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Humans, among Other

Classical Animals
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 23/09/21, SPi

P O S T C L A S SIC A L I N T E RV E N T IO N S
General Editors: Lorna Hardwick and James I. Porter
Postclassical Interventions aims to reorient the meaning of antiquity across and
beyond the humanities. Building on the success of Classical Presences, this
complementary series features shorter-­length monographs designed to provoke
debate about the current and future potential of classical reception through
fresh, bold, and critical thinking.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 23/09/21, SPi

Humans, among Other

Classical Animals
A SH L EY C L E M E N T S

1
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 23/09/21, SPi

1
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© Ashley Clements 2021
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First Edition published in 2021
Impression: 1
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 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 23/09/21, SPi

Preface

Thirty years ago, James Redfield’s quasi-­biographical comparison of Classics

and anthropology briefly advocated in closing the need for anthropology
to ‘come to terms’ with its Greek sources or risk ‘inhabit[ing] a cultural
illusion’.1 For the sake of throwing its subjects into starkest relief, his
article was unashamedly anchored to disciplinary caricatures (particu-
larism vs. generalism, philological detail vs. holistic systems and struc-
tures), but it thereby anticipated a significant aspect of anthropology’s
own programme of self-­criticism of the last two decades.2
This small book might be read as developing Redfield’s enjoinder
both within, but now also beyond the academy, wherever understand-
ings of humans and the world we share with other animals are at stake.
It is not an introductory history of interaction between academic dis­cip­
lines. Unlike the story that is most commonly told about the Classics’
entanglements with anthropology, it is not a brief history of borrowing.3
It is a book of encounters. It offers readings of just four moments in
which the dynamics of Western figurations informed by Classical con-
cepts are visible. Those moments can be connected in a variety of ways.
But they are presented here only with enough historical context to sup-
port our larger narrative arc. They are all, in different ways, exemplary.

1 Redfield (1991) 23. 2 Programme of self-­criticism, see my Chapter 4.

3 Brief history of borrowing narratives or analyses, see e.g. Kluckhohn (1961); Finley
(1975); Cartledge (1994); Ackerman (2007); Kindt (2009); Siapkas (2012). The Classical inter-
est in using anthropology to explain or defamiliarize the Greeks or in the ‘comparative anthro-
pology’ of the ancient world: explaining ancient cultures, see e.g. Humphreys (1978) 21; Sissa
(1997); Martin (2008); defamiliarization, see e.g. Humphreys (1993) 1 (but also emphasizing
self-­reflexive defamiliarization), Cartledge (1993) 201; ‘comparative anthropology’ of ancient
cultures, see e.g. Detienne (2007), (2008); recent resurgent Classical interest in ‘comparativism’
(self-­aware comparison as a disciplinary and historical practice), see e.g. Lloyd (2015); Holmes
(2016); Gagné, Goldhill, and Lloyd (2018). Nineteenth-­century disciplinary entanglements
between Classics and anthropology of the sort exemplified by e.g. J.G. Frazer, J.E. Harrison,
R.R. Marett and many of their contemporaries, and typically studied in existing scholarship on
Classics and early anthropology, see e.g. Ackerman (2002); cf. Varto (2018) for a recent contri-
bution with broader scope.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 23/09/21, SPi

vi Preface

But our contention is that any four moments of European engagement

with the question of the human could be found from our selected his-
torical periods and, read from the perspective of this book, would reveal
similar dynamics.4
They will take us on a journey through history and between worlds.
And here is their promise. For those who follow them attentively, the
modern world to which they will return us will not quite be as familiar
as it once was, the lives we lead, not quite as necessary as they once felt,
the ways of thinking we thoughtlessly reduplicate, not quite as essential.
Their end is to reveal the insidious implication of the Classics in the
concepts and structures of thought that have led us to our present his-
torical moment. But their journey is equally our own and its full impli-
cations are deliberately left open.
They extend their invitation to all, both the Classically and the
anthropologically inclined. But against those who comfortably celebrate
the Classics while decrying the modern world they have helped make,
they will most reward those excited to think new vistas within and
beyond the Classical and open to being persuaded of the need to do so.5
They will turn us to the past worlds implicit in our present horizons, but
they are really a primer for futures as yet uncharted, for new prospects,
new peculiarities, new possibilities.

