When King Pyrrhus passed through Italy, after he had recognized the order of the army that the Romans had sent out to meet him, he said, “I do not know what barbarians these are (for the Greeks call all foreign nations barbarians), but the disposition of this army that I see is not barbaric at all.” The Greeks said as much about the one that Flaminius brought to their country, and Philip, seeing from a hill the order and distribution of the Roman camp in his kingdom, under Publius Sulpicius Galba. This is how one must be careful not to attach oneself to vulgar opinions, and one must judge them by the way of reason, not by the common voice.
For a long time I had with me a man who had spent ten or twelve years in that other world which was discovered in our century, in the place where Villegaignon landed, which he named Antarctic France. This discovery of an infinite country seems to be of some consideration. I don’t know if I can answer for myself that there won’t be others in the future, so many people greater than us who have been deceived in this. I’m afraid that we have eyes bigger than our stomachs, and more curiosity than we have capacity. We embrace everything, but we only hold the wind.
Plato introduces Solon, who says that he learned from the priests of the city of Sais in Egypt that, in ancient times and before the flood, there was a large island called Atlantis, right at the mouth of the Strait of Gibraltar, which covered more land than Africa and Asia together, and that the kings of that region, who not only possessed that island but had extended their territory onto the mainland so far that they controlled the width of Africa as far as Egypt, and the length of Europe as far as Tuscany, undertook to cross over to Asia, and subjugate all the nations bordering the Mediterranean Sea as far as the Gulf of the Sea Major: and, for this purpose, they crossed Spain, Gaul, Italy, as far as Greece, where the Athenians subdued them: but some time later, both the Athenians and they and their island were swallowed up by the flood. It is very likely that this extreme devastation of water caused strange changes to the habitations of the earth, as it is believed that the sea cut Sicily off from Italy,
These places, once by force and vast convulsive ruin, They say that they were torn apart, when immediately both lands were one. (Virgil)
Cyprus from Syria, the Isle of Negrepont from the mainland of Boeocia; and elsewhere joined the lands that were divided, filling the intervening pits with silt and sand,
It nourishes neighboring cities, and feels the heavy burden of the plow. (Horace)
But there is little likelihood that this island is the new world we have just discovered: for it almost touched Spain, and it would be an incredible effect of the flood to have set it back, as it is, more than twelve hundred leagues; besides what modern navigators have already discovered, that it is not an island, but a continent with East India on one side, and the lands that are below the two poles on the other; or, if it is separated from them, that it is separated by such a small strait and interval that it does not deserve to be called an island for that reason. It seems that there are movements, some natural, others feverish, in these large bodies as in ours.
When I consider the impression that my river Dordogne makes on my time towards the right bank of its descent, and that in twenty years it has gained so much, and robbed several ships of their foundations, I can see that it is an extraordinary agitation: for, if it had always gone at this rate, or were to go in the future, the face of the world would be turned upside down. But changes take place: sometimes they spread on one side, sometimes on the other; sometimes they are contained. I am not talking about the sudden floods that we deal with at the courts. In the Médoc, along the coast, my brother, Sieur d’Arsac, sees a piece of land buried under the sand that the sea vomits up in front of it; the tops of some ships are still visible; his rents and estates have been exchanged for very meagre pastures. The inhabitants say that, for some time now, the sea has been pushing itself so hard towards them that they have lost four leagues of land. These sands are its forerunners: and we see great waves of shifting sand that advance half a league ahead of it, and gain ground.
The other testimony from antiquity, to which one wants to relate this discovery, is in Aristotle, at least if this little booklet of unheard-of marvels is his. He tells there that certain Carthaginians, having thrown themselves across the Atlantic Ocean, outside the Strait of Gibraltar, and sailed for a long time, had finally discovered a large fertile island, completely covered in woods and watered by large, deep rivers, a long way from any firm land; and that they, and others since, attracted by the goodness and fertility of the land, went there with their wives and children, and began to settle. The Lords of Carthage, seeing that their country was gradually depopulating, expressly forbade, on pain of death, anyone from going there, and drove out these new inhabitants, fearing, as it is said, that over time they would multiply so much that they would supplant them and ruin their estate. This account of Aristotle’s is also inconsistent with our new lands. This man I had, was a simple and crude man, which is a condition that lends itself to truthful testimony: for refined people notice much more curiously and more things, but they gloss them over; and, to emphasize their interpretation and persuade you, they cannot help but alter the story a little: they never present pure facts to you, they incline and mask them according to the face they have given them; and, to give credit to their judgment and draw you into it, they willingly lend a hand to the matter, lengthening and amplifying it.
