis in South American Indigenous Societies (Colonial
Where interaction with particular peoples is under discussion, I use specific

terminology. Travellers and geographers themselves had difficulty distin-
guishing between local populations with different languages, territories,
practices and cultures, and with historical changes to these societies.19
When referring to particular source texts and maps, I deploy their own
terminology while attempting to identify the people to whom they refer.
Columbus’s Diario
Columbus’s journal from his first voyage in search of the Indies (1492–3)
contains the earliest appearance of the neologism ‘cannibal’ in any Euro-
pean language.20 ‘Carib’ was an indigenous term that was later adopted into
European lexicons. The linguistic invention of the terms ‘cannibal’ and
‘cannibalism’ characterized the Caribs by their man-eating proclivities.21
Columbus’s journal survives in the form of a lengthy summary, known as
the Diario, transcribed by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas.22 Las
Casas copied verbatim tracts of particular interest to him and those he
deemed worthy of quotation.23 The Diario is thus an intertextual work,
recording Columbus’s words through Las Casas’s responses to them.24
Eaters of human flesh appear in the earliest reference to New World
monsters, on 4 November 1492. Columbus, on the island of Cuba, was in
conversation with members of the Taíno people. He ‘understood that, far
from there, there were one-eyed people and others with dogs’ muzzles who
ate human beings; upon seizing a person, they cut his throat and drank his
blood and cut off his genitals’.25 Columbus reports their existence on the
Period)’, in Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, ed. Frank Salomon and
Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 443–501.
19
Monteiro, Crises and Transformations’.
20
Margarita Zamora, Reading Columbus (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 7.
21
Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 15.
22
David Henige, In Search of Columbus: The Sources for the First Voyage (Tucson, AZ: University
of Arizona Press, 1991), 22.
23
RC vi, SE, 3–4, 17; David Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of
Columbus (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 110: Las Casas also
included material from the Diario in one of his histories of the Indies, but this contained more
of Las Casas’s own interventions.
24
An important analysis in this vein is Zamora, Reading Columbus, 43–51, esp. 49.
25
RC vi, SE, DB48.8 (includes an English translation to which I have at times made minor
changes): ‘Entendió . . . que lexos de allí avía hombres de un ojo, y otros con hoçicos de perros
que comían los hombres, y que en tomando uno lo degollavan y le bevían la sangre, y le
cortavan su natura’.
basis of indigenous testimony, but one cannot help wondering how much
of the Indians’ speech he could have understood after a few weeks in the
region.26 His interpreter spoke Hebrew, Aramaic and some Arabic –
languages Columbus expected to hear when he reached Asia.27 Even the
interpreter was absent at this point, having been sent on a reconnaissance
mission on 2 November.
The man-eater’s next appearance, on 23 November, introduces the
word cannibal, or rather ‘canibales’, to the European episteme. Still
on Cuba, Columbus hears from the Taíno that on the island called Bohío
were ‘people . . . who had one eye in the middle of their foreheads
and others whom they called “canibales”, of whom they showed them-
selves to have a great fear’.28 The two types of people collapse into one
on 26 November:
All the people whom he has found up to today, he says, have the greatest
fear of those from Caniba, or Canima, and they say that the latter live on
this island of Bohío . . . and he believes that those people go out to carry
the former off to their own lands and homes, as they are great cowards
and know nothing about weapons.. . . They said that the people here had
only one eye each and dogs’ faces, but the admiral believed that they were
lying, and felt that the people who used to capture them must belong to
the Great Khan’s dominion.29
These ‘Caniba’ were the Island Caribs or Karipuna, denoted as man-

eaters by the Taíno. Both groups of Arawak-speaking peoples, they had
gradually migrated from the eastern coast of South America to the island
chains of the Greater and Lesser Antilles.30 Columbus seems reluctant to
accept that he has stumbled into the territory of marauding, one-eyed,
dog-headed man-eaters, despite the presence of cyclopes, cynocephali and
anthropophagi in medieval travel and encyclopedic works relating to the
Eastern part of the world. He had hoped to carry the word of Christianity
26
For Columbus’s (mis)understanding of situations, see, e.g., Peter Mason, Deconstructing
America: Representations of the Other (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1990), 101.
27
Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 20.
28
RC vi, SE, DB59.4: ‘gente que tenía un ojo en la frente, y otros que se llamavan caníbales, a
quien mostravan tener gran miedo’.
29
Ibid., DB62.11–62.13: ‘Toda la gente que hasta oy a hallado diz que tiene grandíssimo temor de
los de Caniba o Canima, y dizen que biven en esta ysla de Bohío . . . y cree que van a tomar a
aquéllos a sus tierras y casas, como sean muy cobardes y no saber de armas. . .. dezían que no
tenían sino un ojo y la cara de perro; y creýa el Almirante que mentían, y sentía el Almirante
que devían de ser del señorío del Gran Can que los captibavan’. The use of the third person is
the result of Las Casas’s transcription.
30
Abulafia, Discovery of Mankind, 115; Whitehead, ‘Invaded Societies: The Caribbean’.
to the Great Khan of Cathay on behalf of the Catholic Monarchs,

Ferdinand and Isabella; what he most wished to see were signs of Eastern
civilization, not savagery.31 The ensuing supposition that the Indians
must be lying, however, is at odds with his interpretation of their
term ‘Caniba’ as a reference to ‘subjects of the Great Khan’ – the Eastern
potentate he had promised to reach – rather than to monsters with canine
faces.32 Unable, perhaps, to avoid the possibility of having misunderstood
the Indians, Columbus turns uncertainty to his own advantage, attaching
selected sounds from their speech to his desired outcome.
The linguistic triangle of ‘canibales’, man-eating cynocephali and
the Great Khan, out of which the word cannibal would evolve, eventu-
ally displacing and redefining the older anthropophage, is clear.33 Over
the next few weeks, Columbus continued to record his disbelief in man-
eaters and dismissed the testimony of people who lived in fear of the
Bohío islanders.34 When he failed to find the kingdom of the Great
Khan, he resurrected the fearsome Caniba, now recording claims about
their man-eating tendencies with more conviction.35 On 26 December,
he even promised some villagers who described how the Caribs
had abducted their people that ‘the monarchs of Castile would
command that the Caribs be destroyed’ – a reversal of his position
exactly a month earlier, when he had been convinced that ‘they were
lying’.36
Columbus’s Diario provides two insights for contextualizing cannibal
imagery and texts on maps: first, the neologism ‘canibal’ was originally a
term for the Carib, an ethnic group; their name soon became synonym-
ous with the practice of eating human flesh, a process that re-defined the
Carib by a single characteristic. Second, the Diario’s monstrous discourse
introduced a classical ethnological framework into an empirical account
of the Americas. The use of ‘canibal’ to refer to a single people in
the Antilles would not be preserved on maps, where the ethnography
of the Caribs would, as it were, overwhelm that of the Taíno and
other groups.
31
For the Diario’s interlocking discourses of civilization and savagery, see Hulme, Colonial
Encounters, 20–34.
32
For Columbus’s aims and geographical expectations, see, e.g. Abulafia, Discovery of Mankind,
24–30.
33
For a masterful account of how the word ‘Carib’ would come to mean ‘anthropophage’, see
Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 16–22, 39–43. See also Lestringant, Cannibals, 15–19.
34 35
See entries for 5, 11 and 17 December. 13 January.
36
RC vi, SE, DB, 91.25: ‘los reyes de Castilla mandarían destruyr a los caribes’.
Columbian and Vespuccian voyages in print
Travel writing from the voyages of Columbus and Vespucci is typically

characterized as sensational, full of cannibals, promiscuous sexual behav-
iour and the absence of morals. In fact, peaceful visions of the inhabitants
of the circum-Caribbean basin receive more column-inches in these works;
references to violent activities are buried in the larger narrative. This is also
the case in the early Portuguese travel writing about Brazil, notably the
account of the first known landfall, penned by Pedro Vaz de Caminha.37
Accounts from the Columbian voyages of the late fifteenth century
describe encounters with an Arawak-speaking people, the Taíno, who
inhabited the Antilles island chain in the Caribbean. These people were
apparently simple, beautiful and timid; they had no concept of money,
providing valuable commodities in exchange for beads. Two letters
ascribed to Columbus, apparently written on the return voyage, announced
the results of his first expedition and described the inhabitants of the
Antilles.38 One letter, sent to Luis de Santángel, Escribano de Ración or
keeper of the royal privy purse, received a contemporary printing. Santán-
gel had assisted in procuring funds for the first voyage.39 The letter
appeared in twelve editions in 1493 alone in Spanish, Latin, Catalan and
Italian, and was printed widely across Europe thereafter.40
In Letter to Santángel, Columbus presents New World anthropophagy and
monstrosity as unusual occurrences: ‘I have so far found no monstrous
people, as many expected’; the inhabitants are in fact very beautiful and not
‘black as in Guinea’; the sun’s rays are not as intense as they are in Guinea.41
37
Discussed in Chapter 4, near n. 66.
38
In works generally ascribed to Columbus, the mediatory effects of printers, copyists and
abstractors are impossible to separate fully from their purported author. One may go so far as to
consider, with Margarita Zamora, that ‘the very signature “Columbus” must be seen as an
aggregate, a corporate author as it were’ (Zamora, Reading Columbus, 7). Of course, all printed
travel accounts were the result of similar mediations.
39
Christopher Columbus, Letters from America: Columbus’s First Accounts of the 1492 Voyage,
ed. and trans. B. W. Ife (London: King’s College, London, 1992), 7; Zamora, Reading
Columbus, 5.
40
Christopher Columbus, Epistola . . . de su gran descubrimiento . . . (Barcelona, 1493). For other
editions, see EA, I, 1–2. Zamora, Reading Columbus, 5: The Latin editions are mis-addressed to
Rafaél (rather than Gàbriel) Sánchez, the treasurer for the kingdom of Aragon. Ibid., 9–10:
Columbus probably wrote two letters to the Catholic monarchs, dated 14 Feb and 4 March 1493.
No version of the first survives; the second, containing many of the same passages and sprinkled
with messianic statements, was probably suppressed. For text and translation, see ibid., Appendix.
41
Columbus, Letters from America, 58–61: ‘fasta aqui no he hallado ombres monstrudos como
muchas pensauan’; ‘negros como en Guinea’.
Readers familiar with the works of Aristotle and the Hippocratic corpus
would have been predisposed to thinking of these islands as attractive locales
for finding such civil societies as the empire of the Great Khan that Columbus
wished to reach. The Taíno described to their interlocutors a warlike,
Arawak-speaking people they called the Carib, said to dwell in the coastal
region of northeast South America and on nearby islands rather than deep in
the interior where mapmakers’ illustrations would place them:42
. . .I have found no monstrous men nor heard of any, except on one

island . . . which is inhabited by people who are held in all the islands to
be very ferocious and who eat human flesh. These people have many
canoes in which they range around all the islands of India robbing and
stealing whenever they can.43
Here, Columbus uses a broad definition of monstrudos encompassing