4 Many other ‘moments’ of European anthropological Classical entanglement would be

possible to explore (perhaps especially from the nineteenth century on); and our earlier
‘moments’ are not selected as mere teleological antecedents of those historically later. History
of the idea of the ‘West’ and ‘Western’ and its relation to the European, see Hall (1992).
5 Here and throughout, the ‘Classical’ is necessarily broadly defined; for a critical discussion
of the (constructed and multivalent) concept, see Porter (2006), esp. 52: ‘the classical is neces-
sarily a moving object constituted by its interpreters, variously and over time’.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 23/09/21, SPi

Acknowledgements

Twenty five years ago in London Charles Stewart taught me that anthro-
pology is ‘a world of many worlds’ and that anthropology and Classics
have always been entwined. Everything here is indebted to him. My col-
leagues and students have been as inspirational in their enthusiasm for
an untraditional pluriverse of Classics as they have been in their demon-
strations of the anthropological lives one can go on to live from Classical
beginnings. The excellent work of a host of scholars across several dis­
cip­lines has been essential to this project: Tim Ingold, John Miller,
Richard Nash, Kate Nichols, Rachel Poliquin, Sadiah Qureshi, Efram
Seri-­Shriar, especially. Professor Harold J. Clark generously shared his
research on Jacob de Bondt (or ‘Bontius’). Anna Chahoud, Monica Gale,
Brian McGing, and Robin Osborne all shared sage approaches to publi-
cation. Anna Chahoud, Monica Gale, and Christine Morris all very
kindly suffered early chapter drafts and snippets, while Olaf Almqvist,
Tim Hill, Pete Liddel, and Brian McGing offered extremely helpful com-
ments on the entirety. Anonymous Press readers had astute criticisms
and Charlotte Loveridge and the series editors had the courage and
vision to back the idea when no one else did. Céline Louasli, Vasuki
Ravichandran, and Ian Brookes (whose copy-­editing has manifestly
improved the final thing) gracefully guided me through production, and
my dad, Alan Clements, expertly came to my rescue with the illustra-
tions. Kate has had the particular pleasure of microscopically seeing the
whole thing develop. She continues to enjoy hearing me talk at very
great length about the peculiar advantages of a very short book.
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 23/09/21, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 23/09/21, SPi

Contents

List of Illustrations xi
Prologue1
1. Horsing around the Americas 5
2. Analogous Apes 35
3. Breathless Beasts and Stuffed Savages 54
4. From Organic Societies to Unnatural Lives 98
Epilogue121

Bibliography 125
Index 143
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 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 23/09/21, SPi

List of Illustrations

1.1. Tupinamba cannibals. Woodcut from André Thevet (1558

[1557]) Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique. Paris: 77v.
Historic Images/Alamy Stock Photo. 15
1.2. Cortés meeting Xicontencatl. MS fragment, Tlaxcalan conquest
pictorial, scenes 2 and 3. Benson Latin American Collection,
University of Texas, Austin. 27
1.3. Female centaur and monkey. House of the Dean, Puebla, Mexico.
© Gilles Mermet. 33
1.4. Amerindian centaur. Church of Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo, Mexico.
Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo. 33
2.1. Fig. 15., Nicolaes Tulp’s ‘Homo sylvestris, Orang-outang’ or
‘Satyrus Indicus’, Fig.16., Jacob de Bondt’s ‘Ourang Outang’ (with
fig leaf added), Fig. 17., Conrad von Gessner’s wild man, all
redrawn in Edward Tyson (1699) Orang-Outang, sive Homo
Sylvestris: Or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie Compared with that of a
Monkey, an Ape, and a Man. London: 107–8. The Natural History
Museum/Alamy Stock Photo. 41
2.2. Tyson’s Pygmie. Engraving from Edward Tyson (1699) Orang-
Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris: Or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie
Compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man. London: 95
(figure 1). Album/Bridgeman Images. 50
3.1. ‘Ground plan of the Crystal Palace and Gardens at Sydenham’.
Woodcut engraving from the Illustrated London News, 17th June 1854. 61
3.2. ‘The British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger’. Punch,
22nd August 1857. FALKENSTEINFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo. 66
3.3. ‘Tippoo’s Tiger’. Painted wooden semi-automaton consisting of a
tiger mauling a prostrate figure, c.1790, Mysore. Victoria and
Albert Museum, London. V&A Images. 67
3.4. ‘Lion attacking a dromedary’. Édouard Verreaux (1867).
© Carnegie Natural History Museum, Pittsburgh. Here pictured
before its 2016 conservation, which restored the rider’s original
more upright position. 69
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xii List of Illustrations