Either you need a man who is very faithful, or so simple that he has nothing to build on and give verisimilitude to, to false inventions; and who has not espoused anything. Mine was like that; and, besides that, he showed me several times several sailors and merchants he had met on this voyage. So I am content with this information, without inquiring what the cosmographers have to say about it. We would need topographers to give us a detailed account of the places where they have been. But, having had the advantage over us of having seen Palestine, they want to enjoy the privilege of telling us news of the rest of the world. I would like everyone to write what they know, and as much as they know, not only in this, but in all other subjects: for someone may have some particular knowledge or experience of the nature of a river or a spring, but otherwise knows only what everyone else knows.
However, he will undertake, in order to circulate this small piece, to write all of physics. This vice gives rise to several major inconveniences. Now, to return to my point, I find that there is nothing barbaric or savage about this nation, from what I have been told, except that everyone calls barbarism that which is not of their custom; in truth it seems that we have no other view of truth and reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the country where we are. There is always the perfect religion, the perfect police force, perfect and complete use of all things. They are wild, in the same way that we call wild the fruits that nature, by itself and its ordinary progress, has produced: where, in truth, it is those that we have altered by our artifice and diverted from the common order that we should rather call wild. In these, the true virtues and qualities, which are more useful and natural, are lively and vigorous, whereas in these we have bastardized them and have only accommodated them to the pleasure of our corrupt taste. And yet flavor and delicacy are found to our own excellent taste, to the envy of our own, in various fruits of those regions, without cultivation. It is not right that art should win the point of honor over our great and powerful mother nature. We have so enhanced the beauty and richness of her works through our inventions that we have completely stifled her. If, wherever her purity shines through, she puts our vain and frivolous endeavors to shame in a wonderful way,
And the ivy comes of its own accord, And the more beautiful arbutus of the caves rises in the sun, And the birds sing sweeter than any art. (Propertius)
All our efforts cannot succeed in representing the nest of the smallest bird, its structure, its beauty and the usefulness of its purpose, any more than the web of the meanest spider. All things, as Plato said, are produced by nature, or by fortune, or by art; the greatest and most beautiful, by one or other of the first two; the least and most imperfect, by the last. These nations therefore seem to me to be barbarous, for having received very little from the human spirit, and still being very close to their original naivety.
Natural laws still rule them, very little bastardized by ours; but it is in such purity that I sometimes take umbrage at why knowledge did not come sooner, in the days when there were men who would have been better able to judge of it than we. I am displeased that Licurgus and Plato did not have it; for it seems to me that what we see by experience in those nations surpasses not only all the paintings with which poetry has embellished the golden age, and all its inventions to feign a happy condition of men, but also the conception and the very desire of philosophy. They could hardly have imagined such pure and simple happiness as we see it in our experience; nor could they have believed that our society could be maintained with so little artifice and human bondage.
It is a nation, I said to Plato, in which there is no kind of trade; no knowledge of letters; no science of numbers; no magistrate, nor of political superiority; no use of service, of wealth or of poverty; no contracts; no successions; no divisions; no occupations other than idle ones; no respect of kinship other than common; no clothing; no agriculture; no metal; no use of wine or of wheat. The very words that signify lying, treason, dissimulation, avarice, envy, detraction, forgiveness, are unheard of. How far would he find the republic he had imagined, removed from this perfection:
Will be fresh from the gods. Nature first gave these ways.(Virgil)
Moreover, they live in a very pleasant and well-tempered country; so that, from what my witnesses have told me, it is rare to see a sick man there; and they have assured me that they have seen none there who are trembling, mangy, toothless, or bent double with old age. They are seated along the sea, and close on the landward side with great and lofty mountains, having, between them, a stretch of about a hundred leagues from side to side. They have an abundance of fish and meats that bear no resemblance to ours, and they eat them with no other artifice than to cook them.
The first man to bring a horse there, even though he had been there on several other trips, made them so afraid in this instance that they shot him dead before they could recognize him. Their ships are very long and capable of carrying two or three hundred souls, made of the bark of large trees, held to the ground at one end and supporting each other by their trunks, like some of our barns, whose roofs hang down to the ground and serve as sides. They have such hard wood that they cut it, and make their swords and grills to cook their meat. Their beds are made of cotton fabric, suspended from the ceiling, like those on our ships, each one to his own: for the women sleep separately from their husbands. They get up with the sun, and eat suddenly after getting up, for the whole day; for they have no other meal than that one.
