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ABSTRACT
“What would we not have eaten?” Jean de Léry posited, remembering the undesirable animals and foodstuffs he consumed while starving on a ship in the Atlantic in 1558. This was a question rhetorically present in nearly all the starvation accounts in sixteenth century colonization narratives. When colonizers starved in the Americas during their attempts to settle, they reported the hierarchy of animals they ate, from the most to the least “edible,” often arguing that in desperation, one would eat anything at all. However, edibility, like taste, is as culturally constructed as it is physiological. This article looks at these accounts of starvation and presents an analysis of these hierarchies of edibility and disgust as phenomena intrinsically linked with cultural identities and integral to developing colonial thought processes. When Europeans reported eating “disgusting” animals, they said just as much about themselves and their shifting identities as the animals.
Notes
1. Léry, Histoire d’un voyage, 221.
2. Herrmann, “The ‘tragicall historie;’” Shahani, “Cannibal Foods”
3. This article is indebted to the works of Rachel B. Herrmann, Kathleen Donegan, and Carla Cevasco for their formative contributions on how hunger accounts shaped early American mythologies. Herrmann, “The ‘tragicall historie;’” Donegan, Seasons of Misery; and Cevasco, Violent Appetites.
4. The larger cultural shifts in the edibility of animals in the colonial Atlantic World is further explored in my forthcoming book, Eating Animals in the Early Modern Atlantic World.
5. On major developments in the topic of settler colonialism: Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview; Veracini, “Introducing Settler Colonial Studies,” 1–12; Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology; and Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 387–409.
6. Eden, The Early American Table, 59–60.
7. Herrmann, “The ‘Tragicall historie,’” 49–55.
8. Joy, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows, 20.
9. Joy, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows, 16.
10. Cevasco, Violent Appetites, 4.
11. Donegan, Seasons of Misery, 1–3.
12. Cevasco, Violent Appetites, 4.
13. Fudge, Renaissance Beasts, 74–77. See also Jeanneret, A Feast of Words; and Bazell, “Strife among the Table-Fellows.”
14. Percy, “A True Relation.”
15. Smith, “General History,” 239.
16. Percy, “A True Relation.”
17. Percy, “A True Relation.”
18. Laudonnière, L’Histoire Notable, 30–1.
19. Léry, Histoire d’un Voyage, 152.
20. Cabeza de Vaca was one of four survivors of Pánfilo de Narváez’s disastrous expedition to Florida, whose epic journey on foot from modern day Florida to Texas circulated widely in Spanish royal chronicler Gonzalo Fernández Oviedo’s Historia General y Natural as well as Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative: Relación de los Naufragios (Account of the Disasters).
21. Cabeza de Vaca, We Came Naked and Barefoot, 180.
22. Cabeza de Vaca, La Relación, 34.
23. Cabeza de Vaca, La Relación, 23–4.
24. Léry, Histoire d’un Voyage, 400–12.
25. Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, 21.
26. The Ancient Planters of Virginia, “A Brief Declaration,” 895–6.
27. Percy, “A True Relation”
28. More information on the Jamestown Project can be found in Kupperman, ed., Captain John Smith; and Shahani, Tasting Difference, 135.
29. Shahani, Tasting Difference, 135. Known as “Jane,” it is not clear whether she died of natural causes and was then consumed, or murdered expressly for this purpose.
30. Herrmann, “The ‘tragicall historie,’” 50.
31. Percy, “A True Relation.”
32. Here “carbonado’d” likely refers to carbonado, a piece of meat scored before it is grilled. Smith, “General History,” 240. See also Kupperman, ed., Captain John Smith.
33. Smith, “General History,” 240.
34. Herrmann, “The ‘tragicall historie,’” 53.
35. Laudonnière, L’Histoire Notable de la Floride, 32.
36. Smithers, “Rituals of Consumption,” 21.
37. Léry, Histoire d’un Voyage, 37–8.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Danielle Alesi
Danielle Alesi is an Assistant Professor of History at Nazareth University in Rochester, NY. Her research interests include the human-animal relationship in Atlantic World Colonization. Her first book, titled Eating Animals in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Consuming Empire, 1492-1700 is under contract and review with Amsterdam University Press.