3.5. ‘The giraffes with the Arabs who brought them over to this
Country’. George Scharf (1836). Bridgeman Images. 70
3.6. ‘Jungle life and tiger-hunting—trophy arranged by Mr Rowland
Ward, F.L.S.’ Artist’s impression of taxidermy exhibit set up for
the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886. Illustrated London
News, 17th July 1886. 74
3.7. ‘Orang-utan attacked by Dyaks’. From Alfred Russell Wallace
(1869) The Malay Archipelago: the Land of the Orang-utan, and
the Bird of Paradise. A Narrative of Travel, with Studies of Man
and Nature. London: Frontispiece. Natural History Museum,
London, UK/Bridgeman Images. 77
3.8. The African Court at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham. Plate 100
from Philip Henry Delamotte (1855) Photographic Views of the
Progress of the Crystal Palace, Sydenham: Taken during the
Progress of the Works, by Desire of the Directors (2 vols.). London. 87
3.9. Leopard attacking antelope at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham.
Plate 99 from Philip Henry Delamotte (1855) Photographic
Views of the Progress of the Crystal Palace, Sydenham: Taken
during the Progress of the Works, by Desire of the Directors (2
vols.). London. 89
3.10. Models of the Zulus in diorama at the Crystal Palace,
Sydenham, c.1863. Albumen print, Enrico Angelo Ludovico
Negretti and Joseph Warren Zambra. Pitt Rivers Museum,
Oxford, UK/Bridgeman Images. 91
3.11. ‘The Greek Court from the Nave’. Plate vii from Matthew Digby
Wyatt (1854) Views of the Crystal Palace and Park, Sydenham.
From drawings by eminent artists, and photographs by
P.H. Delamotte. London. Album/Alamy Stock Photo.  93

Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders prior to publication but this has
not been possible in every case. If notified, the publisher will undertake to rectify any errors or
omissions at the earliest opportunity.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 23/09/21, SPi

Prologue

As I write, my own university launches its new vision of the purpose of

our educational programme, offering a revitalized set of Graduate
Attributes. The first of our new TEP (Trinity Education Project)
Graduate Attributes is ‘to act responsibly’. This, our College manifesto
explains, amongst other qualities, entails thinking from a global per-
spective, ethically, and taking responsibility. The existence of this book
is due to the fact that, unusually, in our Classics Department we teach—
amongst other things—anthropology. But anthropology, I explained to
my last cohort of students, teaches you that you cannot take responsibil-
ity. And you certainly cannot ever assume it. As a discipline it is founded
on exploring the responses of others and it teaches us to take those
responses seriously. It prompts us to think with others about how to live
and how to live well and what to do when we encounter difference. And
so it furnishes us with the ability to respond. And it teaches us—as Tim
Ingold has argued—that once you have acquired that ability, once you
are response-­able, you must respond well—you are responsible.1 And
this is why it teaches us that you cannot just take responsibility as if
given by others; and you certainly cannot assume it. You must work for it.
You must put yourself out there, place yourself at risk. You must be
prepared to begin conversations that challenge your certainties: to
re-­examine the foundations of everything you take for granted, to see
anew and become estranged from the systems of knowledge that guide
your thinking. Cultivating response-­ability and acting responsibly, in
other words, means understanding your ways of thinking, including
academic ways, and anthropology itself, as themselves just so many
other responses to the world born from history and tradition.
‘Why then is Classics relevant to our new flagship Graduate Attribute
of acting responsibly?’ I asked that cohort. ‘And why, more importantly,

1 Ingold (2017a) 27: ‘There can, in this sense, be no responsibility without “response ability” ’
(building in turn upon Cage (2011) 10). Cf. Haraway (2008) 71, (2016) 34–6.