physical and behavioural aberrations. Thus he introduced the Antillian
anthropophages to European audiences within the conceptual framework
of Plinian monstrosity.44
The Letter presents marauding anthropophages as an exception rather
than the norm in the Antilles islands. The naked people of Hispaniola
lacked iron, steel and weapons, and were ‘amazingly timid faced with
marvels’ (‘muy temerosos a marauilla’):
. . .they are so lacking in guile and so generous with what they have that
no one would believe it unless they saw it. . .. I forbade the men to give
them such worthless things as pieces of broken crockery and pieces of
broken glass and the ends of laces. . .. There was a sailor who had a piece
of gold weighing two and a half castellanos in exchange for a lace. . ..45
42
It is important to note, however, that the linguistic relatedness of groups changes over time,
and that it is not necessarily linked to shared culture or kinship. In Amazonia, socio-ethnic
groups did not fissure across monolingual lines. See especially Neil L. Whitehead, ‘Arawak
Linguistic and Cultural Identity through Time: Contact, Colonialism, and Creolization’, in
Comparative Arawakan Histories: Rethinking Language Family and Culture Area in Amazonia,
ed. Jonathan D. Hill and Fernando Santos-Granero (Urbana, IL and Chicago, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 2002), 51–73, at 51–4.
43
Columbus, Letters from America, 58–61 (I have made minor changes to the translation):
‘monstruos no he hallado ni noticia saluo de una ysla . . . que es poblada de una iente que tienen
en todas las yslas por muy ferozes, los qualles comen carne umana. Estos tienen muchas canoas
con las quales corren todas las yslas de India, y roban y toman quanto pueden’.
44
For the writings of Galen, Aristotle and Pliny on human difference, see Chapter 1.
45
Columbus, Letters from America, 50–3: ‘ellos son tanto sin engaño y tan liberales de lo que
tienen que no lo creeria sino el que lo viese. . .. Yo defendi que no se les diesen cosas tan siuiles
como pedazos de escudillas rotas y pedazos de vidrio roto y cabos de agugetas . . . que se acerto
hauer un marinero por una agugeta de oro de peso de dos castellano y medio’.
3.1 Christopher Columbus, De insulis inventis (Basle, 1493), title-page, detail.

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Taylor 32.
Timid and generous, willing to exchange treasure for trinkets, and lacking
technological apparatus that would allow them to resist effectively should
they ever become truculent, the Taíno in this letter were everything a
trader could wish for, and a stark contrast to the bloodthirsty Caribs said
to prey upon them. This notion of pliable peoples is as much a construc-
tion that served mercantile sponsorship as the idea about warlike cannibals
was in the service of slavery.
The illustration in the 1493 Basle edition of the Letter, which derives
from woodcuts in Mediterranean travel accounts, emblematizes this view
of peaceful inhabitants (Fig. 3.1).46 The stock iconographical elements
present a timorous, graceful people fleeing from the Hispaniola coast at
the sight of a European ship. One islander and a figure in a rowing boat
extend their arms to each other, perhaps offering gifts or trading objects.
These figures represent people off the coast of Asia, in characteristic boats
and hats – Columbus, of course, wished to reach (and believed he had
46
Christopher Columbus, Epistola de insulis nuper inventis (Basle, 1493), title-page. Susi Colin,
Das Bild des Indianers, 183, B1; NRC-XI, 294. For descriptions of illustrations from other
Columbian texts, see Colin, Das Bild des Indianers, B2-B5; Santiago Sebastián, Iconografía del
indio americano, siglos XVI-XVII (Madrid: Ediciones Tuero, 1992), 25–30.
reached) the outer reaches of the empire of the Great Khan of Cathay,
a place rich in tradeable goods.47 Early sixteenth-century mapmakers who
drew on letters from the Columbian corpus thus had access to a visual
representation of simple inhabitants with an idyllic way of life, and of
pliable trading partners.
Columbus’s second voyage (1493), announced by a pamphlet known as
the Scillacio-Coma letter, also described two contrasting peoples. The
letter, written by the Barcelona physician Guillermo Coma based on
received news, was translated into Latin by the scholar Nicolò Scillacio
and subsequently printed.48 It outlined the Caribs’ bloodthirsty practice of
feeding on their Taíno neighbours, information that the crew gleaned from
their peaceful indigenous interlocutors:
The islands are submissive to the Cannibals. That ferocious and untamed
people feeds on human flesh, so that I might accurately call them
anthropophages. They continuously wage war on the gentle and
frightened Indians in order to get hold of their flesh – these are the prey,
they are the hunters. They ferociously ravage, plunder and roam in
search of the Indians: they devour the unwarlike ones, abstain from their
own, spare the cannibals.49
In its first appearance in print here, the term ‘cannibal’ identifies a particular
people whom the expedition did not encounter first-hand, rather than the
entirety of the Antillian island population.50 No less a personage than
the captain of the expedition, Pedro Margarit, saw scenes to corroborate this:
Pedro Margarit, a very reliable Spaniard . . . says that he saw there with
his own eyes several Indians skewered on spits to be roasted over burning
coals for the indulgence of gluttony, while many bodies, from which the
47
Colin, Das Bild des Indianers, 185, B.6: The figures also illustrated the Italian edition of
1493 and reappeared, reversed, in the first edition of Vespucci’s letter to Piero Soderini.
48
Nicolò Scillacio, De insulis meridiani atque Indici maris . . . nuper inventis (Pavia, 1494),
preface: Scillacio was doctor of arts and medicine and professor of philosophy at Pavia. For a
discussion of Coma’s probable authorship, see Juan Gil and Consuelo Varela, eds., Cartas de
particulares a Colón y relaciones coetáneas (Madrid: Alianza, 1984), 177–8. Coma is unlikely to
have participated in the expedition, but probably heard of it (perhaps from Pedro Margarit,
who is mentioned in the letter, or his circle) on the return of the first ship; see Rubiés, ‘Travel
Writing and Humanistic Culture’, 157–8.
49
RC xii, AC, 6.2.8 (includes translation, which I have amended slightly): ‘Insulae Canabillis [sic]
parent: gens illa effera et indomita carnibus vescitur humanis, quos anthropophagos iure
nuncupaverim. Adversus Indos molles scilicet et pavidos bella gerunt assidue ad usum carnium:
ea captura, ille venatus; populantur, depredantur, crassantur truculentius Indos, devorant
imbelles, a suis abstinent, parcunt Canaballis’.
50
For timidity, see also ibid., 6.2.14.
heads and extremities had been torn off, lay around in heaps.
The Cannibals themselves do not deny this, but openly confirm that they
eat other people.51
Elsewhere, however, Coma wrote about the peaceful Taíno, their impres-
sive woodworking skills and their generosity.52
The events of Columbus’s voyages were also recorded by the courtier
and humanist chronicler Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, or Peter Martyr. Peter
was personally acquainted with Columbus: he had been present at court
when Columbus returned from his first voyage and he had taken pains to
interview as many members of the expedition as possible.53 Peter dissem-
inated this testimony via Latin letters to his correspondents; versions of his
letters, some edited by his correspondents, some by Peter Martyr himself,
and some by subsequent compilers, were printed in the early decades of the
sixteenth century.
A vivid description of cannibals, which appeared across the earliest three
printed editions of Peter’s letters in print with minor variations, would be
taken up by influential German mapmakers. Angelo Trevisano, one of
Peter’s correspondents and secretary to the Venetian ambassador to Spain,
sent Italian translations of Peter’s letters to Venice where they were
published anonymously in a travel compendium entitled Libretto de tutta
la nauigatione (1504).54 The geographer Fracanzano da Montalboddo
incorporated the book into his Paesi novamente retrovati of 1507.55
Peter Martyr himself began printing his travel material in 1511 and 1516,
as the Oceani decas or Ocean Decades,56 and also in various letters in
his Opus epistolarum of 1530.57
51
Ibid., 6.2.10: ‘Vidisse hic se oculis testatur Petrus Margarita optimae fidei Hispanus, . . . Indos
plures verubus affixos ad luxum gulae assari super ardentibus prunis, cum multa cadavera
iacerent acervatim, quibus capita exempta extremaque corporis evulsa: quin illud Canaballi non
diffitentur, palam hominibus vesci se affirmant.’
52
Ibid., 6.2.9 and 6.2.19, respectively.
53
RC v, PM, 6; John Boyd Thacher, Christopher Columbus: His Life, His Work, His Remains, as
revealed by Original Printed and Manuscript Records, 3 vols. (New York, NY: Knickerbocker
Press, 1903), I, 39–40.
54
Angelo Trevisano, Libretto de tutta la navigatione de re de Spagna de le isole et terreni
nuouamente trouati ... (1504). See also idem, Libretto de tutta la nauigatione de re de spagna de
le isole et terreni nouamente trouati: A Facsimile, intro. by Lawrence C. Wroth (Paris, 1929).
55
Fracanzano da Montalboddo, Paesi novamente retrovati & novo mondo da Alberico Vesputio
Florentino intitulato (Vicenza, 1507). EA, I, 10–18, s.v.: Six editions of the latter had appeared
by 1513 in Italian, Latin and German, printed at Vicenza, Milan and Nuremberg, respectively;
four French printings were made in Paris in 1515.
56
EA, I, s.v. Editions up to 1628 are described in BA, I, nos 1547–1564 and 45010–45013.
57
RC v, PM, xi.
In terms of column inches, cannibalism is again the exception rather

than the rule in these texts which describe how expedition members
encountered the Taíno people whom the accounts unanimously describe
as peaceful, even timid, and easy to trade with. The sailors did not meet the
ruthless Caribs, but merely reported what the Taíno related about them.
We cannot be sure how well – or how little – the Europeans understood
Taíno language and gesture. Nevertheless, for the readers of these accounts,
these new islands contained both fearsome anthropophages and beautiful,
peaceful people.
The second set of narratives that included descriptions of Amerindians
as anthropophages followed Vespucci’s voyages.58 In the period to 1530,
narratives about Vespucci’s travels were disseminated more widely than
those about Columbus’s voyages (some 60 editions and issues to Colum-
bus’s 22), with more than half the works appearing in vernaculars.59 Two
accounts often attributed to Vespucci were printed in a variety of formats.
Scholars argue over their composite authorship and whether Vespucci
made four voyages (as he claims) or two (for which documentary evidence
survives). Since these texts were first disseminated as Vespucci’s accounts,
and since maps refer to Vespucci by name, I shall refer to these texts as
Vespucci’s letters.60 These pamphlets contain information about Tupi
peoples who lived on the coast of the northwestern South American
mainland and its interior, and Carib peoples who dwelled primarily
on the coast. While both groups practised cannibalism, and while the
differences between them were not sharp or fixed over time, sixteenth-
century travel writers described a variety of ritual practices, distinguishing
several treatments of human body parts and mortuary practices while
subsuming others under the loose rubric of man-eating. The accounts also
documented various other aspects of their lives.61
Vespucci’s first letter, which he wrote in Italian to his employer Lorenzo
di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, documents a voyage in 1499 to the South
American coast near the Amazon estuary. Vespucci describes an unnamed
58
For a Vespucci biography, see Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name
to America (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006); for bibliography and sources, see NRC-V.
59
Rudolf Hirsch, ‘Printed Reports on the Early Discoveries and Their Reception’, in Fredi
Chiappelli et al., eds., First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, 2 vols.
(Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1976), II, 537-[59], at 540 and
Appendix 1.
60
For authorship issues, see Fernández-Armesto, Amerigo, 2–3, 114–135; Abulafia, Discovery of
Mankind, 244.
61
Whitehead, ‘Invaded Societies: The Caribbean’.
people who resemble the Tupi-Guaraní tribes of northeast Brazil. He

