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ESSAYS translated
by Charles Cotton
excerpts
from IV. OF CANNIBALS. I
long had a man in my house that lived ten or twelve years in the New
World, discovered in these latter days, and in that part of it where
Villegaignon landed, which he called Antarctic France. This discovery of
so vast a country seems to be of very great consideration. I cannot be
sure, that hereafter there may not be another, so many wiser men than we
having been deceived in this. I am afraid our eyes are bigger than our
bellies, and that we have more curiosity than capacity; for we grasp at
all, but catch nothing but wind.... Now,
to return to my subject, I find that there is nothing barbarous and
savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that
every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not
in use in his own country. As, indeed, we have no other level of truth
and reason, than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the
place wherein we live: there is always the perfect religion, there the
perfect government, there the most exact and accomplished usage of all
things. They are savages at the same rate that we say fruit are wild,
which nature produces of herself and by her own ordinary progress;
whereas in Our
utmost endeavors cannot arrive at so much as to imitate the nest of the
least of birds, its contexture, beauty, and convenience: not so much as
the web of a poor spider. These
nations then seem to me to be so far barbarous, as having received but
very little form and fashion from art and human invention, and
consequently to be not much remote from their original simplicity....
for to my apprehension, what we now see in those nations, does not only
surpass all the pictures with which the poets have adorned the golden
age, and all their inventions in
feigning a happy state of man, but, moreover, the fancy and even the
wish and desire of philosophy itself; so native and so pure a
simplicity, as we by experience see to be in them, could never enter
into their imagination, nor could they ever believe that human society
could have been maintained with so little artifice and human patchwork.
I should tell Plato, that it is a nation wherein there is no manner of
traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name of
magistrate or political superiority; no use of service, riches or
poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no properties, no
employments, but those of leisure, no respect of kindred, but common, no
clothing, no agriculture, no metal, no use of corn or wine; the very
words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy,
detraction, pardon, never heard of. How much would he find his imaginary
republic short of his perfection? The
situation of their country is along the seashore, enclosed on the other
side toward the land, with great and high mountains, having about a
hundred leagues in breadth between. They have great store of fish and
flesh, that have no resemblance to those of ours: which they eat without
any other cookery, than plain boiling, roasting and broiling.... Their
buildings are very long, and of capacity to hold two or three hundred
people, made of the barks of tall trees, reared with one end upon the
ground, and leaning to and supporting one another, at the top, like some
of our barns, of which the coverings hang down to the very ground, and
serves for the side walls. They have wood so hard, that they cut with
it, and make their swords of it, and their grills of it to broil their
meat. Their beds are of cotton, hung swinging from the roof, like our
easman's hammocks, every man his own, for the wives lie apart from their
husbands. They rise with the sun, and so soon as they are up, eat for
all day, for they have no more meals but that...Their young men go
a-hunting after wild beasts with bows and arrows; one part of their
women are employed in preparing their drink the while, which is their
chief employment....The fashion of their beds, ropes, swords, and of the
wooden bracelets they tie about their wrists, when they go to fight, and
of the great canes, bored hollow at one end, by the sound of which they
keep the cadence of their dances, are to be seen in several places, and
among others, at my house. They shave all over, and much more neatly
than we, without other razor than one of wood or stone. They believe in
the immortality of the soul, and that those who have merited well of the
gods, are lodged in that part of heaven where the sun rises, and the
accursed in the west. They have I know not what kind of priests and
prophets, who very rarely present themselves to the people, having their
abode in the mountains. At their arrival, there is a great feast, and
solemn assembly of many villages: each house, as I have described, makes
a village, and they are about a French league distant from one another.
This prophet declaims to them in public, exhorting them to virtue and
their duty: but all their ethics are comprised in these two articles,
resolution in war, and affection to their wives.... They
have continual war with the nations that live further within the
mainland, beyond their mountains, to which they go naked, and without
other arms than their bows and wooden swords, fashioned at one end like
the heads of our javelins. The obstinacy of their battles is wonderful,
and they never end without great effusion of blood: for as to running
away, they know not what it is. Every one for a trophy brings home the
head of an enemy he has killed, which he fixes over the door of his
house. After having a long time treated their prisoners very well, and
given them all the regales they can think of, he to whom the prisoner
belongs, invites a great assembly of his friends. They being come, he
ties a rope to one of the arms of the prisoner, of which, at a distance,
out of his reach, he holds the one end himself, and gives to the friend
he loves best the I
am not sorry that we should here take notice of the barbarous horror of
so cruel an action, but that, seeing so clearly into their faults, we
should be so blind to our own. I conceive there is more barbarity in
eating a man alive, than when he is dead; in tearing a body limb from
limb by racks and torments, that is yet in perfect sense; in roasting it
by degrees; in causing it to be bitten and worried by dogs and swine (as
we have not only read, but lately seen, not among inveterate and mortal
enemies, but among neighbors and fellow-citizens, and, which is worse,
under color of piety and religion), than to roast and eat him after he
is dead. We
may then call these people barbarous, in respect to the rules of reason:
but not in respect to ourselves, who in all sorts of barbarity exceed
them. Their wars are throughout noble and generous, and carry as much
excuse and fair pretense, as that human malady is capable of; having
with them no other foundation than the sole jealousy of valor. Their
disputes are not
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