Humans, among Other Classical Animals. Ashley Clements, Oxford University Press. © Ashley Clements 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192856098.003.0001
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 23/09/21, SPi

2 Humans, among Other Classical Animals

do we teach anthropology in our Department of Classics?’ Because

every time you invoke the notion of ‘culture’ or ‘cultures’ to think about
others, every time you reach for the concepts of ‘nature’, or ‘myth’, or the
‘human’, ‘humanity’, or the ‘humane’, and a whole host of other ideas by
which we understand ourselves and the world across our and every
other university—and not least, of course, ‘responsibility’, or ‘ethics’—
Classics exerts itself in your thinking.2 Anthropology is taught in our
Department of Classics and Classics is relevant to acting responsibly
because it is written into the discipline that teaches you how to respond,
and because being able to approach the responses of others seriously,
ethically, and globally, as we should, means being able to recognize the
contingency of our own.3
The origins of this small book lie in a wider project to open up the
historical co-­implication of the Classics and anthropology by exploring
the multivalent role of Classical conceptions in Western ideas of the
human. At the moment when anthropology is interrogating the particu-
larity of its own foundations, that is, it seemed opportune to cast an eye
back over the enduring influence of the Classics in several historical
attempts to make sense of ourselves and others. But looking back invari-
ably implied looking forward too, and so in the course of its genesis this
smaller project necessarily also became a rumination in more implicit
terms on the value of Classics in our modern world.
We are uncontroversially living in a period of extraordinary crisis.
The rise of the far right across Europe and the Americas—in forms often
mobilizing Classical precedents in defence of extremist views—has
infused the issue of how to respond to human diversity and deal with
the responses of others with renewed urgency. Even more urgently, it is
beyond doubt that what humans do in environmental terms over the
next twenty years—how, and in pursuit of what, we choose to live—will
determine the future of all living beings inhabiting our planet, deciding
whether the appalling destruction of the world characteristic of the

2 On the ‘human’ and ‘humane’, Høgel (2015).

3 Anthropology and Classics thereby bestows and reveals as foundational the first quality
entailed in the TEP Graduate Attribute of ‘acting responsibly’: the ability to act ‘on the basis of
knowledge and understanding’.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 23/09/21, SPi

Prologue 3

Anthropocene continues at its present rate.4 Our students of today will

be the arbiters of this future. So why, then, choose to study the Classics
for nearly a quarter of this precious time? Worse, why choose to teach it
for the whole duration?
This small book is the briefest of gestures towards an answer to these
questions. In the deliberately selective chapters that follow our aim is to
survey in snapshots the place Classics has occupied in Western attempts
to understand the world during the early-­modern and modern periods
leading up to our present moment, exploring how the Classics have
always been embroiled in anthropological conversations about our place
in relation to others. Its purpose is less to reiterate the undeniable his-
torical importance of the Classics in Western attempts to place the
human than to highlight—ultimately in positive terms—the contin-
gency of its most profound (and often disastrous) conceptual heritage to
us. The value of the Classics in this ‘post-­human’ age,5 it suggests, lies in
understanding why we think in the ways we do about things of vital
importance to the world we have made in the present—the environ-
ment, humans and animals, what is worth pursuing in our lives, and
what will make us happy. But it is also about how our ideas about
these—and many other—things rest on foundations that were once sur-
rounded by alternatives. The study of the Classics reveals the historical
particularity of our commitments and the contingency of those ideas
most influential to Western thought over the past five hundred years
and now in most urgent need of challenge. But from our an­thropo­
logic­al perspective, we turn back to beginnings the better to move
beyond them: to identify what we need to do to free ourselves from the
trappings of our intellectual baggage, and think more attentively to and
with others, so that together we might just find and do better.

