Content area
Full Text
The majority of early modern accounts of discovery and travel narratives about America reflect a peculiar fusion of a utopian and paradise-like idyll of the new continent with cruel cannibalistic practices of the natives. This apparently paradoxical side-by-side of a benevolent Nature and obvious horror, which dates back to ancient and medieval texts, can be traced as a leitmotif in the travelogues of Columbus and Vespucci, as well as in many of the eyewitness accounts of the sixteenth century, not to mention literary adaptations in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels. The following analysis juxtaposes illustrative textual and pictorial examples of sixteenth-century travel narratives with ancient, medieval, and early modern texts, thus attempting to provide an explanation for the striking interdependence of cannibalism and utopian concepts in the first images of America.
The early myth of America is very much rooted in the tradition of ancient and medieval utopian projections in travel literature. Many utopias, such as Plato's Atlantis myth, the widespread notion of the "insulae fortunatarum," or the mysterious islands in the Atlantic according to the Irish abbot St. Brendan depict a utopian West beyond the known world. Parallel to these utopias of the West, ancient and medieval sources use the Far East to situate the Earthly Paradise. Marco Polo's fourteenth-century travelogue and the fictional geographic fantasies of Sir John Mandeville are the most prominent advocates of these eastward projections. The westbound voyage of Columbus, which was supposed to lead to the East via the West made it possible to fuse both utopian traditions in the early image of America. The major gaps in the knowledge of the new continent could therefore be bridged by recourses to ancient and medieval utopian concepts of the East and the West.
A central aspect among these projections in the early image of America is the notion of a benevolent Nature which eagerly provides everything necessary for human life. 1 This basically feminized concept of Nature as an alma mater or nourishing mother has a long tradition ranging from ancient notions of a Golden Age, the concept of a locus amoenus, and modern pastorals, to the first descriptions of America. Already Columbus characterizes the new continent through images that are reminiscent of classical utopias: "[T]he other islands of this region,...