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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 November 2009
In Book V of the Cosmographia, Sebastian Münster briefly recounts the first voyage of Columbus to the West Indies. The crew had landed at the island of Hispaniola, their presence causing the islanders to flee into the woods. The Spaniards pursued them and, capturing a woman, brought her back to their ship. They filled her with “delicate meates and wyne,” clothed her in “fayre apparel,” and then let her go. “And as this womanne returned to her companie,” we are told, “some being moued by the lyberalitie declared vnto her, came by greate multitudes to the sea bankes, bringinge golde with them, which they chaunged for earthen pottes, and drinking glasses.” The islanders somehow made known that they fled because they mistook the Europeans for cannibals who lived to the south, and even “made greuous complaynt to our men, of the beastly and fearse maners of these Canibales”:
when soeuer they take any of them vnder the age of xiiij yeares, they vse to geld them, and franke them vntyll they be very fat, as we are wont to do with capons or hennes: and as for suche as drawe towarde xx. yeare old, to kyll them forthwith and pull out theyr guttes, and eate the same freshe and newe, wyth other extreme parts of the bodye, poudering the residue with salte, and keping it in a certayne pickle as we do iegottes or sansages [sic]. Yet eate they not the women, but reserue them to encrease, as we do hennes to lay egges. And if thei take any old women, they kepe them for drudges.
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