4 This figure is based upon the estimate of the UN’s IPCC’s (Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change) special report (2018) on the impact of global warming, which predicts the
severe climatic consequences of present greenhouse gas emissions will be in full effect as soon
as 2040. Substantive change is needed in the next twelve years in order to mitigate global
disaster.
5 ‘Post-­humanism’ rejects the ultimately Classical conception of the human (e.g. as homo
sapiens, the uniquely rational animal, tool-­maker, linguist, possessor of imagination, self-­
awareness, etc.) that tacitly assumes the exceptionality of humanity amongst all other living
beings. For recent critical discussion, Peterson (2018) and in Classics, Chesi and Spiegel (2019).
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 23/09/21, SPi

4 Humans, among Other Classical Animals

Our voyage ahead is one of encounters. We will encounter the New

World as did its first European respondents, and those respondents, in
turn, as did their first critics, whose texts, reread against the testimony
of indigenous American voices, satirize the fallaciousness of European
misperceptions exemplified by the European image of the New World
centaur. We will encounter the hall of mirrors constructed by the first
scientific treatise of primatology, as it sought to negotiate the welter of
medieval and seventeenth-­century Classical and ‘indigenous’ under-
standings of the ape and disentangle its subject from the human by
euhemerizing the Homeric pygmy. We will encounter the sculptural col-
locations of man and animal at the site of the widest dissemination of
ethnological knowledge in the nineteenth century, R.G. Latham’s and
E. Forbes’s ethnological and natural historical dioramas of the Crystal
Palace’s Natural History Courts. And whilst here, by acclimatizing to the
wider Victorian construction of savage nature and primitive civilization,
we will encounter anew the Classical foundations of the ‘field’ that
Latham’s exhibits enacted for practitioners of the nascent discipline of
social anthropology. And as we turn to our culminating encounter with
that fully fledged discipline, we will trace modern anthropology’s sus-
tained dialogue with the Classical, from its earliest theorists of social life
beyond the biological to its new theorization of life itself as a relational
unity beyond the human. Throughout, at the heart of anthropology’s
twentieth-­century growth to self-­awareness, at the heart of its possible
futures as a discipline, and of the promise of new solutions to our cur-
rent global problem of how to share the world with others, our encoun-
ter will reveal the prerequisite of recognizing the essential contingency
of the Classical.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 23/09/21, SPi

1
Horsing around the Americas

Our first encounter explores the programmatic role of Classical

conceptions in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-­ century European
assimilation of the Americas. A passing detail in a foundational
text of anthropological criticism, Michel de Montaigne’s satirical
Of Cannibals, prompts us to re-­examine the conquest idea of the
New World centaur invoked by European writers to explain
indigenous American responses to their first encounters with
mounted Europeans. Written into the story of early conquistador
rationalizations of the New World ‘Indians’, as Montaigne well
knew and contemporary indigenous American voices confirm, is
a lesson about cross-­cultural (mis)understanding and the dangers
of fallaciously generalizing from the particular.

We begin by jumping from the ancient world to the sixteenth-­century

New World—although that is not perhaps as much of a jump as you
might imagine, because it was not the New World that was discovered
by Christopher Columbus in 1492. Columbus indeed merely made
landfall on a territory only suspected as new a decade later by Amerigo
Vespucci (who coined the phrase mundus novus and was later to give his
name to the new continent), and not fully recognized until a generation
later, in 1519–21, by the findings of the Magellan expedition.1 Convinced
that he had landed on some islands off the coast of the Asian continent
of the Old World (whence the name ‘Indians’ for its inhabitants),
Columbus’ New World explorations and discoveries took place firmly
within the realm of the known and what he saw, however marvellous,

1 Huddleston (1967) 5.

Humans, among Other Classical Animals. Ashley Clements, Oxford University Press. © Ashley Clements 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192856098.003.0002
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 23/09/21, SPi