mentions that they set stones and bones into holes in their faces, a practice
that later travellers ascribed to the Tupinambá.62 The letter was translated
into Latin and printed at Paris in 1503;63 subsequent editions (entitled
Mundus Novus) were numerous.64 Vespucci’s second account was
addressed to Piero Soderini, head of the Florentine Republic and former
pupil of Vespucci’s uncle, and printed at Florence in 1505–6.65 The letter
outlined four voyages, although Vespucci probably made only two and
borrowed material from the Columbian corpus. Vespucci presented a
range of indigenous behaviours including cannibalism, nakedness, naivety
in trading and the lack of trappings of European society.
Illustrations in these accounts contain similar themes to those in the
Columbian texts. A woodcut in the 1505 Leipzig edition of the Mundus
Novus depicts the inhabitants as nearly naked in feather costumes and
bearing bows, arrows and clubs.66 The 1505 Strasbourg edition contains
two simple woodcuts on the title-page. One shows naked inhabitants;
the other, European ships approaching land.67 A German broadsheet,
probably printed at Augsburg by Johann Froschauer in 1505,68 drew
on this letter for its caption (Fig. 3.2).69 It describes the Amerindians’
costumes, their habit of eating and smoking human body parts, and their
sexual promiscuity:
This picture shows us the people and island that were discovered by the
Christian king of Portugal or by his subjects. The people are thus naked,
handsome, brown; their heads, necks, arms, private parts [and the] feet of
62
Staden, True History, ed. Whitehead.
63
Amerigo Vespucci, Albericus Vesputius Laurentio Petri Francisci de Medicis salutem plurimam
dicit (Paris, 1503); EA, I, no. 503/9; Amerigo Vespucci, Letters from a New World: Amerigo
Vespucci’s Discovery of America, ed. and with intro. by Luciano Formisano (New York, NY:
Marsilio Pub, 1992), xix: an earlier version was written in Portuguese to King Manuel of
Portugal; no copy survives.
64
EA, I, nos 505/11–15, 505/17–24. Fifteen issues appeared in 1505 alone, in cities including
Augsburg, Antwerp, Basle, Nuremberg, Strasbourg and Venice.
65
Amerigo Vespucci, Lettera . . . delle isole nuouamente trovate (Florence, 1505). Vespucci,
Letters, xxii; EA, I, no. 505/16.
66
Illustrated in, e.g., Abulafia, Discovery of Mankind, fig. 21; Colin, Das Bild des Indianers, fig. 7.
67
Amerigo Vespucci, De ora antarctica per regem Portugallie pridem inventa (Strasbourg, 1505).
68
Dise figur anzaigt uns das volck und insel die gefunden ist durch den cristenlichen künig zu
Portigal oder von seinen underthonen (s.l., [1503]). This has been considered as the earliest
South American image in print; see, e.g., Rudolf Schuller, ‘The Oldest Known Illustration of the
South American Indians’, Journal de la Société des Americanistes de Paris, N. S., 16 (1924),
111–18; William C. Sturtevant, ‘First Visual Images’, 420. For descriptions of this and other
woodcuts from Vespucci editions, see Sebastián, Iconografía, 32–43.
69
Established in Schuller, ‘Oldest Known Illustration’, at 115–7.
3.2 Dise figur anzaigt uns das volck und insel die gefunden ist ([Augsburg?], [c.1503]), woodcut,
attributed to Johann Froschauer.
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Einbl. V,2.
men and women are lightly covered with feathers. The men also have
many precious stones in their faces and chests. Nor does anyone possess
anything, but all things are in common. And the men have as wives those
who please them, be they mothers, sisters, or friends, among whom they
make no distinction. They also fight with each other and eat each other,
even the slain, and hang the same flesh in smoke. They live to be a
hundred and fifty years old and have no government.70
70
‘Dise figur anzaigt vns das volck vnd insel die gefunden ist durch den cristenlichen künig zu
Portigal oder von seinen vnderthonen. Die leüt sind also nacket, hübsch, braun wolgestalt von
leib. ir heübter halsz. arm. scham. füsz frawen vnd mann ain wenig mit federn bedeckt. Auch
haben die mann in iren angesichten vnd brust vid edel gestain. Es hat auch nyemantz nichts
sunder sind alle ding gemain. Vnnd die mann habendt weyber welche in gefallen. es sey mutter,
schwester oder freündt. Darjnn haben sy kain vnderschaid. Sy streyten auch mit ainander. Sy
essen auch ainander selbs die erschlagen werden. vnd hencken das selbig fleisch in den rauch.
Sy werden alt hundert vnd fünfftzig iar. Vnd haben kain regiment.’ For a larger illustration, see
Max Justo Guedes and Gerald Lombardi, Portugal-Brazil: The Age of Atlantic Discoveries
In the caption of this print, in contrast to the captions on early maps,

cannibalism appears almost as an afterthought, interspersed within a
litany of attractive qualities.71 Indeed, the inhabitants’ longevity may
have suggested to readers that they lived in proximity to the Fountain
of Youth, mentioned in the Romance of Alexander and the Book of John
Mandeville.72 The viewer’s attention is more evenly divided between
cannibalism and other activities. A nursing mother accompanied by
three children share the lower foreground with three male warriors.
Above their heads and to the right are motifs of cannibalism: four figures
handle, eat or observe the eating of human limbs; a human head and
limbs hang prominently from a beam. The European ships in the
background remind the viewer that this information came from recent
voyages.
Three woodcuts adorn the 1509 edition of Vespucci’s letter to Soder-
ini.73 This edition was printed by Johann Grüninger of Strasbourg, who
would soon print several influential maps depicting cannibals in Brazil.
One woodcut shows anthropophages chopping limbs on a table, a
nursing mother and other figures (Fig. 3.3).74 Another details the
(New York: Brazilian Cultural Foundation, 1990), no. 93. I have also consulted the transcription
in Jan van Doesborgh, De novo mondo. Antwerp, Jan van Doesborch [about 1520]. A Facsimile
of a Unique Broadsheet, ed. and trans. Maria Elizabeth Kronenberg (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1927), at 20. The translation is from Schuller, ‘Oldest Known Illustration’, 111; I have
made minor amendments.
71
The broadsheet seems to have inspired a woodcut by the Flemish printer Jan van Doesborch or
Doesborgh that appeared in his Of the Newe Landes and of ye People founde by the Messengers
of the kynge of Portyngale named Emanuel . . . ([Antwerp], c.1520), title-page and sig. [A.ii.r],
For comparisons of editions, see De novo mondo, ed. Kronenberg, 1–5; Robert Proctor, Jan van
Doesborgh, Printer at Antwerp: An Essay in Bibliography (London: Bibliographical Society,
1894), 32–3. Several elements are common to both the Carta Marina and the Doesborgh
scenes: the body parts hanging from above, the nursing woman and the man with a bow.
Van Doesborgh’s woodcuts are dated to c.1511–23. Van Doesborgh, De novo mondo, ed.
Kronenberg, 9, hesitantly suggests 1520; Sturtevant, ‘First Visual Images’, 446, n. 13 gives a
broader range.
72
See Jorge Magasich-Airola and Jean-Marc de Beer, America Magica: When Renaissance
Europe Thought It Had Conquered Paradise, trans. Monica Sander (London: Anthem Press,
2000), 44–51.
73
Amerigo Vespucci, Diss büchlin saget wie die zwen durchlüchtigsten herren . . . haben . . . funden
vil insulen vnnd ein Nüwe welt von wilden nackenden Leuten vormals vnbekant (Strasbourg,
1509). Its publisher, Johann Grüninger, also issued maps illustrated with cannibals, as we shall
see. For a description of the illustrations, see Colin, ‘Wild Man and the Indian’, 17–18. EA,
no. 509/11: This was a German translation of a Latin version that had been published with
Martin Waldseemüller’s Cosmographiae introductio. For Waldseemüller and his works,
see later.
74
Vespucci, Diss büchlin, sig. B.i.v.
3.3 Amerigo Vespucci, Diss büchlin sagt . . . (Strasbourg, 1509), sig. B.i.v.
The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, 18657.
3.4 Amerigo Vespucci, Diss büchlin sagt. . .(Strasbourg, 1509), sig. E.iiii.v.
The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, 18657.
moment when a woman raises a jawbone to bring down a European

sailor, who is later cooked and eaten (Fig. 3.4).75 A figure who might
have been interpreted as a troglodyte appears in the background. A third
75
Ibid., sig. E.iiii.v.
image shows Europeans in the Caribbean, one of whom appears to be

greeting some indigenous women.76
As a whole, the Columbian and Vespuccian sources provided a range of
characterizations of the Tupi, Carib and Taíno peoples. Despite describing
cannibalism, they also offered reasonable grounds for concluding that at
least some of these peoples were far from depraved. Their lack of clothing
and other trappings of ‘civilized’ life, together with the extreme western
(and, by extension, far eastern) geographical location of the Caribbean,
could well have suggested to viewers that these peoples inhabited the
Terrestrial Paradise.
Emblematizing Circum-Caribbean peoples:

two cartographic approaches
By contrast to travel accounts and their illustrations, which created the

binary of peaceful Taíno and voracious Carib, on map imagery, the Taíno
motifs are almost completely absent until the late sixteenth century;
the man-eating Carib dominated the earliest representations.77 This selec-
tion of anthropophagous images over those of trade or idyllic life
occurred on maps produced in the German lands, Portugal, Spain and
the Low Countries.78 Some mapmakers produced manuscript maps for
individual patrons; others produced printed maps to be sold on the open
market. Despite these differences in audiences, key motifs of Carib
anthropophagy – the spit-roast, the cooking-pot and the limbs hanging
from trees – appeared across mapmaking centres. The cannibal
butchering-table, a scene reminiscent of medieval iconographic traditions
of host desecration and Far Eastern cannibalism but absent from the New
World sources, and yet placed in Brazil by the Strasbourg workshop of
Johann Grüninger, also travelled across multiple centres of map produc-
tion.79 Cannibals on maps were a community invented by a transregional
76
Ibid., sig. D.iiii.r.
77
An important exception here is the representation of the Tupi on maps produced in Normandy,
the subject of Chapter 4.
78
These examples are analysed in Davies, ‘Amerindians on European Maps’, chapters 4 and 5.
79
For an example of a butchering-table associated with the Far East, see Paris, Bibliothèque
Nationale de France, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, ‘Devisement dou monde’ 16th century, Mss.
Fr. 5219, 119v. This is a late example of an illuminated manuscript of Marco Polo’s account of
the east.
group of mapmakers who, nevertheless, depended on travellers’ accounts

