Do Roman Catholics KnOw

Woodcut of a fur-coated man with the head of a dog: a Cynocephalus, or Doghead

how Columbus discovered cannibals in the New World?

Associated to Place: New Worlds > articles -- by * Dionysia Xanthippos (137 Articles), Historical Article 1 Featured November 30 , 2008

The story of how Columbus became so entranced by ancient tales of the Dogheads and other monstrous races of the East that he believed the Carib Indians of the New World to be dog-faced cannibals, thereby justifying their enslavement by the Spanish. (Formerly titled, "Christopher Columbus and the Monstrous Races") In 1492, while Christopher Columbus was sailing West to get to the East, back in Nuremberg, Germany, Hartmann Schedel was preparing his famous Chronicle of the History of the World. Next to his Map of the World would appear, above six other equally odd creatures, this woodcut of a fur-coated man with the head of a dog: a Cynocephalus, or Doghead (shown above). Peering through his telescope as his ships approached the New World in 1492, Christopher Columbus hoped to see, along with other monstrous races of the East, a Doghead. The Dogheads, he knew, were just one of many strange peoples that peopled India and the East. This was what the chroniclers had predicted in their chronicles and the mapmakers had depicted on their maps of the world. So Columbus knew that if he could find just one of those monsters he could prove that he had, as he'd planned, circumnavigated the globe and reached India and the East. For centuries everyone believed that to see such wonders you had to travel East, in the direction of the Wonders. As Marco Polo had done, for example. And before him, ... The Crusaders. As they travelled east to the Holy Land, many carried with them little guidebooks with crude drawings of the marvels they would see, including members of the Monstrous Races. When Crusaders and pilgrims travelling south from Germany and France met Crusaders and pilgrims coming north from Spain at the crossroads town of Vzelay, they would see carved above a portal on the 12th-century Abbey Church of La Madeleine (Mary Magdalene) a figure of Christ the Redeemer surrounded by figures of the Saved, including members of the Monstrous Races. Just as Christian theologians today debate whether the Good News of Christ's Salvation extends to extraterrestrials (ET's), so did their medieval counterparts when hearing of strange creatures elsewhere in the world that were like, but also quite unlike, themselves. It is easy to see how the monks of Vzelay answered that question.

THE DOGHEADS

A dogheaded couple on the tympanum of Christ the Redeemer over an inner portal in the Benedictine Abbey Church of St. Mary Magdalene, Vzelay.

(A mob defaced the figures over the outside portals during the French Revolution.). The "man," or dog-man, leads his dog-lady (we can't say "bitch," here, though she LOOKS a bit dominating) on the road to salvation. Perhaps so crusading knights might identify with him as friend rather than foe, the sculptor shows him carrying a sword instead of the usual knobby club from a tree limb.

THE PYGMIES

Here a pygmy climbs onto his horse on the tympanum of Christ the Redeemer in the church of La Madelaine, Vzelay. Though this is a pigmy horse, a mere pony, the pygmy still needs a ladder to get up to it. The artist may also have intended a parallel to the Christian steps to salvation, commonly depicted as climbing a ladder to Heaven. (Recall the refrain of the old spiritual, "We are climbing Jacob's Ladder, Soldiers of the Cross.") At the top of the Ladder is Christ; so, by analogy, Christ is the Horse that carries the saved person up to Heaven? Just as in the Classical world an apotheosized hero may ride up to Olympus on a winged horse or in a golden chariot drawn by winged horses? Note how the pygmy's cloak flies out behind him like a pair of wings. Behind the pygmy and his horse can be seen what looks like another sort of monster: a Scorpion-man.