They do not drink at the time, as Suidas says of some other Eastern peoples, who drink outside of eating; they drink several times a day, and in large quantities. Their drink is made from some root, and is the color of our claret wines. They only drink it when it is warm: this drink only keeps for two or three days; it has a slightly pungent taste, not at all smoky, beneficial to the stomach, and laxative for those who are not used to it: it is a very pleasant drink for those who are used to it. Instead of bread, they use a certain white substance, like candied coriander. I have tasted it: the taste is sweet and a little bland.
The whole day is spent dancing. The youngest go out to hunt animals with bows and arrows. Some of the women, however, amuse themselves by heating their drink, which is their main task. There is someone from the elders who, in the morning, before they start eating, walks around the whole granary, going from one end to the other, and repeating the same clause several times, until he has completed the tour (because these are buildings that are a good hundred paces long).
He recommends only two things to them: valour against their enemies and friendship towards their wives. And never fail to acknowledge this obligation, for their guidance, that it is they who keep their drink warm and seasoned. In many places, and among others in my house, you can see the shape of their beds, their cords, their swords and wooden bracelets with which they cover their wrists during combat, and large canes, open at one end, with which they keep time when dancing. They are clean-shaven everywhere, and trim their beards much more neatly than we do, using nothing but wood or stone to shave. They believe that souls are eternal, and that those who have earned the gods’ favor are housed in the part of the sky where the sun rises; the damned, on the side of the West. They have I don’t know what priests and prophets, who very rarely present themselves to the people, having their home in the mountains. On their arrival there is a great festival and solemn assembly of several villages (each barn, as I have described it, makes a village, and they are about a French league from each other).
This prophet speaks to them in public, exhorting them to virtue and to their duty; but all their ethical knowledge contains only these two articles, resolution in war and affection for their women. This one tells them what is to come and what they can expect from their endeavors, whether to lead them to war or keep them from it; but it is such a matter that, where it is necessary to divine well, and if it happens otherwise than he has foretold, he is torn to pieces if they catch him, and condemned as a false prophet. For this reason, once someone has been disappointed, they are never seen again.
Divination is a gift from God: that is why it should be a punishable offense to abuse it. Among the Scythians, when the soothsayers had failed in their predictions, they would be laid, bound hand and foot, on carts full of heather, drawn by oxen, and burned. Those who deal in matters subject to the conduct of human self-sufficiency are excusable for doing what they can. But those others, who come to us boasting assurances of an extraordinary faculty which is beyond our knowledge, should they not be punished for the fact that they do not keep their promise, and for the temerity of their imposture?
They wage wars against nations that are beyond their mountains, further inland, to which they go naked, having no weapons other than bows or wooden swords, sharpened at one end, in the style of the tips of our spears. It is a marvelous thing to see the steadfastness of their battles, which never end except in murder and bloodshed, for they know nothing of roads and terror. Each one brings back the head of the enemy he has killed as his trophy and attaches it to the entrance of his home. After having treated their prisoners well for a long time, and with all the amenities they can think of, the one who is their master holds a large gathering of his acquaintances: he attaches a rope to one of the prisoner’s arms, by the end of which he holds him, a few steps away, for fear of being offended, and gives the other arm to his dearest friend to hold in the same way; and the two of them, in front of the whole assembly, beat him to death with their swords.
When they have done this, they roast him and eat him together, sending portions to their friends who are absent. It is not, as one might think, to feed themselves, as the Scythians did in ancient times: it is to exact extreme vengeance. And so it was, having noticed that the Portuguese, who had allied themselves with their adversaries, used another kind of death against them, when they took them, which was to bury them up to the waist, and to shoot the rest of the body with arrows, and to hang them afterwards: they thought that these people from the other world, like those who had spread knowledge of many vices among their neighbors, and who were much greater masters than them in all sorts of mischief, did not take this kind of revenge without occasion, and that it must be more bitter than theirs, they began to abandon their old ways to follow this one.
I am not convinced that we can thank the barbaric horror of such an act, but yes, indeed, judging their faults well, we are so blind to our own. I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead, in tearing, by torment and by pain, a body still full of feeling, in roasting him to a turn, in making dogs and pigs bite and bruise him (as we have done, not only to them, but as we have seen in recent memory, not between former enemies, but between neighbors and fellow citizens, and, what is worse, under the pretext of piety and religion), than to roast and eat it after it is dead. Chrysippus and Zenon, leaders of the Stoic sect, thought it was all right to use our charcoal for whatever was necessary for our needs, and to obtain food from it: as our ancestors, besieged by Caesar in the city of Alexia, resolved to sustain the hunger of this siege with the bodies of the elderly, women and other persons useless in combat.