for content and authority.
The earliest surviving map to illustrate an Amerindian, the manuscript
map known as the Kunstmann II map, was probably the work of a
Portuguese or Italian mapmaker working in Portugal c.1502–6.80 The
map’s New World vignette is the earliest known image of the spit-
roasting of human flesh in the Americas, an iconic motif that would
later appear across print culture, manuscript images and the decorative
arts.81 The mapmaker or illuminator clearly devised the image by read-
ing travel accounts, but the scene is independent of illustrations in
surviving broadsheets and in printed accounts of New World travels
that pre-date it. The mapmaker engaged selectively and creatively with
multiple sources about this region but, contrary to the conventional
narrative of the mapmaker as derivative copier of illustrations devised
by others, made up his own.
Although the mapmaker drew on the most recent cartographic infor-
mation from the Vespuccian voyages, the map’s only image for the
New World derives from the experiences detailed in the Columbian
accounts. The largest illumination on the map is a vignette in Brazil
showing a kneeling figure roasting a person whole on a spit (Fig. 3.5).
The position of the victim’s hands suggests that they have been tied
together, and that the arms have been trussed up to the side of the body.
These details point to the Scillacio-Coma letter relating to Columbus’s
second voyage, where we learn that Pedro Margarit saw ‘several
Indians skewered on spits’.82 By contrast, Vespucci’s description of anthro-
pophagous cookery specifies that bodies were jointed before they were
80
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. icon. 133. Ivan Kupcík, . . . Munich Portolan Charts:
‘Kunstmann I - XIII’ and Ten Further Portolan Charts (Munich and Berlin: Deutcher
Kunstverlag, 2000), 6: Friedrich Kunstmann (1817–1887) was a Munich clergyman who
produced a facsimile atlas of thirteen portolan charts numbered ‘Kunstmann I’ to ‘Kunstmann
XIII’: Atlas zur Entdeckungsgeschichte Amerikas. Aus Handschriften der K. Hof- und Staats-
Bibliothek, der K. Universitaet und des Hauptconservatoriums der K. B. Armee, ed. Friedrich
Kunstmann et al. (Munich, 1859); for the Kunstmann II map, see Blatt II. Kupcík, Portolan
Charts, 28–31: The map does not show Madagascar; hence, it predates either the discovery of
the island in 1506, or widespread knowledge of it. The Brazilian coastline is derived from
Vespucci’s 1501–2 voyage, which gives the map a terminus post quem of 1502. There is no
direct evidence of the map’s date, creator or intended audience, but the geographical elements,
some of which date from Vespucci’s voyages, give us the date-range for its production.
81
For examples across visual culture, see Honour, New Golden Land; Karl-Heinz Kohl, ed.,
Mythen der Neuen Welt, zur Entdeckungsgeschichte Lateinamerikas (Berlin: Frölich &
Kaufmann, 1982).
82
See near n. 43.
3.5 Kunstmann II map, c.1506, detail from Brazil.
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Cod. icon. 133.
cooked.83 The map’s inscriptions also offer information drawn from the
Columbian voyages. A caption near the Caribbean islands informs
the reader that they are called ‘Antilia’, and that ‘all these islands and
lands were discovered by a Genoese by the name of Columbus’.84 Many
elements from the nearby captions also appear in the Scillacio-Coma letter:
anthropophagy; snakes; parrots; numerous references to gold; cinnamon;
and scattered, lawless peoples.85 A few appear in Columbus’s Letter to
Santángel as well: gold, cinammon and anthropophages.86
This image, iconic to the modern eye, was not one that emerged
straightforwardly or unconsciously from the sources. Indeed, the map-
maker may not have had an illustration of cannibal spit-roasting to hand.
The only print showing anthropophagy that might have been in circulation
before it was completed in 1505–6 is Froschauer’s c.1506 woodcut
(Fig. 3.2). This print may not have reached the Kunstman map’s illumin-
ator; and, even if it did reach him, it does not contain spit-roasting
iconography.
The process of devising a geographically specific vignette, together with
the convention of placing images of people who lived in a particular region
within that region on the map, led to an image of Antillian and coastal
anthropophagy becoming the emblematic scene for Brazil. The inhabitants
of the Brazilian interior – a region extrapolated from Vespucci’s excursions
along the coastline, the extent of which was unknown – were thus emblem-
atized by a practice that had apparently been witnessed by native peoples
encountered in the Antilles Islands. Nevertheless, it was precisely
this practice of comparing multiple travellers’ accounts and synthesizing
selected material into a visual form that made maps authoritative reference
sources.
It was not inevitable that these workshop practices would lead to the
region of Brazil being associated primarily with anthropophagy. The motif
83
Here I disagree with scholars who have suggested that the image derives from the capture,
execution and consumption of a sailor on Vespucci’s third voyage to the New World, c.1501–2
(see, for example, BAV, V, 251; Susi Colin, ‘Woodcutters and Cannibals: Brazilian Indians as
seen on Early Maps’, in AEM, 175–81, at 176; Sebastián, Iconografía, 30–1). The Kunstmann II
vignette does not match Vespucci’s version of the roasting process: ‘where the women
themselves were already hacking our young man up into pieces, and, at a great fire they had
built, were roasting him before our eyes, showing us many pieces and then eating them’
(Vespucci, Letters, 89; NRC-V, I, 370–1: ‘ubi mulieres ipsae erant, quae iuvenem nostrum, quem
trucidaverant (nobis videntibus) in frusta secabant, necnon frusta ipsa nobis ostentantes, ad
ingentem quem succenderant ignem torrebant, et deinde posthaec manducabant’.).
84
‘Omnes istae insulae ac terrae inventae fuerunt ab uno Genuensi nomine Columbo’.
85 86
RC xii, AC, 6.2.8–6.2.25. Columbus, Letters from America, 50–63.
3.6 Johannes Ruysch, Universalior cogniti orbis tabula ex recentibus confecta observationi (Rome, 1507).
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, JCB Z P975 1507 / 2-SIZE (copy 1).
is not the central focus on the 1507 world map by Johannes Ruysch, the
earliest printed world map to include commentary on the Americas, which
appeared in the 1508 Rome edition and in late issues of the 1507 edition of
Ptolemy’s Geographia.87 The map extends from the North Pole to some
38 degrees below the equator, and divides the world below the Arctic Circle
(circulus arcticus) into seven climatic zones north of the equator and four
zones south of the equator (Fig. 3.6). The map’s southern edge is just south
of the tip of Africa, and passes though a large landmass to the west entitled
‘Terra sancte crucis sive Mundus novus’ (Land of the Holy Cross or New
World). The lower reaches of ‘Mundus novus’ remain unknown, falling
outside the map. They lie to the southeast of the east Asian islands that
include Java major and Java minor.
87
Johannes Ruysch, Universalior cogniti orbis tabula ex recentibus confecta observationi (Rome,
1507).
Since the map encompassed the entire known world on a space of

approximately 45 cm by 60 cm, we must assume that Ruysch thought
carefully about what information to include on it. For the extensive text
captions, the most prominent of which appear in the New World, Ruysch
could have drawn on the edition of Vespucci’s Mundus Novus that
Matthias Ringmann had published to accompany Martin Waldseemüller’s
1507 world map.88 The central caption summarizes many of the key
elements of Vespucci’s ethnography of the northeast coast of what is
now Brazil: warfare, the lack of leaders and religion, feather headdresses,
anthropophagi, herbal cures and longevity. It offers brief notes on
the region’s natural history and commodities. While Vespucci had only
traversed the coastal areas, the caption appears in the centre of the land-
mass. For a Renaissance viewer, the caption would have signified activities
across this landmass. The map’s fairly general approach to summarizing
the region is in keeping with late medieval decisions about what to include
on maps. Ruysch’s map and the Kunstmann II map, appearing within five
years of one another, illuminate how different visions of Brazil’s peoples
could be devised from the same sources.
Mapping cannibals
The earliest printed map to illustrate New World anthropophages, Martin

Waldseemüller’s world map of 1516 known as the Carta Marina (Fig. 3.7),
helped to circulate the spit-roasting image that had appeared in the
tradition of Portuguese manuscript cartography. The map’s vignette of
cannibalism in the Brazilian interior – taken from printed descriptions
about the Caribbean islands, and appearing decades before European
printed travel accounts about Brazil itself – spread to maps across multiple
centres of production and to imagery on prints (Fig. 3.8).89 The Latin
88
Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann, Cosmographie introductio quibusdam
geometriae [ac] astronomiae principiis ad eam rem necessariis (St. Dié, 1507). For the map’s
publishing history, see John W. Hessler, The Naming of America: Martin Waldseemüller’s
1507 World Map and the ‘Cosmographiae introductio’ (London: GILES, 2008). For a recent
overview, see Hessler and Van Duzer, Seeing the World Anew.
89
While Vespucci had travelled along part of the Brazilian coast, and Waldseemüller drew on
Vespucci, it was his information about the Carib peoples of the Caribbean islands and part of
the mainland coast, rather than his discussions of the Tupi peoples of the South American
mainland, that Waldseemüller used.
3.7 Martin Waldseemüller, Carta Marina ([Strasbourg?], 1516).

