Insatiable Appetites. Kelly L. Watson

about the legendary women of the island of Matinino. Columbus recorded that only women lived on this island and that they did not practice the traditional employs of their sex, but rather were fierce warriors. These women were said to be the consorts of the Carib warriors, who at a certain time of the year traveled to Matinino to mate with them. Male children were returned to their Carib fathers, and female children were raised by the women.32 Together the cannibals and the women of Matinino fascinated Columbus and filled him with the desire to encounter them on his second voyage. Herodotus indicated that the Amazons lived in a region bordering Scythia and the cannibals and tells a similar story about sex between Scythian men and Amazonian women.33 Although Columbus never explicitly connects the Caribbean with Scythia, he nonetheless transposes the geographical and sexual relationship between cannibals and Amazons onto the New World.

      On his first voyage of discovery, Columbus did not find great caches of gold or spices, but his encounters with Indians provided him with clues about their possible location and what he believed to be the location of the Great Khan. The writings from this voyage reveal a profound ambivalence about the presence of cannibalism in the Caribbean. At times the admiral seems quite skeptical about what is revealed to him; at other times, however, he appears eager to hear about the sophistication of the man-eaters and the possible presence of gold in their midst. His diary and the published letter to Santángel further emphasize this ambivalence; he recorded that the cannibals were supposedly one-eyed and dog-headed, yet he doubted the truth of this. He was less skeptical about their cannibalistic ways but still did not unquestioningly accept it.

      Neither Columbus, his son Ferdinand, nor Las Casas provides much detail about the gendered or sexual practices of Caribbean Natives. However, Columbus was intrigued by their nudity and remarked upon it a number of times.34 He fixated on the beauty of some of the Indians, but in the published versions of his accounts, he stops short of describing sexuality in any detail.35 He wrote that the men on Hispaniola only possessed one wife each, “except for the king, who could have as many as twenty.”36 The sexual practices of the women of Matinino and their Carib lovers did appear of some interest to the admiral, perhaps because of their relative strangeness.

      The connection between sexuality and cannibalism became more firmly established in accounts of the second voyage and subsequently in the writings of Michele da Cuneo and Amerigo Vespucci. Additionally the first reference to cannibalism described dog-headed beings who drank blood and removed the genitals of their victims. In the coming decades Caribs would be widely accused of castrating and consuming their victims. This particular threat to masculinity embodied the most deep-seated fear of European men: not only did the Caribs practice strange sexual behaviors, but they also enacted their rage and vengeance on virile men, first by removing their “manhood,” then by ingesting and incorporating male bodies into their own.

      There were a number of published secondhand accounts that deal with the admiral’s first voyage to the Americas. For example, Allegretto Allegretti wrote in 1493, “On one island there are men who eat other men from a nearby island, and they are great enemies to each other and do not have any type of weapons.”37 Allegretti displays none of the ambivalence evidenced in Columbus’s writings. He also incorrectly asserts that none of the islanders had any weapons, which was directly contradicted by the letter to Santángel, which was published in the same month in which Allegretti wrote his account.38 Allegretti also claims that the Indians welcomed the Spaniards by presenting them with “many young virgins,” an event that does not occur in the extant records of Columbus.

      In his chronicle of the history of Venice from 1493, Domenico Malipiero repeats that the Indians of the New World were generous, timid, and good-natured. However, he also notes, “The island called Santa Maria has people like the others, except they have very long hair and eat human flesh, and they go about in the vessels referred to above [canoes] abducting men from other islands.”39 In this passage the Caribs and those that eat human flesh are clearly conflated. Interestingly Malipiero seems to suggest that the length of their hair is as important and interesting as their man-eating. He does not doubt that the cannibals are men and not monsters, nor does he express doubt about the veracity of the Arawak descriptions of them.