To read Alexander von Humboldt’s journals of his and Aimé Bonpland’s journey to the Americas, much of which took place in Venezuela (1799-1804), is not only a pleasure, but also a rewarding experience. In many instances, I find his narratives and observations to be as helpful and profitable today as readers found them to be two centuries ago.

His praiseworthy writing and infinite curiosity does not, however, obscure Mr. Humboldt’s manifest prejudice against Christianity or his exasperating blind spot towards the enormous contributions by missionaries who loved the Americas and who travelled and lived there centuries before Humboldt’s birth. Were it not for those who went before, Humboldt’s travels would not have been possible, certainly not anywhere close to the extent he was able to achieve. 

For more on Humboldt, see here, here and here. As noted in that last link (“So Far From God and So Close to the United States”), Humboldt got his passport, enabling him to travel, not from “Enlightenment France” but from “priest-ridden Spain.”

The following comments are extracted from the sections of his journals concerning his explorations in the lower Orinoco regions. 

“Some of the islands are inhabited by a cruel and savage race, called cannibals, who eat the flesh of men and boys, and captives and slaves of the male sex, abstaining from that of females.” Hist. Venet. 1551. The custom of sparing the lives of female prisoners confirms what I have previously said of the language of the women. Does the word cannibal, applied to the Caribs of the West India Islands, belong to the language of this archipelago (that of Haiti)? or must we seek for it in an idiom of Florida, which some traditions indicate as the first country of the Caribs?) It is they who have rendered the names of cannibals, Caribbees, and anthropophagi, synonymous; it was their cruelties that prompted the law promulgated in 1504, by which the Spaniards were permitted to make a slave of every individual of an American nation which could be proved to be of Caribbee origin.

Note Humboldt’s allusion to a possible Floridian origin to the Caribs. Although some anthropologists make strong arguments for a Brazilian origin, meaning the Caribs came up from what is now Brazil, the Floridian, or North American origin of the Caribs is not an unprecedented hypotheses. Their features would seem to corroborate that theory. This is not due only to their physical features but also their few surviving sculptures and even their language. These things intimate an ancestry very dissimilar from that of most of the other Indians of South and Central America and the Caribbean. The Caribs seem to be evidence of ancient communications between North and South America.

Interested readers might take a few minutes to open a map of the Caribbean Sea, put a finger on the southern tip of Florida, and then trace it down to Cuba, and then move it in a pronounced southeastern arc across Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and on and on, all the way down to Grenada and finally to Tobago and Trinidad, just off the coast of Venezuela. It doesn’t take too much imagination to see an ancient land bridge which once connected Florida and Venezuela. At the least, it isn’t difficult to hypothesize that the Caribs migrated through those islands down to South America.

Humboldt seeks to cast doubt on the extent of the cruelties of the Caribs, writing “I believe [such cannibalism] was much exaggerated….” Much exaggerated? So they ate human flesh, just not as much as reported? Instead of a pound of flesh a week, they limited themselves to, say, a pound fortnightly? That might be an academic question to a detached observer, but certainly not to the ill-fated victims of that cruel and ferocious people.

We’ll conclude this post with his citing an old missionary and then going on to relate his own experience with “the perversity” of certain Indian tribes, which experience corroborates the missionaries comments.

“You cannot imagine,” said the old missionary of Mandavaca, “the perversity of this Indian race (familia de Indios). You receive men of a new tribe into the village; they appear to be mild, good, and laborious; but suffer them to take part in an incursion (entrada) to bring in the natives, and you can scarcely prevent them from murdering all they meet, and hiding some portions of the dead bodies.” In reflecting on the manners of these Indians, we are almost horrified at that combination of sentiments which seem to exclude each other; that faculty of nations to become but partially humanized; that preponderance of customs, prejudices, and traditions, over the natural affections of the heart.

Note how Humboldt, in appealing to “natural affections”, knowingly or not, cites the first chapter of Romans, which warns that any people who reject God will degenerate and that among the characteristics of a people evidencing that degeneration are men “without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful….[Emphasis mine]”

We took one who had become sufficiently civilized in a few weeks to be useful to us in placing the instruments necessary for our observations at night. He was no less mild than intelligent, and we had some desire of taking him into our service. What was our horror when, talking to him by means of an interpreter, we learned, that the flesh of the marimonde monkeys, though blacker, appeared to him to have the taste of human flesh. He told us that his relations (that is, the people of his tribe) preferred the inside of the hands in man, as in bears. This assertion was accompanied with gestures of savage gratification. 

We inquired of this young man, so calm and so affectionate in the little services which he rendered us, whether he still felt sometimes a desire to eat of a Cheruvichahena. He answered, without discomposure, that, living in the mission, he would only eat what he saw was eaten by the Padres. Reproaches addressed to the natives on the abominable practice which we here discuss, produce no effect; it is as if a Brahmin, travelling in Europe, were to reproach us with the habit of feeding on the flesh of animals.

In the eyes of the Indian of the Guaisia, the Cheruvichahena was a being entirely different from himself; and one whom he thought it was no more unjust to kill than the jaguars of the forest. It was merely from a sense of propriety that, whilst he remained in the mission, he would only eat the same food as the Fathers. The natives, if they return to their tribe (al monte), or find themselves pressed by hunger, soon resume their old habits of anthropophagy. 

Humboldt goes on to seek to mitigate excessive revulsion to the described practice by noting that cannibalism was widespread in thirteenth century Egypt. Howbeit, his brief dissertation on the Egyptian practice does not eclipse the yuck factor elicited by his matter-of-fact discussion about his “sufficiently civilized” travel companion.

As readers of this blog know, I very much admire Alexander von Humboldt. My father introduced me to him and I’ve introduced him to my children. He makes for exhilarating reading. But, as you read him, be sure to “prove all things, hold fast that which is good.”

We’ll visit with him again.