Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History(31)

birds were boiling in their pots, also geese mixed with bits of human flesh, while other parts of human bodies were fixed on spits, ready for roasting. Upon searching another house the Spaniards found arm and leg bones, which the cannibals carefully preserve for pointing their arrows; for they have no iron. All other bones, after the flesh is eaten, they throw aside. The Spaniards discovered the recently decapitated head of a young man still wet with blood.

Clearly, Martyr was instrumental in dehumanizing the Caribs, describing them as savages who treated their fellow islanders in the much the same way Europeans might treat sheep or cattle. Additionally, in keeping with his pro-Columbus stance, Martyr also used the threat of cannibals (now described as having nearly supernatural powers) as a thinly veiled justification for the overt military theme of Columbus’s third voyage, an expedition that became, in effect, a New World troop surge:

The inhabitants of these islands (which, from now on we may consider ours), women and men have no other means of escaping capture by the cannibals, than by flight. Although they use wooden arrows with sharpened points, they are aware that these arms are of little use against the fury and violence of their enemies, and they all admit that ten cannibals could easily overcome a hundred of their own men in a pitched battle.

So was there any real cannibalism going on in the Caribbean when Columbus arrived? Oxford-trained anthropologist Neil Whitehead suggests that while many reports of the behavior are examples of “imperial propaganda,” there are several reasons to think that the Caribs and other Amerindian groups did practice forms of ritualized cannibalism. Whitehead’s rationale is that, in addition to the self-serving allegations of man-eating from Columbus and his men, reports from other Spaniards placed Amerindian cannibalism into social contexts—as funerary rites or rituals related to the treatment of enemies slain during battle. For example, in the 17th century, Jacinto de Caravajal wrote, “The ordinary food of the Caribs is cassava, fish or game . . . they eat human flesh when they are at war and do so as a sign of victory, not as food.”

According to anthropologists, ritualized cannibalism can be differentiated into two forms: exocannibalism and endocannibalism. Exocannibalism (from the Greek exo—“from the outside”) refers to the consumption of individuals from outside one’s own community or social group, while endocannibalism (from the Greek endo—“from the inside”) is defined as the ritual consumption of deceased members of one’s own family, community, or social group.

With regard to exocannibalism, a number of historical accounts claim that the Caribs consumed their enemies—those killed in battle, taken prisoner, or captured during raids. The belief was that this form of ritual cannibalism was a way to transfer desired traits, like strength or courage, from the deceased enemy to themselves.

In other times and places, exocannibalism has been used as a way to both terrorize an enemy and feed the hungry. In the 1960s, anthropologist Pierre Clastres lived with the Ache of Paraguay and claimed that one of the four groups that he studied ate their enemies. Similar claims have been made about the Tupinambá of eastern Brazil, most famously by Hans Stadin, a 16th century German shipwrecked while serving as a seaman on a Portuguese ship. In his 1557 book, True Story and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-eating People in the New World, America, Stadin, who reportedly spent a year in captivity before escaping, described raids in which the Tupinambá killed and ate everyone they captured (except, apparently, him).

In the Pacific Theater during World War II, Allied prisoners of war described numerous instances in which their Japanese captors tortured and then ate their prisoners. Presumably with their supply routes interrupted by Allied submarines and bombing raids, the Japanese were on such short rations that they resorted to cannibalism. In postwar tribunals, survivors testified that their captors acted systematically, selecting one individual each day and hacking off limbs and flesh while they were alive and conscious. American soldiers also became even more insistent about removing the bodies of their fallen comrades from the battlefield after it was discovered that the Japanese sometimes sliced off pieces of the dead with bayonets—a gory ritual some Americans began to practice as well.

The most famous wartime incident of starvation-related exocannibalism was the Chichi Jima Incident, in which Lt. Gen. Yoshio Tachibana ordered his starving men on the island of Chichi Jima to execute a group of downed American airmen who had been captured after carrying out a bombing raid. Medical orderlies were then instructed to cut the livers from the bodies, and the organs were cooked and served to the senior staff. Tachibana and several others were arrested after the war, but since cannibalism was not listed as a war crime, they were actually convicted and hanged for preventing the honorable burial of the prisoners the officer and his men had eaten. Later was it revealed that an American submarine had recovered one of the nine downed fliers, thus saving him from a similar fate at the hands of the starving Japanese. The lucky man’s name was Lt. George H. W. Bush.

There is no such element of terror involved in the practice of endocannibalism, although it can overlap with some aspects of exocannibalism in that body parts (in this case, from relatives or group members) are consumed for reasons that include transferring the spirits of the dead or their traits into the bodies of the living. Anthropologists have proposed that, much like Christian burial rituals or the administration of Last Rites, endocannibalism was undertaken by some groups in order to facilitate the separation of the deceased’s soul from its body. The Melanesians (those societal groups living in Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Papua New Guinea) reportedly practiced a form of mortuary cannibalism for this reason, consuming small tidbits from the bodies of their deceased relatives. This form of ritual cannibalism will be examined in detail in an upcoming chapter.