Image courtesy of the Jay I. Kislak Foundation and the Library of Congress.
3.8 Martin Waldseemüller, Carta Marina ([Strasbourg?], 1516), detail from Brazil.
Image courtesy of the Jay I. Kislak Foundation and the Library of Congress.
map’s initial print run may have been around 1,000.90 The Carta Marina
was a publishing success: in the 1520s and 1530s, German editions
followed, with Lorenz Fries producing these three-quarter sized editions,
shortening some of the legends as he rendered them in the vernacular.91
Waldseemüller was part of a group of humanists, known as the Gym-
nasium Vosagense, based in St Dié, on the western foothills of the Vosges
mountains.92 The Gymnasium, despite its inland location far from
the Atlantic ports, had privileged access to some of the latest travellers’
information. The group worked under the patronage of René II, Duke
of Lorraine, under whose auspices his chaplain and secretary Gaultier
Lud established a scholarly printing press. The duke also procured,
from his contacts in Lisbon, manuscripts relating to the discoveries in
the western ocean. These included a French translation of the letter
Vespucci had sent to Soderini (here addressed to René II) and a number
of maps.93
The Carta Marina’s man-eating vignette (Fig. 3.8) is compositionally
similar to the scene on Johann Froschauer’s broadsheet (Fig. 3.2).94 On
the latter, the cannibalism is muted by the broader scenes of social
interaction. While human body parts hang from the rafters of a wooden
90
Martin Waldseemüller, Carta Marina ([Strasbourg?], 1516). The sole surviving copy is in the
Jay I. Kislak Collection in the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. The Carta Marina
comprises twelve woodcuts printed on separate sheets, each 45.5 x 62 cm. Only a single copy, a
proof state, is known today. For facsimiles, see Hessler and Van Duzer, Seeing the World Anew;
Fischer and Wieser, Oldest Map.
91
Hildegard Binder Johnson, Carta Marina: World Geography in Strassburg, 1525 (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1963).
92
For overviews of the Gymnasium, see Albert Ronsin, ‘L’Amérique du Gymnase vosgien de
Saint-Dié-des-Vosges’, in La France-Amérique (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles), ed. Frank Lestringant
(Paris, 1998), 37–64; Seymour I. Schwartz, Putting ‘America’ on the Map: The Story of the Most
Important Graphic Document in the History of the United States (Amherst, NY: Prometheus,
2007), 34–49. For further bibliography, see Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 218, n. 6.
93
Ronsin, ‘L’Amérique’, 38–9.
94
The vignette also shares features with a woodcut of uncertain date by the Flemish printer
Jan van Doesborgh, Of the Newe Landes, (title-page and sig. [A.ii.r]) and idem, De novo
mondo. Common to the Doesborgh and Waldseemüller images are the body parts hanging
from above, the nursing woman and the man with a bow. Van Doesborgh’s woodcuts are
dated to c.1511–23. The Carta Marina could have been one of its sources, rather than vice
versa. Alternatively, both may have drawn independently on the Froschauer woodcut. In
any case, there are no surviving printed precedents for the Carta Marina’s spit-roast and
hunter and neither printed nor manuscript examples of the hunter draped with a body pre-
date the map. De novo mondo, 9, hesitantly suggests 1520 for the date of the Doesborgh
woodcut; Sturtevant, ‘First Visual Images’, 446, n. 13 gives a broader range. for a
bibliographical overview, see De novo mondo, 1–5; Proctor, Doesborgh, Printer at Antwerp:,
32–3. See also n. 64.
structure and a fire beneath serves to smoke them,95 the broadsheet does
not revolve around its discreet scene of spit-roasting. The nursing figure
and man carrying a bow in the foreground of the print form, by contrast,
a cannibalistic composition on the map: the seated woman gnaws a
human limb; the nearby man carries one of his victims. The jewels in
faces mentioned in Vespucci and in Froschauer’s caption, and illustrated
on the broadsheet, do not appear.
As with the 1506 Kunstman II map, the Carta Marina illustrates
cannibalism within the northeast portion of Brazil (Fig. 3.8). The scene
shows the return of a hunter with his victim, the spit-roasting of the
carcass in jointed portions and the eating of flesh. The limbs on a tree
suggest a further stage – hanging the meat in order to tenderize it and to
keep it out of the reach of animals. Some of these details had been
described in Peter Martyr’s Oceani decas:
Entering the houses they discovered they had . . . human flesh in their
kitchens, some boiled along with flesh from parrots and ducks, some
fixed on skewers ready to be roasted. . .. They also found the head of a
recently killed youth hanging from a beam, still dripping with blood.96
This incident took place on Guadeloupe during Columbus’s second

voyage, and the interpretation in the Oceani decas may have inspired the
spit-roasting and meat-eating elements.97 By re-imagining the scene out-
of-doors, the artist kept the design simple and gave prominence to the
cooking stages.
A menacing inscription identifies this region as ‘the land of the canni-
bals; those who live here are anthropophages’.98 A lengthier caption
informs us that:
Here is the most cruel nation of anthropophages (whom people call

cannibals) which invades the neighbouring islands. They capture people
of both sexes by fearful pursuit. They are accustomed to castrating
male prisoners just as we do with rams, capons and bulls so that they
become fatter for slaying. The old men, however, they directly consign to
95
Established in Schuller, ‘Oldest Known Illustration’, at 115–7.
96
RC v, PM, 1.2.4: ‘Domos ingressi habere . . . in eorum coquinis elixas cum psittacis et anserinis
carnibus carnes humanas, et fixas verubus alias assandas comperere. . .. Invenere etiam caput
nuper occissi iuvenis trabi appensum, sanguine adhuc madidum.’
97
This information also appears in the manuscript letter of Dr Chanca. Peter Martyr either had
access to a copy, or heard Chanca’s evidence in person. For the letter, see Columbus, Four
Voyages of Columbus, at 20–73.
98
‘Terra cannibalorum qui hanc habitant Anthropophagi sunt’.
slaughter. They devour the intestines, together with the outer limbs, as a
fresh delicacy. The flanks and other parts of the body they preserve in
salt. They sustain the female prisoners for the purpose of breeding as we
keep hens for eggs, but the old women they set to toil and servitude.99
The information paraphrases a passage from one of the versions of Peter

Martyr’s writings about the Columbian voyages to the Caribbean islands,
rather than any journey into the continental interior. The caption most
closely resembles a passage in the first edition of Peter’s Oceani decas.100
Three practical factors may have prompted Waldseemüller’s placement
of cannibals in Brazil. The first was the iconography of the Portuguese
manuscript charts which, as another caption informs the reader, formed
some of his sources. The Carta Marina’s cartography resembles that of
‘King Hamy’ type maps,101 of which the Kunstmann II map is an example
(Fig. 3.5). No other surviving Portuguese map before 1558 includes similar
illustrations, so it is impossible to be sure how representative the Kunst-
mann II map is of the iconography of any maps that Waldseemüller or his
printer Johann Grüninger had to hand.102 Diogo Homem’s 1558 atlas
known as the Queen Mary Atlas shows the limbs in trees and spit-roasts,
and describes the people of Brazil as Canibales who eat human flesh
(Fig. 3.9).103 The Waldseemüller iconographic tradition was an extended
synthesis of anthropophagous elements in printed texts about the
Caribbean and in the Portuguese manuscript map tradition.
Second, Waldseemüller may have drawn here on Vespucci’s Mundus
novus. The Mundus Novus noted the presence, in coastal northern Brazil
(a landmass whose full extent was as yet unknown), of ‘human flesh salted
and suspended from beams throughout the houses, as we hang up bacon
99
‘Genus que hic antrophagorum [sic] crudelissimum (quos Canibales vocant) insulas vicinas
invadit dira persecutione capiunt homines utriusque sexus. Masculos captivos decastrare
solent tanquam nos arietes capones bovesque ut crassiores mactationi evadant. Senes autem
mox occisioni tradunt et intestina cum exterioribus membris recenti sapore manducant. Latera
et alie quidem partes corporis sale conservant. Mulieres captivas sustinent ratione partus sicuti
galline apud nos propter ova. Sed vetulas ad labores et ministeria constituunt.’
100
I deduced this after comparing the map’s caption to Trevisano, Libretto; Montalboddo, Paesi,
1507; idem, Paesi novamente retrovati (Milan, 1508); idem, Newe vnbekanthe Landte . . .
(Nuremberg, 1508); idem, Itinerarium Portugallensium . . . (Milan, 1508), and the 1511 and
1516 editions of the Oceani decas.
101
Johnson, ‘German Cosmographers’, 27; Hans Wolff, ‘The Munich Portolan Charts: Past and
Present’, in AEM, 127–44, at 134.
102
Maps containing the term ‘cannibal’ include the Juan de la Cosa map (1500) and the Zorzi
map (1500), and the Ruysch map (Rome, 1507).
103
BL-Mss, Add. MS. 5415.a., f. 23v. For a facsimile and discussion, see The Queen Mary Atlas ed.
Peter Barber (London: Folio Society, 2005) and the accompanying commentary volume.
3.9 Diogo Homem, ‘Queen Mary Atlas’, 1558, detail from Brazil.
© British Library Board, Add. MS. 5415, f.23v.
and pork at home’.104 While the Carta Marina’s caption was clearly
derived from a Columbian text, as I shall demonstrate later, the vignette
of hanging limbs was perhaps inspired by this passage from Vespucci’s
Mundus Novus.
The third factor, one that certainly informed the positioning of many
map images, is the challenge posed by scale and composition. The cannibal
image would have been almost invisible had it been placed in the tiny
Caribbean islands; and mapmakers did not place people associated with
particular regions in the ocean, but within the lands they inhabited.105 The
practical considerations of representing nature in a finite space inflected
not just mapmaking, of course, but all branches of natural inquiry.
Tall plants, for example, might be bent, chopped or sliced to fit on a
page while providing sufficient detail of their most important parts.106
Given the additional spur of Vespucci’s references to anthropophages
along the Brazilian coast, the placement within a large but indeterminate
landmass – which might turn out to be an enormous island – of
an amalgamation of Columbian and Vespuccian information about
anthropophages was a reasonable decision.107
The decision to use ethnographic information from Columbus’s rather
than Vespucci’s voyages for the South American interior was deliberate.
This perhaps reflects the change in Waldseemüller’s perception, in
the period 1507–16, of the relative achievements of Columbus and of
Vespucci, the man whose name – Amerigo – Waldseemüller had given
to America on his 1507 world map.108 An earlier stage in this change of
heart is visible in the 1513 edition of Ptolemy to which Waldseemüller
104
NRC-V, I, 311: ‘per domos humanam carnem salsamet contignationibus suspensam, uti apud
nos moris est lardum suspendere et carnem suinam’; Vespucci, Letters, 50.
105
This is the case for all the maps I have examined; I have not found any exceptions
elsewhere, apart from classicized scenes portraying figures such as Poseidon, rather than
inhabitants of lands nearby, and ethnographic imagery placed in frames outside the map
border or in distinct insets. In the late sixteenth century, when Dutch mapmakers began to
place peoples in rows and columns on the edges of their maps, they created clearly defined
spaces for them. A few unillustrated maps predating Waldseemüller briefly mention
‘cannibals’ as inhabitants of the Antillean islands. These include the Juan de la Cosa map
(1500) and the Zorzi map (1500), and the Ruysch map (Rome, 1507).
106
Bleichmar, Visible Empire, 104.
107
For the notion of Brazil as another island, see Lestringant, Cannibals, 42. There was – and is –
no ontological reason to justify why some landmasses are deemed to be islands while others are
continents. See Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of
Metageography (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1997).
108
For his subsequent rejection of Vespucci, see Johnson, ‘German Cosmographers’, 32–3. This
map does not illustrate Amerindians.
contributed; here, South America was named ‘Terra Incognita’ rather than
‘America’. A nearby caption observed that ‘this land with neighbouring
islands was discovered by the Genoese Columbus by order of the Castilian
King’.109 In 1516, on the Carta Marina, Waldseemüller continued to
associate the largest new landmass in the west with Columbus rather than
with Vespucci: he drew on the insular Caribbean ethnography of the
Columbus letters, pushing it into the Brazilian interior. Thus, the term
‘cannibal’, originating from the name of the Carib tribes of coastal Brazil
and the Antilles, came to be associated with all the inhabitants of Brazil.
While the sources do not state who devised each of the map’s elements,
there is an editorial consistency across the representation of cannibalism
on this map.
The immediate priority for German mapmakers was to sell maps to
viewers who wished to contemplate the world as a whole. While this goal
differed from the needs of the colonial administrators who invoked native
cannibalism to justify conquest and the enslavement of Caribs, German
maps drew on and helped to circulate the iconographic strategies of
Portuguese manuscript charts drawn up for imperially minded audi-
ences.110 The placement of the map vignette and caption in the South
American interior suggested that cannibalism was practised on the
enormous landmass, not on some small speck-like islands. While
the widespread identification of Brazil with cannibalism in the European
imagination in the second half of the sixteenth century is well known,
Waldseemüller’s map was the reason why, by the 1510s, the region of
Brazil was already attracting cannibals from elsewhere.
The French Calvinist Jean de Léry was one traveller who paid great
attention to the positioning and details of the imagery on maps. Léry was a
member of the 1555–60 expedition to set up the first French colony in
Brazil. The naval officer Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon had secured
sponsorship from both Catholic and Huguenot patrons, but it appears
that, during the expedition, Villegagnon had three Huguenots killed.
The rest began to fear for their lives, left the French compound and lived
amicably with the Tupinambá, a people of southeastern Brazil, while
109
Ptolemy, . . . Geographiae opus (Strasbourg, 1513), ‘Terrae Novae’ map: ‘Hic terra cum
adjacentibus insulis inventa est per Columbum Januensem ex mandato Regis Castelle’.
110
While it is possible that these mapmakers also saw Spanish manuscript maps depicting
cannibals in northern South America, there is no evidence for such maps. Very few illustrated
Spanish world maps survive from the sixteenth century.
waiting for the next ship that could take them home.111 The expedition was
a failure; the Portuguese defeated the colony in 1560.112
Twenty years later, Léry published his Histoire d’un voyage faict en la
terre du Bresil (1578).113 Here, Léry described the barbecue or boucan, a
cooking arrangement that was apparently unknown in Europe, paying
attention to the iconographic details:
I shall here refute the error of those who, as one case see in their maps of
the world, have represented and painted for us the savages of the land of
Brazil. . .roasting human flesh on a spit, as we cook mutton joints and
other meat; furthermore, they have also falsely shown them cutting it
with great iron knives on benches, and hanging the meat up for display,
as our beef butchers do over here. Since these things are no truer than the
tales of Rabelais about Panurge escaping from the spit larded and half-
cooked, it is easy to see that those who make such maps are ignorant, and
have never had knowledge of the things they set forth.114
Léry evidently expected to see in Brazil on maps precisely located vignettes

