AS ESTEBAN EMBARKED on a ship overcrowded with refugees at Azemmour in 1522, the scenes around him were similar to television images familiar in our own times: hungry, nearly broken Africans gathered together in search of survival, their faces ghostly with bewilderment as they abandon themselves to an almost lifeless hope. Once on board, Esteban and his companions resigned themselves to the false promise of a new dawn.
For those lucky enough to have been earmarked as ideal commodities for sale in the slave markets of Lisbon or Seville, there was perhaps some reason to be optimistic about saving their lives, although at a considerable cost. They, at least, might be bought by masters who were required by law to ensure that their slaves were properly clothed, fed, and sheltered. Many of those who embarked may even have had some idea of their legal rights. Whether many masters had either the inclination or the wherewithal to comply with those laws in such a woeful time is another matter, but some certainly did. For a few of the refugees, then, their hope was not in vain.
But for many more, the fabled Spanish shores of which they had heard so much talk from the merchants and mariners of Azemmour were merely the tragic epilogue to a horrible story. Southern Spain is only eighteen miles from Ceuta and Morocco, and pestilence and dearth had struck the Spanish too. Again, we must rely on conjecture to establish Esteban’s likely story, but a young Spanish chronicler, Juan Daza, describes the terrible destiny of the refugees from Azemmour. In reality, their prospects were hardly better in Spain than they had been in North Africa.
Juan Daza, like Cabeza de Vaca, was from the small city of Jerez de la Frontera, famous for its sherry wine and Thoroughbred horses. The two men were close in age and must have come across each other from time to time in the claustrophobic village atmosphere of Jerez. The apocalyptic horror and catastrophe that engulfed the place at the time Esteban arrived in Spain is described by Daza in a naive writing style that betrays his youth but is confident and authoritative in tone.
Daza recorded that in 1522 there was not enough grain to sow for a harvest the following autumn. The charitable hospitals were filled to overflowing with the sick and the starving. People resorted to all manner of foodstuffs, and the streets of the city rang with cries of mendicant monks, begging for the poor with their plea: “For the love of God!”
With them went a great crowd of youngsters, calling out the heartrending lament of the starving poor, “I am dying of hunger!” At night, these miserable creatures slept in the streets, the haunting moans of their private anguish punctuating the slumber of more fortunate citizens. In the morning there were many dead, but there was no one to bury them.
Daza tells us that there was no one to shed a tear for these beggars and no one would give them food; nor was anyone prepared to stop them from stealing it, even though it was scarce and expensive. They stole figs, walnuts, and chestnuts and took bread from the bakers and cheese from the cheesewrights, and even the sheriffs and their deputies turned a blind eye for there was neither dog nor cat nor donkey left alive in the stricken town—the hungry had eaten them all along with other things that were far worse. In the countryside men and women lived like beasts, eating thistles, weeds, and other poisonous herbs and grasses that killed them.
Then, in the cycle of disasters, plague struck Spain again in the late spring of 1522, and the bodies piled up in the streets of Jerez and other Andalusian cities. The churchyards were full and no one could enter the churches because of the stench of rotting corpses.
“It was shocking to see the bodies of the Moorish slaves, men and women, piled up in the city rubbish dumps where they had been buried out of necessity…and awful to see how many of these Moorish carcasses there were,” Daza explained. “And the reason that there were so many Moors here is that last year there was great famine over there, beyond the sea, in the regions of Safi and Azemmour. The Moors themselves approached the Christians and pleaded with them to take them captive and to bring them to Spain.”
So many were brought in 1522 that their value fell to practically nothing, not least because of their terrible health.
“More than six thousand of these souls were brought to Spain, but it was awful to see them arrive because they were so weak and misshapen from the great hunger they had suffered,” Daza reported. “Nearly all of these aforementioned Moors perished, and very few escaped the plague, the fiercest pestilence ever witnessed by man, which took hold in May and lasted until the Day of Saint John the Baptist (June 24).”
It seems likely that Esteban was one of the few sub-Saharan Africans who managed to escape Azemmour alongside these Moors. But that may have saved his life, because, as we have seen, Spaniards tended to prefer negros to moros as slaves. Esteban would have stood out as a more valuable commodity than the starving Moorish refugees around him.
These were desperate times, marked by awful fears and ghastly deeds. Juan Daza describes how, in 1522, at the orders of the chief sheriff of Jerez, an emaciated, half-starved young lad was paraded naked through the streets, riding on the back of a donkey. From time to time, as the small procession stopped here and there, the boy was tortured with red hot tongs while his grisly crime was described by the town crier. These agonies were abruptly and brutally brought to an end when he was “quartered.” Daza is not specific, but if the punishment was meted out in the usual fashion, then the criminal—Daza judged him to be “no more than eighteen”—was disemboweled and his genitals were cut off while he was still alive. He was then beheaded, and finally his cadaver was cut into four parts. Daza tells us that the four parts were then gibbeted on four roads leading into the city, while his head was posted on a fifth. Daza watched it all, along with a fascinated crowd. No doubt if Esteban was in town and had the opportunity to see it, he would not have missed such an exciting public entertainment.
The young victim of this vicious justice had, however, committed a heinous crime and had violated an ancient taboo. It was April and the warm days of springtime were already giving way to summer in that parched year of failed crops, when the boy, almost crippled with hunger, approached a humble cowshed. He was in luck, for one of the local cheesewrights was preparing to spend the night there.
“For the love of God,” begged the boy, “may I shelter here for the night and get some sleep?”