The Basques, it is said, used such foods; They produced souls. (Juvenal)
And the doctors do not fear to use it for all sorts of purposes for our health, whether to apply it internally or externally; but there has never been any opinion so disordered as to excuse treason, disloyalty, tyranny and cruelty, which are our ordinary faults. We can therefore rightly call them barbarians, with regard to the rules of reason, but not with regard to us, who surpass them in every kind of barbarity.
Their warfare is most noble and generous, and has as much excuse and beauty as this human disease can receive: it has no other foundation among them than the jealousy of virtue. They are not in dispute over the conquest of new lands, for they still enjoy that natural fertility which provides them with all necessary things without labor or effort, in such abundance that they have no need to expand their boundaries. They are still at that happy point, desiring only what their natural needs dictate: anything beyond that is superfluous for them. They generally call each other, those of the same age, brothers; children, those below them; and the older ones are fathers to all the others.
These leave to their heirs in common this full possession of property in undivided form, with no other title than that pure one that nature gives to its creatures, bringing them into the world. If their neighbors cross the mountains to come and attack them, and they win the victory over them, the victor’s gain is glory, and the advantage of having remained master in valor and virtue: For otherwise they have no use for the possessions of the vanquished, and they return to their country, where they lack nothing necessary, nor even that great part, namely, the ability to enjoy their condition happily and to be content with it. So do these in turn. They ask no ransom of their prisoners but the confession and acknowledgment of being vanquished; but there is not one of them, in a whole century, who does not prefer death to releasing, either by his behavior or his words, a single point of invincible valor: There is no one who does not prefer to be killed and eaten to merely asking not to be.
They treat them with complete freedom, so that life is all the more dear to them; and they commonly harangue them with threats of their future death, of the torments they will have to suffer, of the preparations that are being made for this purpose, of the cutting off of their limbs, and of the feast that will be made at their expense. All this is done for the sole purpose of extracting from their mouths some weak or abased words, or of making them want to flee, in order to gain the advantage of having them terrified and their constancy broken. Because, if we look at it properly, true victory consists in this one point:
There is no victory like that which subdues the enemies who confess it in spirit. (Claudian)
The Hungarians, very bellicose fighters, did not used to pursue their point, besides having given the enemy up to them. For, having wrested this confession, they let him go without offense, without ransom, except, at most, to extract a promise not to take up arms against them again.
We gain enough advantages over our enemies, which are borrowed advantages, not our own. It is the quality of a porter, not of virtue, to have stronger arms and legs; it is a physical and corporeal quality that disposition; it is a stroke of fortune to make our enemy flinch, and to dazzle his eyes with the light of the Sun; it is a trick of art and science, and one that can fall to a cowardly and worthless person, to be sufficient at fencing. The estimation and worth of a man consists in his heart and his will; therein lies his true honor; valor is firmness, not of the legs and arms, but of the courage and the soul; it consists not in the worth of our horse, nor of our arms, but in our own. He who falls, obstinate in his courage,
If he has fallen, he fights on his knees. (Seneca)
He who, for fear of imminent death, does not relax any point of his confidence; he who, even as he surrenders his soul, still looks his enemy full in the face with a firm and disdainful gaze, is beaten, not by us, but by fortune; he is killed, not defeated. The bravest are sometimes the most unfortunate. There are also triumphant losses to match victories. Not even these four sister victories, the most beautiful that the sun ever beheld, of Salamis, Plataea, Mycale and Sicily, ever dared to pit all their glory together against the glory of the defeat of King Leonidas and his men at Thermopylae. Who ever ran with more glorious envy and more ambitiousness to win a battle than Captain Ischolas to lose?
Who more ingeniously and curiously ensured his salvation than he did his ruin? He was charged with defending a certain pass in the Peloponnese against the Arcadians. For what purpose, finding himself completely incapable, given the nature of the place and the inequality of forces, and deciding that anyone who presented themselves to the enemies would have no choice but to stay there; on the other hand, considering himself unworthy of his own virtue and magnanimity and of the Lacedaemonian name, to fail in his duty: he took a middle course between these two extremes, in such a way. He kept the youngest and most willing of his troops for the tutelage and service of their country, and sent them back there; and with those whose defect was less, he decided to sustain this step, and, by their death, make the enemies pay for the most expensive entry possible: as it happened.