that articulated the Tupi practices that he had witnessed. His diatribe
against all the ‘wrong’ motifs on maps – motifs he implies are tropes
invented by the imagination – is a roll call of the iconography on early
sixteenth-century German printed maps.
This passage underlines several fundamental points in my argument.
First, into the 1570s, mapmakers based depictions of cannibalism mainly
on information about people whom contemporary travel accounts denoted
111
Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called America, trans. Janet
Whatley (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), xvi–xx. For a discussion of the
expedition, see Frank Lestringant, Le Huguenot et le sauvage: L’Amérique et la controverse
coloniale, en France, au temps des guerres de religion (1555–1589), 3ème éd. revue et augmentée
(Geneva: Droz, 2004).
112
Léry, Voyage, ed. Whatley, xix–xxi.
113
Jean de Léry, Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Bresil (La Rochelle, 1578). The Histoire was
printed in some fourteen editions in the sixteenth century, including in a Dutch translation printed
by Cornelis Claesz. A slightly extended version was printed in Geneva in 1580.
114
Jean de Léry, Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil [1580], ed. Jean-Claude Morisot
(Geneva, 1975), 219 (chap. XV): ‘ie refuteray ici l’erreur de ceux qui comme on peut voir par
leurs cartes vniuerselles, nous ont non seulement representé & peint les sauuages de la terre du
Bresil. . .rostissans la chair des hommes embrochee comme nous faisons les membres de
moutons & autres viandes: mais aussi ont feint qu’auec de grands couperets de fer ils les
coupoyent sur des bancs, & en pendoyent & mettoyent les pieces en monstre, comme font les
bouchers la chair de boeuf par-deça. Tellement que ces choses n’estans non plus vrayes que le
conte de Rabelais touchant Panurge, qui eschappa de la broche tout lardé & à demi cuit, il est
aisé à iuger que ceux qui font telles cartes sont ignorans, lesquels n’ont iamais eu cognoissance
des choses qu’ils mettent en auant’; idem, Voyage, ed. Whatley, 126–7. I have made minor
amendments to the translation.
as Caribs, rather than as Tupinambá. Second, it was difficult for map-

makers to ascertain the geographical extent of the use of the spit-
arrangement in the Americas. Third, the placement of Carib iconography
within Brazil led a contemporary reader to infer that cannibalism was
practised across the whole region – a characterization with serious ramifi-
cations for the region’s inhabitants. Fourth, the customs and appearance of
Brazilian cannibals on maps were a construction by armchair – or, in this
case, workshop – ethnographers.
Léry added that when the colonists cooked a guinea hen on a spit, ‘they
laughed at us, and seeing the meat continually turned, refused to believe
that it could cook, until experience showed them so’.115 This extraordinary
statement – an eyewitness observation in service of a counterfactual argu-
ment to damn further the map illustrators – is a rare viewer’s response to
ethnographic material on maps. The Carib scenes that mapmakers used
did not reflect Tupinambá customs and thus, for Léry, with the placement
of scenes of anthropophagy inside Brazil on maps, the Caribs had been
deployed erroneously to emblematize all the region’s peoples.116
Early sixteenth-century maps were foundational visual works in the
invention of the Brazilian as cannibal. This motif, selected from a wider
range of possibilities in the original travel accounts, became part of a
broader discourse conceptualizing Brazil’s inhabitants in word and image
in ways that legitimized native slavery. As early as 1503, under pressure
from merchants and administrators in Santo Domingo, Queen Isabella of
Castile issued a decree whereby the indios caribes ‘from the Caribbean
islands and Cartagena’ could be enslaved if they resisted evangelization.
While legislation in 1570 outlawed indigenous slavery in Portuguese Brazil,
the law contained a similar loophole that permitted the enslavement of
prisoners taken in a just war. In both cases, allegations of cannibalism were
considered legitimation for just war. Cannibals were sufficiently inhuman
not to be covered by natural law. Gradually, ethnic terms such as caribe
115
Léry, Histoire, ed. Morisot, 220 (chap. XV): ‘eux se rians & moquans de nous ne voulurent
iamais croire, les voyans ainsi incessament remuer qu’elles peussent cuire, iusques à ce que
l’experience leur monstra du contraire’; idem, Voyage, ed. Whatley, 127.
116
No spits appear in the illustrations of accounts about the Tupi peoples that preceded Léry’s,
either; the accounts of Hans Staden and André Thevet both depict the boucan. See Staden,
Warhaftige Historia, part 1, Kaps XX, XXXIX, XLI–XLIII; part 2, Kap. XXVIII; André Thevet,
Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique (Paris, 1557), chap. XL. For a classic study of the
iconography of cannibal cookery in the editions of Staden’s and Léry’s accounts in the De Bry
collection of voyages, see Bernadette Bucher, Icon and Conquest: A Structural Analysis of the
Illustrations of de Bry’s Great Voyages, trans. Basia Miller Gulati (Chicago, IL and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1981), chaps. 5 and 6.
and Chichimeca were re-defined in colonial Spanish and Portuguese