The Vzelay monsters show it's wrong to demonize these strange creatures or think of them as evil or horrible in the way we now call wicked people or frightful movie aliens "monsters." The ancients and then the medieval Christians called these freaks of Nature "monstrous" for the same reason they called them "marvelous" and "wonderful." They spoke of them, in the same breath, as "signs and wonders." And "signs" they were. The word "monster" itself was directly related to the word "demonstrate," meaning to "show." Just as the priest held up the Host in a gold or silver "monstrance" to show the miracle of bread being changed into the body of Christ, so God created "monsters" to show us the power and glory of Creation, and thus the power and glory of the Creator. Sometimes one had to travel great distances to see them. The Irish monk St. Brendan said that God had sent him on long travels about the world to punish his disbelief in the wonders of
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Creation. St.Augustine saw the monstrous races of the East as demonstrations of both God's power and his desire to awaken our yearning for the marvellous.

woodcut from the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493: the heavens appear both a rain of blood and a rainbow of hope, and on earth Siamese twins and four-armed, four-legged children are born

In the late Middle Ages, however, as the world neared another millenium (in those days, a midmillenium did just as well), many of the oddities and freaks of Nature were seen, like Noah's Flood, as "omens," as warnings of doom and disaster to be visited on mankind by an angry God. One can see the tension of the times between good and bad omens in this woodcut from the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493, where in the heavens appear both a rain of blood and a rainbow of hope, while on earth Siamese twins and four-armed, four-legged children are born. But these two are genuine "freaks" - one-of-a-kind accidents of nature, not created species, not monstrous "races" that can reproduce. So Columbus, in searching for the monstrous races of the East, should expect them to be created good, and only some to be, like demons, "fallen," terrible and sterile. But how would he know which were which? At any rate Columbus never lost faith in his pursuit of a New World, a new Christian Millenium. In a letter to Ferdinand and Isabella that he wrote in the Diary or daily log of his fourth and last voyage, he pledged to use its gold to build a New Jerusalem to replace the Old . And in one of his last books, a "Book of
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Prophecies," he predicted his discoveries would usher in that Millenium, with its center the New Jerusalem, and its Emperor the King of Spain.

THE CLASSICAL SOURCES

To feed their fascination for exotic monsters, the Middle Ages relied on classical authors. They knew about pygmies from the Iliad, where Homer describes the Trojans as a swarm of cranes or storks flying north over the sea to battle pygmy farmers in order to devour their crops.

Scene on a famous Greek vase and on a woodcut from the equally famous Nuremberg Chronicle from "Pygmies Fighting Cranes on the Francois Vase".

But Homer has little or nothing to say of other exotic races. Neither does Herodotus, oddly, though he is known not only as the Father of History but also as the Father of Lies. Yet I suspect his account of the dog-headed Egyptian god Anubis and the priests and chief embalmers who wore masks in his image, may be one source of tales about the Dogheads. However, medieval writers relied mainly on Pliny the Elders "Natural History" of 77 AD. And Pliny in turn took most of his material from two earlier Greek writers, Ctesias and Megasthenes. Ctesias of Knidos was a doctor at the Persian court of Artaxerxes in the late 5th century BC. After the death of Alexander the Great, Megasthenes was sent in 303 BC by Seleucus I as an ambassador
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to the Indian court of King Chandragupta in Patna, and he became a gold mine of stories about the Monstrous Races of India. So Megasthenes, along with Pliny, was mined extensively by medieval authors.

THE MEDIEVAL SOURCES OF COLUMBUS' VIEW OF THE WORLD

Dogheads buying and selling nuts and fruits - an early 15th c illustration from Marco Polo's "Les Merveilles." While the dogheads are not shown here as cannibals, this[e] men in the illustration [below]are shown as cannibals, as well as animal worshipers

When Columbus sailed for the New World, hoping to reach India and China, he took along his own heavily annotated copy of "The Travels of Marco Polo." First published around 1300 as "Description of the World," it was later translated into Italian as "Il Milione" - the title Columbus would have known it by.
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In it he read, in Polo's account of a certain island in the Indies, this:

"Now let me tell you of a race of men well worth describing in this book. You may take it for a fact that all the men of this island have heads like dogs, and teeth and eyes like dogs; for I assure you that the whole aspect of their faces is that of big mastiffs. They are a very cruel race: whenever they can get hold of a man who is not one of their kind, they devour him."

Though this and other "wonders" Polo described raised eyebrows, even outright disbelief, Columbus believed it. So he probably believed Polo's report that the great Khan of China had black magicians at his feasts who could make golden cups on the table rise into the air and fly about. Perhaps he drew the line at Polo's report of the ruch, a giant bird that carries off elephants, then drops them to smash on the rocks before swooping down and eating them. That tale was embroidered on later by Antonio Pigafetta, one of Magellan's companions, in his account of how they sailed around the globe in 1522. It also wound up as one of Sinbad the Sailor's adventures in the "Tales of the Arabian Nights." Small wonder that in the early 1400's Polo's "Description:" was translated into French as "Livre des Merveilles du Monde"("Book of the World's Marvels").

