by Renata Procacci
Women in the stories of travellers, conquistadors and missionaries at the time of the first overseas expeditions
Women in the stories of travellers, conquistadors and missionaries at the time of the first overseas expeditions : Until the year 1492, opportunities to get to know peoples and cultures other than their own had been rare for Europeans. Merchants and missionaries had travelled along the route to the Indies, sometimes going as far as China and the African coasts; however, it was only with Columbus’s expedition to the Americas and with the increasingly frequent overseas voyages to the new continents that European nations had the opportunity to confront civilizations and models of life that were often opposed to their own. The “racial” contempt that would be imposed between the 19th and 20th centuries towards all non-European cultures (following the spread of Darwinian evolutionary doctrines) was still absent in these first explorers who observed the inhabitants of the discovered lands with a certain respect; despite some touches of detached superiority or irony, an open sympathy and sometimes even a sense of admiration towards the natives often emerges from their reports and travel diaries: this is the case of scholars and naturalists such as Thomas Hariot, Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, L.A. de Bougainville, Baron de La Hontan, Lionel Wafer, James Cook.
Elsewhere, as among the Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries, a feeling of pity and commiseration prevails towards these people deprived of the light of the Christian religion and condemned to live in such primitive and harsh conditions: Catholic priests who arrived in the wake of the French conquistadors and colonists feel invested by God with the mission of going to the natives to instruct them in the truths of the Christian faith and redeem their souls from the snares of the devil.
Figurae variae cum hominum, tum animalium Asiae et Africae in the Lusitana language
Depending on whether one attitude or the other prevails, the Amerindian, Australian or Polynesian women, faced with the harsh demands of life in the state of nature and with jobs whose burden is not alleviated by any of the comforts which their European sisters enjoy, are admired or pitied; however, there are always words of praise for the courage, the industriousness, the silent tenacity with which they provide for the sustenance of the family group and the tribe, wresting day after day from the land, the sea or the forest the food necessary for themselves and their loved ones, without being frightened by fatigue and dangers, by the cold and tiredness.
The focus is on the attachment of these women to their children and husbands, the sense of solidarity they show towards each other by helping each other in the most challenging moments of a woman’s existence (especially in the last stages of pregnancy and during childbirth), the light-heartedness and joy of living that shine through in the games and entertainment they indulge in whenever they have a moment of free time, and the sense of hospitality they show towards foreigners.
Figurae variae cum hominum, tum animalium Asiae et Africae in the Lusitana language
Sometimes, individual figures of benevolent and kind women appear in the pages of speakers and chroniclers: Anacaona, sister of the king of Haiti (the unusual banquet she offered in honor of Admiral Columbus, at which the most refined local delicacies were served up – such as whole roasted iguanas – is one of those very rare interludes in which Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, the austere official historian of the “Catholic kings”, allows himself some humorous nuances); or the anonymous young woman from Ferro Island who points out the miraculous “water tree” to the thirst-stricken Spaniards (Gerolamo Benzoni, Novae Novis Orbis historiae). Even the admiration for the beauty of these women and – sometimes – the observation of their carefree lack of inhibitions in terms of sexual freedom (this is the case of the Tahitians for Bougainville and Cook and of the Huron and Iroquois Amerindians for La Hontan) are details that add a spicy note to a fundamentally benevolent picture. However, other explorers were not slow to notice that the women of the new continents sometimes presented disturbing aspects. Irrefutable evidence was discovered of the existence of tribes (settled in the Brazilian forests, in the Antilles and in Polynesia) in which women were trained in the arts of war and occupied a pre-eminent political and social position: the Europeans renamed them Amazons by analogy with the mythical warriors of the classical age. These women were so energetic that they were able to build rich and powerful kingdoms and to demand tribute from neighboring populations; they did not tolerate men among them except during a certain period of the year during which they allowed men from neighbouring tribes to enter the borders of their lands and intermarried with them, but only for the purpose of generating children (this last detail, however, is probably due to the imagination of the European speakers: it is certainly likely that there existed in those places some ethnic groups governed by queens and priestesses, it is much less likely that there could exist tribes formed exclusively by female individuals!). At the same time, the indigenous women who lived in other regions of Brazil and the Antilles, as well as on the coasts of Central and South America, devoted themselves to impressive practices of anthropophagy.
The Dutch explorers Simon van Cordes and Sebaldt van Weert, in the 16th century, had already observed with amazement and disgust a native of the Magellanic coast who did not seem to know cooked foods nor did she accept to eat them but fed on animals killed while hunting, greedily devouring their raw meat and drinking their blood: such primordial food habits did not bode well (Charle de Brosses, Histoire des navigations aux Terres Australes). The testimonies of Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Jean de Léry, Hans Staden and others left no doubt: some peoples of the new continents practiced cannibalism and their women were accustomed to cooking human flesh with the same zeal and the same impassive mastery with which European cooks handled veal, chicken or rabbit meat. The victims of that terrible practice were normally men, women and children captured in enemy villages; even for European travellers who fell into their hands there was no escape. Sometimes the lust for tasting human flesh – considered a real delicacy – did not even stop in front of their own creatures: if a Brazilian native happened to be possessed by an enemy warrior and became pregnant, she was authorized by law and tradition to kill and eat the child that would be born; and, Léry reports, the natives invariably took advantage of this authorization, driven perhaps more by greed to taste that “delicacy” than by hatred or the desire for revenge (maternity acquired disturbing connotations even among the amazons: they, at least according to what was said, kept only their daughters with them to raise them and got rid of their male children by killing them at birth or sending them back, as soon as they were past early childhood, to their fathers’ lands of origin).
It is not surprising that the revelation of certain habits and customs was disconcerting for the future European colonizers and that they observed them with a mixture of fascination, dismay and a sense of revolt: the armed virago who dominated men was the exact opposite of the obedient and devoted wife, submissive to male authority; the cruel cannibal who fed on the flesh of children – including that of her own – was the reverse of the mother/nurse who cares for and protects (and who therefore in the collective imagination is, and cannot but be, good, tender, affectionate, available to the most generous sacrifices for her offspring).
Conceptions and roles consolidated for centuries in Europe, and therefore considered indisputable, risked to falter in the face of the discovery of such radically different realities. The Europeans therefore hastened to push them to the margins and, where possible, to erase them in the territories they had taken possession of in the name of the various crowns of Europe, transforming these wild women into good Christians as quickly as possible and re-establishing the familiar and reassuring concept of the roles of man and woman that they had brought with them from the motherland.
The editorial is taken from the article by Renata Procacci published with the title Sposa e madre in terre lontane in the catalogue of the exhibition Donna e’… set up in the Casanatense Library on the occasion of World Food Day 1998. [p. 363-378]
Read more:
CATALOGUE – Donna è… the feminine universe in the Casanatensi collections. Milan, Aisthesis, 1998.
The images illustrating the editorial are taken from the manuscript MS. 1889 Figurae variae cum hominum, tum animalium Asiae et Africae in lingua Lusitania. Ms. cart. sec. XVII; mm. 335×230; cc. 143
Series of full-page drawings, executed in pen and painted in watercolour on loose sheets, accompanied by explanatory captions in Portuguese