Talk:Cannibalism

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• Finally they fell into the hands of a cacique who massacred Valdivia and some of his companions, sacrificing them in honour of his zemes, and afterwards eating them in company with his invited friends. These natives only eat enemies or strangers whom they catch by chance, abstaining at all other times from human flesh. Geronimo d'Aguilar and six of his companions were kept to be eaten three days later; but during the night they escaped from this cruel tyrant, breaking their bonds and taking refuge with a neighbouring cacique, before whom they presented themselves as suppliants. They were received, but as slaves.
• A very sad thing is told concerning the mother of Aguilar. When informed of the fate of her son, she suddenly became crazed by sorrow. She had vaguely heard that her son had fallen into the hands of barbarians who eat human flesh, and whenever she saw meat, either boiled or fixed on spits, she made the house ring with her cries, saying "This is the flesh of my son! Am I not the most unhappy of mothers?"
  • Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, De Orbe Novo, Fourth Decade, Book VI (1530, translated by Francis Augustus MacNutt, 1912)

Thanks for starting this page and your contributions to it! But I think we should be a bit careful about what more to add from Peter Martyr d'Anghiera. Generally, we cannot include every mention of cannibalism and he's generally considered fairly unreliable. I think the first quote, about people escaping from being eaten, may be a good one, but I wouldn't add the second one, as it's just about someone who had "vaguely heard" something. Gawaon (talk) 08:18, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

I mostly agree. Although I think the bit from Aguilar's hysterical mother is memorable, even if she was presumably mistaken about her son's death -- probably needs a brief note to the reader Ficaia (talk) 15:47, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

• And when morning came with its sheen and shone, we arose and walked about the island to the right and left, till we came in sight of an inhabited house afar off. So we made towards it, and ceased not walking till we reached the door thereof when lo! a number of naked men issued from it and without saluting us or a word said, laid hold of us masterfully and carried us to their king, who signed us to sit. So we sat down and they set food before us such 36as we knew not and whose like we had never seen in all our lives. My companions ate of it, for stress of hunger, but my stomach revolted from it and I would not eat; and my refraining from it was, by Allah’s favour, the cause of my being alive till now: for no sooner had my comrades tasted of it than their reason fled and their condition changed and they began to devour it like madmen possessed of an evil spirit. Then the savages gave them to drink of cocoa-nut oil and anointed them therewith; and straightway after drinking thereof, their eyes turned into their heads and they fell to eating greedily, against their wont. When I saw this, I was confounded and concerned for them, nor was I less anxious about myself, for fear of the naked folk. So I watched them narrowly, and it was not long before I discovered them to be a tribe of Magian cannibals whose King was a Ghul. All who came to their country or whoso they caught in their valleys or on their roads they brought to this King and fed them upon that food and anointed them with that oil, whereupon their stomachs dilated that they might eat largely, whilst their reason fled and they lost the power of thought and became idiots. Then they stuffed them with cocoa-nut oil and the aforesaid food, till they became fat and gross, when they slaughtered them by cutting their throats and roasted them for the King’s eating; but, as for the savages themselves, they ate human flesh raw.
  • Sinbad the Sailor, Fourth Voyage
  • R. F. Burton, trans. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, vol. 6 (United States: Burton Club, n.d.), pp. 35–6

• Vascones (fama est) alimentis talibus usi
  Produxere animas.
  • Gascoynes (as fame reportes)
    Liv’d with meates of such sortes.
  • Juvenal, XV, 93, as quoted by Montaigne, trans. John Florio (1603), bk. 1, ch. 30

• When I spoke of human flesh being used at both tents, I said it was prepared for the little ones in both tents. I did not mean to include the larger (my half sisters) children or the grown people, because I am not positive that they tasted of it. Father was crying and did not look at us during the time, and we little ones felt that we could not help it. There was nothing else. Jacob Donners wife came down the steps one day saying to mother “What do you think I cooked this morning?” Then answered the question herself, “Shoemaker’s arm.”
  • Georgia Donner, letter to Charles McGlashan (15 June 1879); she was four years old during the winter of 1846–7, when at least some of the starving Donner Party resorted to cannibalism. — George R. Stewart, Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1936), foreword

• I consider it no reproach, when suffering the agony to which extreme hunger subjects some men, for them to do what the Esquimaux tell us was done. Men so placed are no more responsible for their actions than a madman who commits a great crime. Thank God, when starving for days, and compelled to eat bits of skin, the bones of ptarmigan up to the beak and down to the toe-nails, I felt no painful craving; but I have seen men who suffered so much that I believe they would have eaten any kind of food, however repulsive.
  • John Rae (c. 1854), reporting on Franklin's lost expedition to the Canadian Arctic in search of the Northwest Passage, 1845–8. — Owen Beattie and John Geiger, Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition (1987), ch. 8

• It must not be supposed that in refusing to admit temptation to be an excuse for crime it is forgotten how terrible the temptation was; how awful the suffering; how hard in such trials to keep the judgment straight and the conduct pure. We are often compelled to set up standards we cannot reach ourselves, and to lay down rules which we could not ourselves satisfy. But a man has no right to declare temptation to be an excuse, though he might himself have yielded to it, nor allow compassion for the criminal to change or weaken in any manner the legal definition of the crime.
  • R v. Dudley and Stephens (1884) 14 QBD 273 DC. See Custom of the sea