Meanwhile, between 1357 and 1371 there had appeared in England a book in French with a similar title: "Les Merveilles du Monde," later published in English as "The Travels of Sir John Mandeville." Columbus seems to have possessed a translation of this book, too, and was heavily influenced by it, even though it was a ragbag of wonders that lifted travelogues from dozens of its predecessors. Sifting through this ragbag, however, we find chapter 20, whose title promises to show "... how the earth and the sea be of round form and shape, by proof of the star that is clept [called] Antarctic, that is fixed in the south." Surprisingly, in a rather rambling but quite reasonable argument, our fictive knight "Sir John" delivers: Because no one in northern lands and seas can see that single fixed star below their southern horizon, and just as no one in southern lands and seas can see our North Star, the earth and sea must be curved in each direction. "And those two stars never move, and by them turneth all the firmament right as doth a wheel that turneth by his axle-tree." "And so "the land and the sea be of round shape," The whole world is "round."
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Impressed? I was. And so was Columbus. He was also impressed with Mandeville's sightings of "Folk of Diverse Shape and Marvelously Disfigured."

Folks like these:

In this woodcut from the earliest printed edition of Mandevilles Travels we see, clockwise from top left, specimens of: "wild men with horns and hoofs" (a goat man or satyr); "folk of foul stature and of cursed kind that have no heads. And their eyen be in their shoulders"; "the folk that have but one foot" and use it to shade themselves from the sun; and the "vegetable lamb." Of the last, Mandeville writes: "and when it is ripe men cut it a sonder, and men fynde therein a beast as it were of flesh and bone and blood, as it were a lyttle lambe without wolle, and men eat the beast and fruit also, and sure it seemeth very strange."

Strange indeed

Finally, Columbus was impressed by the "Imago Mundi," a manuscript written in 1410 by the French inquisitor Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly, but not printed as a book until 1480. D'Ailly not only showed, like Mandeville, that the world was round. He predicted that Asia could be reached by sailing west across the Atlantic. Columbus had his own copy of the "Imago Mundi," read it repeatedly, and filled its margins with nearly 900 notes. Here's one he wrote: There are savages who eat human flesh; they have vile and horrible faces.

Remember that one.

THE NUREMBERG CHRONICLE, 1493

While Columbus was searching the New World for these monsters of the East, back in the Old

World Hartmann Schedel was getting ready to publish woodcuts of them in his famous

Nuremberg Chronicle.

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The images of these monsters are cut from separate blocks of wood so that, like the book's wooden letters, they can be rearranged in different ways. In the arrangement shown below the Monoculus or Cyclops and the Blemnye appear again atop a group of 6 along with a Panotis ("All-ears"); a man with a huge stretched lip; a Sciapod or "Shade-foot" whose single leg has a foot so big he uses it as an umbrella to shade him from the sun; and a goat-man or satyr.

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Headed again by the Cynocephalus or Doghead, the Monoculus and Blemnye reappear in a group of seven at the left of the Nuremberg Chronicle's famous "Map of the World."

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This is a modern colorized facsmile, but it is based on one of the several hundred surviving copies that was handcolored with watercolors. First printed in 1493, it would have been too late for Columbus' first voyage, but he surely had a copy of the map that Schedel used for it, which had appeared in a 1482 edition of Ptolemy's "Cosmographia Universalis" that was the first to include maps printed from woodcuts.