The compassionate cheesewright assented, and the boy pleaded for food: “Give me a mouthful of bread, for it is eight days since I had a bite to eat and I’m starving to death.”
“Congratulations! You are in luck,” said the good cheesewright, and he gave the boy some bread and milk, which was what he had in the cowshed. As the boy ate, the benevolent man made up an extra bed for him.
In the morning, as soon as the two companions had awoken, the cheesewright gave the lad a breakfast of bread and milk.
“Stay as long as you like in this cowshed,” said the host, for he was overcome with emotion at the sight of the such a weak and perilously thin youngster.
As the two of them chatted, the cheesewright became drowsy again and slowly dropped off to sleep.
The boy suddenly seized a hoe and smashed the good man over the head. With a knife, he quickly ripped out the man’s intestines. Then he butchered his benefactor, slicing off those parts he most fancied for eating, and filled some saddlebags with the man’s flesh.
He spied a mare nearby, brought her to the hut, saddled her, and buckled on the saddlebags. But as the murderer was ready to make good his escape, the chief cattleman appeared. The boy panicked. Petrified, he failed to mount the horse. The cattleman saw the blood.
“What’s that?” he asked.
In his agitation, the boy was unable to hide the facts of his crime. “I killed the cheesewright,” he confessed. “Then, I butchered his body.”
It seems from Daza’s account, which he perhaps heard directly from the cattleman, that both of them were shocked and aghast at what had happened.
“I did it for the meat,” the boy explained. “For the meat and for no other reason.”
The cattleman grabbed him and quickly tied his hands. He brought his prisoner to the city and he also brought the grim evidence in the saddlebags. The prisoner was thrown into jail. The sheriff was sent for. The prisoner was sentenced to death.
And, when a few curious citizens of Jerez, with Daza no doubt among them, asked this eighteen-year-old why he had committed such a horrible crime, he replied: “The devil said, Get up and kill him!” But he confessed that it was “also so that I could eat my fill of the cheesewright’s flesh, for I was starving to death.”
This was the world into which Esteban stepped as he first arrived in Spain from famished Morocco.
CANNIBALISM IS AN almost uniquely emotive subject. It has left a deep scar on the human mind and it lies at the heart of western European mythology, for it is central to Christian worship. Catholics believe that the bread and wine of Holy Communion truly become the flesh and blood of Christ at the moment of consecration. This mysterious miracle of transubstantiation is linked to the idea of Christ as a sacrificial lamb, an idea that is rooted in the more prosaic tradition of sacrificing a lamb for Passover that was so important to Christ’s own religion, Judaism. And, what is more, it is widely held that the tradition of slaughtering an animal in homage to the gods was little more than a civilized development of an original tradition of human sacrifice.
The Spanish conquistadors found such human sacrifice in Aztec Mexico, a barbaric ritual which they claimed went hand-in-glove with cannibalism, although this has been eloquently disputed. But Europeans held deeply rooted beliefs about cannibalism among “savage” Americans. In fact, the word “cannibal” is a corruption of “Carib,” from which we also derive “Caribbean.” This belief was a direct result of Christopher Columbus’s deluded perception of the New World, for he quickly became convinced that the aggressive peoples he came across on his first voyage in 1492 deliberately waged war against their pacific neighbors in order to eat them. But although Columbus may have sown the seed of this European mythology of Carib man-eating, others soon enthusiastically embellished the idea. The inhabitants of the New World were soon simplistically characterized and classified as either bad or good, depending on whether Europeans thought they were the cannibals or the ones who were eaten.
The Spanish monarchs responded. They signed a decree that enshrined this fantastical distinction between good and bad in law by establishing that it was legitimate to enslave cannibals, whereas the good Indians who did not eat human flesh were to be kindly treated. This was a well-intentioned act of pious rulers who had no understanding of the real situation. But, by signing that decree, they gave every Spanish conquistador good reason to allege and even to believe that the people he persecuted were man-eaters.
How many Americans in 1492—or how many humans throughout history, for that matter—were habitual man-eaters, if any, has been the source of considerable debate, often undignified, among scholars, but it is a question of only passing interest here. It is of paramount importance, however, that Europeans considered cannibalism so atrocious that it defined the difference between peoples who could be considered human and those who should be treated as beasts, the difference between those who should be treated as royal subjects and those who should be enslaved.
Therefore, cannibalism by a European was not merely an especially repellent and revolting act that violated all sense of what it meant to be civilized. It was much worse because it did violence to the essence of what it meant to be human. And so the eighteen-year-old in Jerez had been on the verge of literally bestial behavior, of committing an act of animal atrocity. He had betrayed his humanity.
In fact, the intended crime may have been worse still. The year before, an epidemic had struck the cattle of the region, leaving the animals weak and vulnerable to rustlers and thieves. Many people were driven to mild, acceptable dishonesty by their hunger, killing a beast in the field and taking the meat home for the family pot. But there were many others who stole out of greed, Daza reported, selling the meat for a profit. These malefactors, having learned to ply their delinquent trade by stealing cattle the previous year, now turned their attention to the donkeys and horses that had been put out to pasture. Could it be that the eighteen-year-old victim of sixteenth-century justice intended to sell the butchered cheesewright?
By the middle of July the plague had abated. It is possible that Esteban remained in Jerez, where the first religious brotherhood to be founded in the city by black Africans would shortly be established, in 1527, the year Narváez sailed for Florida. But it seems more likely that Esteban now headed north, to Seville, which was Europe’s gateway to America and the commercial powerhouse of the Spanish empire.