• Many a meal of human hearts and livers was partaken of by soldiers, who were anxious to possess the courage their enemies had displayed; and believing that the qualities would be transferred from the eaten heart to the one who devoured it, they lost no opportunity of in this way possessing themselves of the admired reckless daring of the rebels.
  • Susie Carson Rijnhart, With the Tibetans in Tent and Temple: Narrative of Four Years' Residence on the Tibetan Border, and of a Journey into the Far Interior, 5th ed. (Cincinnati: Foreign Christian Missionary Society, 1901), p. 92, on the brutal suppression of the Dungan Revolt (1895–6) in north-western China

• Chichijima incident
  • James Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage (2003), ch. 15

• Captain Murderer's mission was matrimony, and the gratification of a cannibal appetite with tender brides. On his marriage morning, he always caused both sides of the way to church to be planted with curious flowers; and when his bride said, 'Dear Captain Murderer, I ever saw flowers like these before: what are they called?' he answered, 'They are called Garnish for house-lamb,' and laughed at his ferocious practical joke in a horrid manner, disquieting the minds of the noble bridal company, with a very sharp show of teeth, then displayed for the first time. He made love in a coach and six, and married in a coach and twelve, and all his horses were milk-white horses with one red spot on the back which he caused to be hidden by the harness. For, the spot would come there, though every horse was milk-white when Captain Murderer bought him. And the spot was young bride's blood.
• The Captain brought out a silver pie-dish of immense capacity, and the Captain brought out flour and butter and eggs and all things needful, except the inside of the pie; of materials for the staple of the pie itself, the Captain brought out none. Then said the lovely bride, 'Dear Captain Murderer, what pie is this to be?' He replied, 'A meat pie.' Then said the lovely bride, 'Dear Captain Murderer, I see no meat.' The Captain humorously retorted, 'Look in the glass.' She looked in the glass, but still she saw no meat, and then the Captain roared with laughter, and suddenly frowning and drawing his sword, bade her roll out the crust. So she rolled out the crust, dropping large tears upon it all the time because he was so cross, and when she had lined the dish with crust and had cut the crust all ready to fit the top, the Captain called out, 'I see the meat in the glass!' And the bride looked up at the glass, just in time to see the Captain cutting her head off; and he chopped her in pieces, and peppered her, and salted her, and put her in the pie, and sent it to the baker's, and ate it all, and picked the bones.
  • Charles Dickens, "Captain Murderer", in All the Year Round (8 September 1860), recounting an elaborated version of the Bluebeard story told to him as a child by his nurse

• ?
  • N. L. Whitehead & M. Harbsmeier (eds.) Hans Staden’s True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), p. xvii

• One day they [Liu Pei and Yüan-tê] sought shelter at a house whence a youth came out and made a low obeisance. They asked his name and he gave it as Liu An, of a well known family of hunters. Hearing who the visitor was the hunter wished to lay before him a dish of game, but though he sought for a long time nothing could be found for the table. So he came home, killed his wife and prepared a portion for his guest. While eating Liu Pei asked what flesh it was and the hunter told him "wolf." Yüan-tê knew no better and ate his fill. Next day at daylight, just as he was leaving, he went to the stables in the rear to get his horse and passing through the kitchen he saw the dead body of a woman lying on the table. The flesh of one arm had been cut away. Quite startled he asked what this meant, and then he knew what he had eaten the night before. He was deeply affected at this proof of his host's regard and the tears rained down as he mounted his steed at the gate.
  • Luo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms (14th century), ch. 19
  • Translated by Charles Henry Brewitt-Taylor, vol. 1 of 2 (1925), p. 194

• Mother and father of appetites, I am
  Sagawa, who'll kiss you, for starters.
  • Maggie Hannan, "The Vanishing Point", anthologised in The New Poetry (1993), p. 317

• When a body was considered for human consumption, none of it was discarded except the bitter gall bladder. In the deceased’s old sugarcane garden, maternal kin dismembered the corpse with a bamboo knife and stone axe. They first removed hands and feet, then cut open the arms and legs to strip the muscles. Opening the chest and belly, they avoided rupturing the gall bladder, whose bitter content would ruin the meat. After severing the head, they fractured the skull to remove the brain. Meat, viscera, and brain were all eaten. Marrow was sucked from cracked bones, and sometimes the pulverized bones themselves were cooked and eaten with green vegetables. In North Fore but not in the South, the corpse was buried for several days, then exhumed and eaten when the flesh had “ripened” and the maggots could be cooked as a separate delicacy.
  • Shirley Lindenbaum, Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2013), p. 224

Rename to "Cannibalism"?

Hey User:Ficaia and others here, what would you think about renaming this page to just Cannibalism? Wikipedia describes cannibalism among animals under that name, but we aren't bound by Wikipedia's naming schema and we don't have a page with that name yet. I also doubt there'll be many notable quotes about animal cannibalism. Choosing the simpler name might also make this page easier to find – right now I see it in the top 10 when I google "quotes human cannibalism" (few people will do that), but not when I google "quotes cannibalism". So what do you think about that renaming (leaving the current page name as a redirect)? Gawaon (talk) 08:55, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

I agree Ficaia (talk) 11:51, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

Great, thanks for renaming the page! Gawaon (talk) 08:30, 6 October 2024 (UTC)