At this period maps of the world show it as divided into three continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa. Note how the east coast of Africa extends all the way across to the southern edge of the Indian Ocean to enclose India and China in the East, showing no sea route to those lands further on, let alone from the west. Whether Columbus had any later and better maps I don't know; but he may have if he believed Asia was not closed off and landlocked on its easten end. From the top down, the seven monstrous races shown in Schedel's side panel are; * a Cynocephalus or Doghead in his hairy coat * a one-eyed Monoculos or Cyclops ("Round-eye") * a Blemnye, a headless humanoid with his face on his chest * an Antipod, whose feet turn backwards * a Bearded Lady * a Sciapod, or "Shade-foot," with just one foot, which he uses to shade himself from the sun * a woman with a prodigious appendage (elephant trunk?) extending from her chin to her navel
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(Now back to Columbus):

COLUMBUS AND THE DOG-FACED CANNIBALS OF THE CARIBBEAN

After a year in the New World, Columbus' hope of finding monstrous races that could be saved, to the greater glory of Spain, seemed to fade. In a letter he wrote in 1493 to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, he reports: In these islands I have so far found no human monstrosities, as many expected... But wait.... In his log of Sunday, November 4, 1492, as he began sailing back to Spain, Columbus wrote that within a few weeks after he'd first sighted land, he had met some Indians and shown them some gold and pearls, whereupon they told him that an infinite amount of gold could be had by going to the southeast to a place called Bohio (Cap Hatien, in modern Haiti), where gold could be found lying on the ground all over the place. But be careful, he was told, for beware the terrible people that live there, those people-eating Caribs. Here, in his first mention of them, Columbus writes: "I also understand that, a long distance from here, there are men with one eye and others with dogs' snouts who eat men. On taking a man they behead him, drink his blood and cut off his genitals."

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Eureka! If Columbus can summon the courage to track down these monsters - these Monoculi and Cynocephali - even if he doesn't find a stick of gold, his great voyage is a fantastic success! Has something gotten "lost in translation" here? You bet it has! In the first place, there is no evidence that Columbus spoke directly with any "Indian," with or without any translator present. Even if a translator had been present, there is no way in the world that either side could have understood the other. What's more, no Indian in the New World could have known of men with "dog's snouts," because no Indian had ever seen a dog. Nor would they see one until Columbus' second voyage, when he brought along bloodhounds to track down those terrible dog-headed cannibals, the Caribs or Canibs.

So how did these supposed "dogheads," these Carib Indians, become "cannibals"? It seems that Columbus himself, and his readers, actually invented the word "cannibal" by corruption of the word that he and his men thought they heard, that sounded to them like "Carib." For in Columbus' log of Tuesday, December 11, 1492, he speaks of a vast land beyond "La Espagnola" (Cuba) where the people of "Caniba" live:

"They [the people of Bohio] say there is a great continental land behind La Isla Espagnola, which they call Caritaba. They say that it is of infinite extent, whch supports my belief that these lands may be harassed by a more astute people, because [they] live in great fear of the people of Caniba. So I repeat what I have said before, the Caniba are none other than the people of the Great Khan, who must be very near here. They have ships that come to these lands to capture these people and take them away. Since the people never return, it is believed that they have been eaten."

Beyond India and its islands (the "Indies"), then, lay "Caniba" (China) and its Great Khan, whose marvels Marco Polo had seen and reported. And among them were those wild dog-faced people who ate people, now called "Cannibals," which was just another way of saying "Caribs." And so the islands they ravaged and took over became known as the islands of the "Caribbean." "Caniba," of course, like our word "canine," was Columbus' invention from the Latin word "canus," from the Greek "kynos," "dog."
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In this handsome woodcut from around 1505, the Carib Indians have lost their doggy faces and seem almost European, except in two ways. Though they wear head-dresses, cache-sexes, skirts and anklets made of leaves, like Adam and Eve after the Fall, they are otherwise happily naked. And they remain cannibals, obviously fond of dining on human flesh. They seem unaware of the Spanish ships approaching their island paradise, about to save and civilize these "savages" by converting them to Christianity, or failing that, killing them and forcing them into slavery.

When Columbus captured some of them and exhibited them before Queen Isabella, she was so impressed that she freed them from slavery. But before she died she had second thoughts and permitted the enslavement of "cannibals," opening the door to the enslavement of any "savages" the Spanish could lay their hands on . Right away these idle fellows were worked to death in the mines, digging futily to find that infinity of gold which Columbus had been told was just lying around on the surface of their land.

References: Mar 5, 2006 - 15:18 , Last Edited: Jan 29, 2012 - 22:12 by Ancient Worlds

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