America to mean peoples who were innately given to inhuman, irrational
behaviour.117
While the map imagery of Brazilian cannibals pre-dated the gradual
implementation of forced indigenous labour, the motifs continued into the
mid-seventeenth century on Dutch maps, particularly those printed in
Amsterdam. That this should be the case even on works printed by map
publishers who also published polemical literature against Spanish colonial
practices, and through the period when the Dutch were in conflict with
Portugal for the colonial possession of Brazil, highlights the disjunction
between the overt stance of sympathy taken by, for example, the map
publisher Cornelis Claesz and his publishing decisions as a whole.
West is east
The conceptual proximity of the Far East and the New World on the
Ruysch world map of 1507 (Fig. 3.6) offers another point of departure for
analyzing cannibal iconography on the Waldseemüller Carta Marina.
While the connection between America and east Asia is difficult to see
on maps that place them on opposite sides of a sheet – particularly for
modern eyes used to the enormous expanse of the Pacific Ocean – the
Ruysch map makes the extrapolation of anthropophages from Java and
from the Caribbean Islands to the large island – Mundus novus – in
between highly reasonable. Viewers could thus have seen the Carta
Marina’s cannibal vignette as confirming expectations about the distant
east and – by extension – about the lands found by sailing to the far west.
Anthropophages had long been associated with the Far East. Marco Polo’s
Divisament du monde and the Book of John Mandeville place man-eaters in
Java; the region is populated with man-eaters on Waldseemüller’s Carta
Marina.
In the Uslegung der mercarthen, an illustrated geographical glossary
printed to accompany Lorenz Fries’s 1525 German translation of Wald-
seemüller’s map, Fries distinguishes between the ‘Canibalien’ in chapter
60 of the Uslegung and the inhabitants of ‘Prasilia’ in chapter 82 (who are,
albeit, shown wearing what appear to be necklaces of human teeth). The
book contains an image of dog-headed cannibals managing a cannibal
117
Van Deusen, Global Indios, 3–4.
butcher’s shop at the head of the ‘Canibalien’ chapter and as the title-page
image.118 The distinction anticipates one that would appear in later eye-
witness accounts. Thevet, for example, would draw one between ‘good’ and
‘bad’ anthropophages: The Tupi, in Thevet’s view, merely consumed the
flesh of prisoners of war and their offspring; the Cannibals, by contrast,
indiscriminately ate human flesh as civil people ate mutton.119 This
distinction between Brazilians and ‘Canibalien’ is not preserved on Fries’s
German language world map, which the Uslegung accompanied; here,
there are anthropophages in Brazil, and the Caribbean islands are unillus-
trated. Perhaps the exigencies of squeezing images into spaces came into
play here.
These images would also have resonated with German mercantile inter-
ests in long-distance trading voyages. Many German investors helped to
sponsor Iberian eastward and westward voyages.120 Scenes of anthropoph-
agy, far from raising fears for the safety of their investments, might well
have helped to bridge conceptually the unknown distance between
those lands reached by sailing west from the Spice Islands of the east.
Cartographical knowledge in this era of oceanic exploration comprised not
merely where things were in relation to a coordinate system, but also the
routes via which they were reached.
The German investors’ market might even have inflected the shape of
South America – labelled ‘Terra Nova’ on the Carta Marina. The westward
voyages were undertaken in search of eastern islands. By 1516, it was clear
that numerous islands had been found by sailing west. By presenting
Terra Nova as a separate landmass from Asia, Waldseemüller also denoted
it as an island – albeit an enormous one – although he had no way of
knowing whether or not Terra Nova was attached to Asia in the east. As he
puts it in the Cosmographiae introductio, ‘the earth is now known to be
divided into four parts. The first three of these are connected and are
continents, but the fourth part is an island because it has been found to be
completely surrounded on all of its sides by sea’.121 The point about this
118
Lorenz Fries, Carta Marina (Strasbourg, 1525); Lorenz Fries, Uslegung der mercarthen, oder
Carta Marina . . . (Strasbourg, 1525). For an overview, see Johnson, Carta Marina.
119
Whitehead, ‘Black Read as Red’, 227–8; Lestringant, Cannibals, 44–8.
120
Johnson, German Discovery of the World.
121
Some map scholars have taken this statement to be evidence of secret knowledge about the
existence of the Pacific Ocean. There is, however, a simpler, more compelling reason. Some
aspects of the claim are clearly false – not only was South America not separate from the land
in the north, but the whole American landmass was potentially connected to Asia in the far
north; not until 1728 was the narrow waterway between Siberia and Alaska found, and hence
the separation between Asia and the Americas. Thus we have no reason to believe that
new island was not its separation from east Asia, but its similarity to it
as part of a longer island chain associated with spices and anthropophages.
In a cultural landscape in which islands were associated with prized
commodities, the notion of an enormous island hugging the equator and
spreading southwards could well have excited mercantile buyers of the
map.122 In this way, the selection of anthropophages to emblematize
Brazil fitted the expectations of merchants desirous of profitable westward
voyages to the Far East.
If associating the distant west with the lucrative lands of the distant east
was financially attractive, one might ask to what extent the western hemi-
sphere on Waldseemüller’s Carta Marina of 1516 was merely a reflection of
earlier illustrated cartography of Asia. In fact, the types of information
that Grüninger’s workshop added to the map varied across the parts of
the world; the geographical specificity of the iconography rose sharply
for the lands in the far west, even though the number of illustrations
diminished. Late medieval mappaemundi had been less specific with the
placement of illustrations insofar as Asia and Africa tended to be illuminated
with numerous scenes, without a clear sense of distinct places with different
peoples.123 Similarly, on the Carta Marina, Europe was densely covered with
place names with the occasional coat of arms, mountain range or river.
The ethnography of Africa and Asia on the Carta Marina continued the
iconographic conventions of medieval illuminated maps:124 numerous
images of kings, often jostling for space, are interspersed with small, occa-
sional depictions of monstrous peoples. On many sixteenth-century world
maps, the region of the Americas is replete in blank spaces, all the better
to distinguish its constituent regions from one another – precisely denoted
by empty areas between them. The makers of the Carta Marina and
contemporary maps, while clearly informed by classical and medieval
Waldseemüller’s supposition that the land in the west was an island was anything other than a
guess, albeit one that fits the later discovery of the Pacific. For this, see also Davies, ‘America
and Amerindians’, 359.
122
Ibid. See also Ricardo Padrón, ‘“The Indies of the West”: Or the Tale of how an Imaginary
Geography Circumnavigated the Globe’, in Western Visions of the Far East in a Transpacific
Age (Aldershot, Hants, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 19–42, at 23–6.
123
Two examples are the thirteenth-century Ebstorf and Hereford maps.
124
See, for example, the Psalter Map (c.1265), the Hereford Map (c.1300), the Fra Mauro Map
(c.1459), the Catalan Atlas (c.1375) and the Ebstorf Map (thirteenth century). For the
monstrous peoples of the northern climes on this map, see Chet Van Duzer, ‘A Northern
Refuge of the Monstrous Races: Asia on Waldseemüller’s 1516 Carta Marina’, Imago Mundi,
62:2 (2010), 221–31.
traditions, did not duplicate the cookie-cutter monarchs or the full range of
Old World monsters indiscriminately across the American landmasses.
The significance, for the Americas, of the precise placement of ethno-
graphic data is again made clear in an edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia
begun by Waldseemüller, completed by the physician and mapmaker
Lorenz Fries and printed by Johann Grüninger in 1522. In Brazil, near a
cannibal vignette closely modelled on the Carta Marina, is a caption:
‘Antropophagi hic sunt’ (here there are anthropophages), signalling to
viewers that this very spot was where the activity took place. As Christian
Jacob put it in his reflection on the ‘hic sunt. . .’ construct on illustrated
maps, ‘the image produces meaning by its very localization’.125 In essence,
location, direction and route, however imperfectly known, were the organ-
izing principles for structuring knowledge – ethnographic or otherwise – in
cartographic form in the Renaissance. Mapmakers were not prepared, by
and large, to add to the Americas information that had not come from
westward voyages.
The travels of the German Brazilian cannibal
The Carta Marina and its later editions informed influential makers
of printed maps, cosmographies and geographies including Sebastian
Münster, Peter Apian, Oronce Fine, Joachim Vadian and Abraham Orte-
lius.126 A new motif – the cannibal hut – emerged when a map illustrator
consulted a travel edition with the Carta Marina’s iconography in his mind’s
eye. The world map, the work of humanist geographer Sebastian Münster,
first appeared in a 1532 compendium of travel accounts and geography that
included extracts on cannibals derived from the Libretto or the Paesi.127 Its
illustrations have been attributed to Hans Holbein the Younger.128 The
bottom-left corner of the map contains new and old motifs of anthropoph-
agy, creatively combined to offer a diorama of daily cannibal life (Fig. 3.10).129
125
Ptolemy, . . . Opus geographia (Strasbourg, 1522), map 28; Jacob, Sovereign Map, 171.
126
Fischer and Wieser, Oldest Map, 40.
127
Johann Huttich, Novus orbis regionum ac insularum veteribus incognitarum, una cum tabula
cosmographica, et aliquot aliis consimilis argumenti libellis . . ., preface, Simon Grynaeus (Basle
and Paris, 1532). For contents and editions, see BA, IX, nos 34100–34107.
128
Dackerman, Prints, 246, item 84. Holbein had produced illustrations for another mathematical
work of Münster’s, also printed in Basel by Henricus Petrus, in 1544; see ibid., 246, item 58.
The map also appeared in the Basle editions of 1537 and 1555. For Münster’s writing on
America, see Davies, ‘America and Amerindians’.
129
Sebastian Münster, Typus cosmographicus universalis (Basle, 1532).
3.10 Sebastian Münster, Typus cosmographicus universalis in Johann Huttich, ed., Geographica universalis (Basle, 1532).
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 1986 +106.
All the elements of Léry’s complaint appear here. The American vignette
contains the butchering-table and joints roasting on a spit, which were both
becoming customary. A man leads a horse to which a trussed figure has been
tied. The hand protruding from a cooking pot reflects printed descriptions;
Peter Martyr had mentioned human body parts boiled with animals.130
The hair-raising image of a head and limbs hanging from a hut does not
appear in any known illustrations that pre-date it. It (or its lost source)
amalgamated two motifs from Vespuccian sources: huts and body parts
hanging from roofs. The description of the cannibals’ houses as wooden
huts had appeared in both Columbian and Vespuccian texts, but neither
mentioned body parts hanging outside them. In the Soderini letter we
merely learn that: ‘Their dwellings are firmly constructed in the shape of a
bell from large trees fastened together, and are covered with palm leaves,
which offer most ample protection against the winds and storms.’131 In the
Scillacio-Coma letter from Columbus’s second voyage, the huts are pleas-
ing objects of marvel:
The elegance of the magnificent houses, built with thicker reeds and
resembling canopies, instantly turned the faces of our men in wonder.
The ingeniously worked wood aroused delight; the perfectly handled
timbers, covetousness.132
Far from necessarily eliciting disgust or horror, this extract shows how
huts could stimulate feelings of admiration. By embellishing the cannibals’
pyramid-shaped houses with the hanging body parts described elsewhere,
the map illustration turned a marvellous object demonstrating artisanal
skill into one highlighting violence.133
130
The printed sources include the Libretto and Paesi (chap. xcii) and the 1511 and 1516 editions
of Peter Martyr.
131
Martin Waldseemüller, The Cosmographiae introductio [1507] in Facsimile, ed. Charles George
Herbermann, intro. Joseph Fischer and Franz von Wieser (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries
Press, 1969 [first published in 1907]), LIII–LIV and 97; Waldseemüller and Ringmann,
Cosmographie introductio, sig. c.i.r-v: ‘illorum domus campanarum instar constructae sunt
firmiter ex magnis arboribus solidatae palmarum foliis desuper contectae et adversus ventos et
tempestates tutissime . . . esse’. I have amended the translation slightly.
132
RC xii, 6.2.9: ‘Domus magnificae arundinibus textae crassioribus, conopea imitatae, quarum
elegantia nostrorum ora verterunt protinus in admirationem; ligna affabre extructa
voluptatem, tigna examussim elaborata cupidinem auxere’. Huts also appear in Peter Martyr’s
text: RC v, PM, 1.2.3; and hanging limbs, in ibid., 1.2.4.
133
The hut reappeared in a simpler form – minus some of the dismembered limbs and the person
peeking out of the entrance – in Münster’s 1540 map of America, Novae insulae, XVII nova
tabula in idem, Geographia universalis, vetus et nova, complectens Claudii Ptolemaei
Alexandrini enarrationis libros VIII (Basle, 1540). The map was reprinted in multiple editions
of Münster’s Cosmographia universalis from 1544.
The motifs developed in the Rhenish lands soon spread to other regions
of production. A number of motifs that appeared on Waldseemüller’s 1516
Carta Marina resurface on later Portuguese manuscript maps.134 It is
impossible to be certain whether the manuscript illuminators had seen the
Carta Marina, which may have been produced in 1,000 copies, and was
succeeded by later editions. The similarities could equally be the conse-
quence of Waldseemüller’s own dependence on Iberian manuscript cartog-
raphy. Portuguese manuscript maps contain several motifs in the region of
Brazil that are characteristic of early sixteenth-century travellers’ descrip-
tions of Carib, rather than Tupi, peoples. Key among these was the roasting-
spit that, as we shall see in Chapter 4, the Tupi peoples who Léry encoun-
tered did not use. Since Portuguese traders in Brazil had had dealings
(peaceful and otherwise), with the local Tupi tribes, the Carib cast of
Brazilian ethnography on maps suggests that these traders’ accounts, none
of which are known to have been printed in this period, had only a limited
effect on wider perceptions of the peoples of Brazil, even in Portugal.
Mapmakers in the Low Countries began producing maps illustrated
with the world’s peoples in the mid-sixteenth century. Their main source
of cartographic information was Spain; the few Spanish printed maps had
been produced at Antwerp, a city with a highly developed printing trad-
ition in the sixteenth century. For iconographic material, however, these
mapmakers drew on German illustrations, a practice that helped to cement
Waldseemüller’s mainland cannibal practices within the map traditions
of the Low Countries and, through their circulation in Spain, England
and elsewhere, to inflect viewers’ opinions about the inhabitants of the
New World.135
Conclusion
Mapmakers managed alterity through dietary difference, a tradition of

ethnography with an ancient lineage. Despite this, the choice of Waldsee-
müller or his printer Grüninger to place cannibals – and only cannibals –
in Brazil constituted a departure from the medieval conventions for illus-
trating the inhabitants of the southern and western extremes of the world,
from the vantage-point of Europe. While surviving world maps from the
134
For examples, see Davies, ‘Amerindians on European Maps’, chap. 4.
135
Numerous examples are discussed in Davies, ‘Amerindians on European Maps’, chapters 4
and 5.
thirteenth century placed anthropophagi in Africa and Asia, they also

