THE GREAT OPENING 75initially enraptured.^18 "They go naked as the day they were born," he
wrote, "the women as well as the men." And: "We Christians said
they were remarkably beautiful, the men as well as the women."
And: "This beauty was moral as well as physical.... They are the
most pleasant and peaceful people in the world."
Along with beauty went innocence. "The Admiral said he could
not believe that a man could have ever beheld people so good of
heart, so generous and timid, because they all gave away everything
they had to us Christians and ran to give us whatever they had as
soon as they saw us." And: "In exchange for anything you give
them, no matter how trifling, they immediately give you all their
possessions." And: "They do not covet other people's property....
Whatever you ask for that belongs to them, they never refuse. On
the contrary, they ask you to help yourself, and show so much love
that you give them your heart." And: "They are very gende and
know nothing of evil. They know nothing of killing one another."^19
But such an idyllic image could not long survive the test of
experience. In particular, one thing these generous people were not
ready to give away, and that was their women. And that was the one
thing that, after months at sea, these horny Spaniards wanted above
all, more even than gold. Also, the same innocents who were ready
to give freely of their possessions assumed the Spanish would do the
same. So they took, which the Spanish defined as theft. The very
Columbus who had waxed rhapsodic on arrival soon repented
himself of his credulity and offered some practical advice to his men:
"During your voyage to Cibao, if an Indian steals anything at all, you
must punish him by cutting off his nose and his hands, because these
are the parts of the body that they cannot hide."
So now the noble savage had become the savage, pure and simple.
What else could he be? No one could live up to scriptural myths in
the presence of some of the most ruthless rogues ever let loose on
unsuspecting victims. Pascal Bruckner argues persuasively that the
Indian was "condemned from the very beginning because he had
been declared perfect." This new, and for the white man far more
congenial, image was reinforced, moreover, by other aspects of
Indian culture—in particular their alleged recourse to cannibalism.
Some scholars would deny the existence of such practice, at least for
the Indians of the Caribbean. (There would seem to be no doubt of
it in Mexico or Central America.) How credible such denials are is
hard to say; it is, after all, very hard to prove a negative, but it is clear
that anthropologists are sometimes motivated here by a need to see