For, having been soon surrounded on all sides by the Arcadians, after having made a great slaughter of them, he and his men were all put to the sword. Is there any trophy assigned to the victors that is not better deserved by the vanquished? True victory is about stunning the enemy, not saving him; and the honor of virtue lies in fighting, not in defeating.
To return to our story, these prisoners are so far from surrendering, given all that is done to them, that on the contrary, during the two or three months that they are kept, they carry themselves cheerfully; they urge their masters to hurry up and put them to the test; they challenge them, insult them, reproach them for their cowardice and the number of battles lost against their own men. I have a song made by a prisoner, which contains this passage: let them come boldly, all of them, and gather together to dine on him, for they will be eating their fathers and grandfathers, who served as food and nourishment for his body. “These muscles,” he says, ‘this blood and these veins, are yours, poor fools that you are; you do not recognize that the substance of your ancestors’ limbs is still there: savor them well, you will find the taste of your own flesh in them.
An invention that in no way smacks of barbarism. Those who paint them dying, and who represent this action when they are knocked out, they paint the prisoner spitting in the face of those who kill him and pouting at them. Indeed, they do not cease until their last sigh to defy them and challenge them with words and bearing. Without lying, for us, these are very wild men; because, either they must be so deliberately, or we must be: there is a wonderful distance between their form and ours. The men have several wives, and have a greater number of them the more they are reputed to be valiant: it is a praiseworthy beauty in their marriages, that the same jealousy that our women have for us to prevent us from the friendship and goodwill of other women, theirs have it all the same to acquire it for their own.
Being more careful of their husbands’ honor than of anything else, they seek and endeavor to have as many companions as they can, especially since it is a testimony to the husband’s virtue. Ours will cry miracle; it is not: it is a virtue properly matrimonial, but of the highest order. And, in the Bible, Leah, Rachel, Sarah and Jacob’s wives provided their beautiful maidservants to their husbands; and Livia indulged the appetites of Augustus, in her own interest; and the wife of King Dejotarus, Stratonice, not only provided her husband with a very beautiful young chambermaid to serve her, but carefully nursed her children, and helped them to succeed to their father’s estates.
And, lest it be thought that all this is done out of a simple and slavish obligation to their custom and the impression of the authority of their ancient custom, without speech or judgment, and because their souls are so stupid that they cannot see any other way, it is necessary to allege some traits of their self-sufficiency. In addition to the one I have just recited from one of their warlike songs, I have another, a love song, which begins as follows: Snake, stop there; stop there, snake, so that my sister can draw the pattern and work of a rich cordon on the pattern of your skin, which I can give to my friend: may your beauty and your disposition be preferred to all other snakes at all times. This first verse is the chorus of the song. Now I have enough experience with poetry to judge that not only is there nothing barbaric about this imagination, but that it is completely Anacreontic.
Their language, moreover, is a gentle language with a pleasant sound, reminiscent of Greek endings. Three of them, ignorant of how much the knowledge of the corruptions of this world will one day cost them their rest and their happiness, and that their ruin will arise from this commerce, as I suppose it is already advanced, how miserable to have allowed themselves to be led by the desire of novelty, and to have left the sweetness of their heaven to come and see ours, were in Rouen, when the late King Charles the Ninth was there. The King spoke to them at length; they were shown our way of doing things, our pomp, the form of a beautiful city. After that, someone asked their advice and wanted to know what they had found most admirable. They replied three things, of which I have lost the third and am very upset about it, but I still remember two of them.
They said that they found it very strange that so many tall men with beards, strong and armed, who were around the King (it is likely that they were talking about the Swiss guards), submitted to obeying a child, and that they would have chosen someone from among them to command; secondly (they have a way of speaking such that they refer to men as half of each other) that they had perceived that there were men among us who were full and replete with every kind of comfort, and that their halves were beggars at their doors, starving from hunger and poverty; and found it strange how these needy halves here could suffer such injustice, that they did not seize the others by the throat, or set fire to their houses. I spoke to one of them for a very long time; but I had a translator who followed me so poorly, and who was so hindered in receiving my imaginings by his stupidity, that I could not get much pleasure out of it.
When I asked him what benefit he derived from the superiority he enjoyed among his own kind (for he was a captain, and our sailors called him king), he told me that it was to lead the way in war; he showed me a space of ground to indicate how many men he was followed by, to signify that it was as many as he could in such a space, it could be four or five thousand men; if, outside of war, all his authority had expired, he said that he still had the authority to have paths cut through the hedges of their woods, through which he could pass with ease, when he visited the villages that depended on him. All this is not too bad: but why, they are not wearing any hose.