included a host of other extraordinary figures that had appeared in Pliny,
such as the long-eared Panotti and one-legged Sciapodes. Similarly, a wide
range of monstrous peoples appears in the easternmost regions of Asia,
and in Africa, on sixteenth-century maps.136
This type of imagery might appear at first sight to be highly sensation-
alized, devised from the medieval monster tradition by a printer with
his eye on sales figures. Waldseemüller’s Carta Marina, however, is so
richly covered in Latin inscriptions that identify its monstrous peoples
that we must assume that he, or other humanists, were involved
in choosing the material and devising the illuminations. The details of
the iconography of Brazilian cannibalism can be traced beyond Grünin-
ger’s workshop to contemporary travellers’ accounts. Indeed, even the
monsters in the Old World on the Carta Marina had been described
by earlier travellers, or by authors who had spoken to eyewitnesses.137
For scholar-geographers, ethnographic marvels from eyewitness sources
were credible.
Nevertheless, there was no reason why German humanists should
necessarily have emphasized monstrosity over peaceful activities. The
Venetian Fra Mauro map (c.1459) was based heavily on Marco Polo’s
Divisament dou monde, and yet it concentrates on information of relevance
to merchants, particularly the locations of spices.138 Just as Fra Mauro was
working in Venice at a time when the city’s sons were actively engaged
in trade with the east, Waldseemüller and other German cartographers
and printers could have chosen to emphasize the trading possibilities of
this new world, with a German mercantile audience in mind.139 German
mapmakers might have begun a tradition of illustrating commodities such
as gold, pearls and brazilwood in map interiors.
Equally, the Americas could have been epitomized by images of the
Terrestrial Paradise. By the fifteenth century, both southern Africa and
Asia were associated with Paradise. While these may seem to be mutually
136
See, for example, the Rylands and Desceliers 1550 manuscript maps, studied in Chapter 4.
137
See Johnson, ‘Buying Stories’, for the ways in which German publishers and cosmographers
paid attention to particular details in travel writing, and valued eyewitness authority in ancient
texts, and judged new authorities against them.
138
Angelo Cattaneo, Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 205–11. For the
map’s inscriptions, see Piero Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map: With a Commentary and
Translations of the Inscriptions (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006).
139
For German mercantile interests overseas, particularly the spice trade, see Johnson, German
Discovery, 92–103 and chap. 4 in the same work.
contradictory locations, in fact, there had long been an association between

the two regions, as well as a cross-fertilization of what was to be expected
in each.140 Travellers to the Caribbean and the South American mainland
had suggested that Paradise was nearby; the nudity of the local inhabitants
was thought by some to corroborate this.
Stephanie Leitch’s thoughtful monograph on early sixteenth-century
ethnographic images in German print culture emphasizes the roles played
by humanist scholarship and by exotic artefacts and specimens made
available by local merchants. Leitch focused on two artists, Hans Burgk-
mair and Jörg Breu, and prints they made in c.1508 and 1515, respectively.
In this study of mapping others in largely the metaphorical sense,141 Leitch
asserts that: ‘Humanist mediation kept these artists’ representations free
from both the discourse of monstrous races that historically characterized
travel accounts, as well as from the propagandistic and colonial taint that
would mark images of these same subjects in the wake of conquest.’142
The engagement of Rhenish mapmakers with the Americas reveals a
contrasting facet of German print culture. In 1516, the Grüninger work-
shop created an iconic Amerindian image on the Carta Marina that
reinforced rather than exploded the discourse of monstrous peoples.
Despite Waldseemüller’s humanist training, the makers of this map also
placed a number of monstrous peoples around the northern, southern and
eastern edges of the Old World. These included the chopper-happy
anthropophage in Java and the Parossites in Tartaria who subsisted on
an ethereal diet of the vapours of cooked meat.143 Since Latin texts about
these beings appear on the map, we must assume that an educated
140
Scafi, Mapping Paradise, 218.
141
Leitch, Mapping Ethnography. Few of the prints discussed are also maps. The important
exception is the map in the 1492 Nuremberg Chronicle, which Leitch discusses in chap. 2.
Leitch also argues that Hans Burgkmair’s famous multi-block ethnographic woodcut (1508) is
a map (76–7). I take a different view: while the woodcuts do arrange the peoples of Africa and
Asia in the order in which the merchant Balthasar Springer encountered them on his voyage to
East Asia, this is not sufficient reason to call Burgkmair’s ethnographic frieze a map. The only
space that is represented visually is the space within each vignette. While the sailing-route
from Europe to East Asia was two-dimensional, the woodcuts have been designed as a one-
dimensional frieze, not as a map of the sailing-route. One might consider the frieze as a visual
itinerary, however, but it is no closer to a portolan chart or an itinerary map than it is to a
portolan (a book of written sailing-directions).
142
Leitch, Mapping Ethnography, 3.
143
For Waldseemüller’s sources for the monsters of northern Europe and Asia, see Van Duzer,
‘Northern Refuge’: this shows that the main sources were ultimately John of Plano Carpini’s
travel narratives, as abstracted in the Speculum historiale of Vincent de Beauvais, and a
cosmographical treatise, Pierre d’Ailly’s Imago Mundi. In both cases, it is very likely that most
of the ethnographic illustrations on Waldseemüller’s map were original compositions.
individual was involved in devising the violent ethnographic content that

Waldseemüller’s successor, Fries, would reinforce.
Sebastian Münster, another humanist working in the 1530s–1550s,
continued this tradition; his 1532 world map emblematized the inhabitants
of America through every anthropophagous trope available: butchering
tables; amputated limbs jostling uneasily with shrunken heads hanging
from rafters, like so many sides of ham (or perhaps Würste); and cannibal
cooking-pots (which do represent Tupi practice) from which dismembered
hands protrude in a forlorn but ultimately futile fashion. By 1550 and the
publication of the most comprehensive edition of Münster’s Cosmographia
in his own lifetime, a range of printed texts described other Amerindian
peoples, notably the inhabitants of the Inca and Mexica regions. All the
same, the cannibals are the only Amerindian people that Münster chose to
discuss at length in the Cosmographia. Münster lists many of his sources in
a catalogue of authors that appears among the work’s prefatory materials.
Among these are Columbus, Vespucci and Lorenz Fries. The cannibals’
monstrous behaviour echoed that of Andaman islanders and other anthro-
pophages who were splattered across the sensational pages of medieval
sources from the Wonders of the East to the Book of John Mandeville.144
Waldseemüller’s decision to link information about the anthropophagy
of the Caribbean with Brazil constructed a particular notion of Brazilian
activities in the European imagination. While a Portuguese manuscript
map might have inspired the image, the Carta Marina disseminated it in
print. Western European printed and manuscript map traditions were
intricately entangled; elements of the Carta Marina’s iconography – relat-
ing to the New and Old Worlds – also appeared in French manuscript
maps and shaped subsequent Portuguese manuscript maps.145
Renaissance German mapmakers made choices for the details, compos-
ition and location of ethnographic material on maps; map viewers paid
attention to these choices. There was reasonable cause in the available
sources for the invention of Waldseemüller’s Amerindian anthropophages,
if not for Münster’s continuing deployment of them at the expense of every
other Amerindian people. In addition, anthropophages had long been
associated with the spice-rich islands of the Moluccas. For both Portuguese
manuscript maps commissioned to celebrate Portuguese navigational
achievements, and for German maps drawing on those maps and printed
144
Anthropophages appear on on the edges of the habitable world on medieval maps such as the
Hereford map; see Mittman, Maps and Monsters, 40, 57–8.
145
See Chapter 4.
texts, choosing the cannibal motif for Brazil connected the lands found by
sailing west to the riches of the Far East. Finally, dietary practices had
commonly helped to delineate different peoples in the Old World on maps.
Since there was almost no evidence in the travel accounts of physical
abnormalities among the Amerindians, the most fundamental way in
which these peoples could be distinguished from Europeans was through
the representation of their anthropophagy.
The circulation of these maps and of geographical works informed by
them formed part of the intellectual landscape in which native peoples
were being coerced or enslaved into working in gold and silver mines in the
Caribbean islands, Mexico, Brazil, Peru and the northern Andes. Indigen-
ous persons and transported Africans developed Afro-indigenous popula-
tions and cultures over time in these mining regions, as well as mulatto
(Afro-European) and mestizo (indigenous-European) groups.146 Individ-
uals identified as Carib cannibals were the only peoples of the Caribbean
islands and nearby mainland regions who could legally be enslaved,
although many persons were enslaved through the loopholes in the ter-
minology.147 Mapmakers chose cannibalism for epistemological reasons,
but their choices created the kind of Indian who chimed with colonial
linguistic invention. German maps, however, went a step further than the
binary of ‘peaceful’ and ‘warlike’ Indians, and implied instead that all of
the peoples of Brazil were cannibals and thus lawfully enslavable.
146
For mestisaje or cultural intermixing in mining communities, see Kris Lane, ‘Africans and
Natives in the Mines of Spanish America’, in Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations
in Colonial Latin America, ed. Matthew Restall (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico
Press, 2005), 159–84; for the same in Brazil, see Stuart B. Schwartz and Hal Langfur,
‘Tapahuns, Negros da Terra, and Curibocas: Common Cause and Confrontation between
Blacks and Natives in Colonial Brazil’, in Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in
Colonial Latin America, ed. Matthew Restall (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico
Press, 2005), 81–114.
147
See Van Deusen, Global Indios.

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3 | Spit-roasts, barbecues and the invention

of the Brazilian cannibal

Cannibalism appeared on the ﬁrst map of the Americas to illustrate the

Recent research in forensic archaeology, ethnohistory, anthropology and

To Carib or not to Carib? Language games and

The ethnic distinction made in travel accounts between peaceful Arawaks

Where interaction with particular peoples is under discussion, I use speciﬁc

These ‘Caniba’ were the Island Caribs or Karipuna, denoted as man-

to the Great Khan of Cathay on behalf of the Catholic Monarchs,

Columbian and Vespuccian voyages in print

Travel writing from the voyages of Columbus and Vespucci is typically

. . .I have found no monstrous men nor heard of any, except on one

Here, Columbus uses a broad deﬁnition of monstrudos encompassing

3.1 Christopher Columbus, De insulis inventis (Basle, 1493), title-page, detail.

In terms of column inches, cannibalism is again the exception rather

people who resemble the Tupi-Guaraní tribes of northeast Brazil. He

In the caption of this print, in contrast to the captions on early maps,

moment when a woman raises a jawbone to bring down a European

image shows Europeans in the Caribbean, one of whom appears to be

Emblematizing Circum-Caribbean peoples:

By contrast to travel accounts and their illustrations, which created the

group of mapmakers who, nevertheless, depended on travellers’ accounts

Since the map encompassed the entire known world on a space of

The earliest printed map to illustrate New World anthropophages, Martin

3.7 Martin Waldseemüller, Carta Marina ([Strasbourg?], 1516).

This incident took place on Guadeloupe during Columbus’s second

Here is the most cruel nation of anthropophages (whom people call

The information paraphrases a passage from one of the versions of Peter

Léry evidently expected to see in Brazil on maps precisely located vignettes

as Caribs, rather than as Tupinambá. Second, it was diﬃcult for map-

and Chichimeca were re-deﬁned in colonial Spanish and Portuguese

The travels of the German Brazilian cannibal

Mapmakers managed alterity through dietary diﬀerence, a tradition of

thirteenth century placed anthropophagi in Africa and Asia, they also

contradictory locations, in fact, there had long been an association between

individual was involved in devising the violent ethnographic content that

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