6 Humans, among Other Classical Animals

was not cause for surprise.2 Thanks to the humanists’ rediscovery, dis-
semination, and translation of Greek and Roman literature in the fif-
teenth century, and the transmission of Classical conceptions through
medieval travel writing, the Americas entered into European conscious-
ness simply as yet undiscovered territories of the Old World. Accepting
the unity of mankind through common descent from Adam as a biblical
given and human diversity as a tenet already established by the ancients,
the humanists ‘lacked the idea of distinct “cultures” ’.3 Hence the new
peoples with which travellers came into contact in the age of discovery
were just more ethnographic examples to be assimilated into the
Classical and medieval literary catalogue of the human and pseudo- or
subhuman which left a permanent imprint in even the topography of
the newly explored continent.
The great ‘Amazon’ river, although originally named Mar Dulce
(‘Sweet Sea’) by its European sailors in 1500, for instance, only acquired
its name because of Friar Gasper de Carvajal’s particularly vivid descrip-
tion of a skirmish fought in 1541–2 downstream of the confluence of the
Madeira between a party of conquistadors led by the first Spaniard to
travel the entire length of the Amazon, Francisco de Orellana, and the
Tupya tribe allegedly compelled to fight by tall white warrior women.4
Carvajal’s account so powerfully cemented the idea of the existence of
Classical Amazons in the Americas that despite the fact that he himself
called the river the Marañón, it became identified with its most fabulous
Classical mythical inhabitants. Indeed, that identification received fur-
ther support from information about ‘Amazons’ that Orellana gleaned
from local informants who allegedly recognized in European questions
about warrior women and fortified palaces indigenous traditions of
matriarchies and the Inca Empire.5

2 As Blaser and de la Cadena (2018) 6 observe, ‘Inasmuch as knowledges are world-­making

practices, they tend to make the world they know.’ Cf. Ryan (1981) 520; Haase and Meyer
(1994); Campbell (2006) 133–59.
3 Turner (2014) 39; Ryan (1981) 520.
4 Carvajal (1934 [1546]) 212–14, 220–1; Leonard (1944).
5 Latham’s nineteenth-­century representation of the Amazonians at the Crystal Palace
ex­hib­ition of 1854 casts aspersions on the non-­European origin of such traditions, which he
hypothesizes were probably merely inherited from earlier European enquiries, see Latham and
Forbes (1854) I: 67–8.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 23/09/21, SPi

Horsing around the Americas 7

The grounds for this cross-­cultural confluence of perceptions had in

fact been laid long before Orellana’s expedition. Building upon accounts
by Classical writers like Herodotus and Pliny the Elder which situated
the Amazons, along with the monstrous and exotic, on the periphery of
the known world, medieval writers had speculated that the warrior
women must dwell on a far Eastern island surrounded by a river in the
Indian kingdom of Prester John. Marco Polo had even tantalizingly
written of an Island of Females lying 500 miles from Kesmacoran (the
coastal strip of Makran uniting Iran and Pakistan) and thirty miles from
its counterpart Island of Males. On Columbus’ second voyage to the
Americas in 1493, the great explorer himself had consequently invested
considerable time seeking out an island called Mantinino (modern
Martinique), described by the natives as populated only by autonomous
women, which lay adjacent to another island, reportedly of man-­eating
men, called Cariba. (Columbus’ hearing guided by his preconceptions,
the natives’ ‘Cariba’ became ‘Caniba’, ‘the people of the [Great] khan’—
whence the name ‘cannibal’—and then, by equation to the Latin canis or
Spanish cane, suitably equipped to eat men, that is, allegedly ‘dog-­
headed’ just like the fabled ancient Cynocephali.)6 The reality occasion-
ally differed notably from the fables, as Columbus himself attested when
rather disappointedly he observed that the ‘three Sirens emerging from
the sea’ he had seen when sailing to the Río del Oro on Española island
(modern Haiti) were ‘not as beautiful as they are said to be, for their
faces had some masculine traits’—this, unfortunately, is probably the
poor manatee’s first appearance in Western literature.7 But the general
European understanding of the new as the old primed early explorers
with expectations of finding a host of fabled peoples inhabiting the
periphery of the known world, not to mention fabulous wealth.

6 The women of Mantinino were later equated to the Amazons by Peter Martyr of Anghiera;
on Columbus’ mishearing of ‘Cariba’, and understanding of the mention of dog-­headed Caniba,
which he regards as a fabrication of the natives even though a construction of his own based
upon common European expectations of finding such races in East India, see Todorov (1999)
30; cf. Restall (2003) 102.
7 Columbus, First Voyage cited (and translated) by Sanchez (1994) 203.
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