Cannibalism in Melaka?
If you read the Wikipedia entry on the Portuguese conquest of Melaka you will come across the claim that the city’s pre-conquest rulers ‘kept a group of captured cannibals from New Guinea to whom the perpetrators of serious crimes were fed’ (Figure 1). This would be fascinating if it were true. But is it?
In this post we’re going to have an in-depth look at this Papuan cannibal claim. I conclude that any cannibals who may have resided in Melaka before the capture of the city in 1511 were far more likely to have come from Sumatra than New Guinea — but also that accusations of cannibalism were often used as rhetorical devices in European accounts and should be taken with a pinch of salt. I’ll examine the evidence below, beginning with a couple of sixteenth-century Portuguese accounts before moving on to look at some earlier texts.
Cannibalism is an inherently difficult subject to write about sensitively. It seems wrong to refer to entire societies of people as ‘cannibals’ simply because they may have consumed human flesh for certain purposes. It’s hard to talk about it in any other way, though, so, bearing that caveat firmly in mind, let’s look at the evidence.
Albuquerque’s Commentaries
The citation on the Wikipedia page takes us to Brás de Albuquerque’s Commentarios do grande Afonso Dalboquerque, one of the most important Portuguese sources on Southeast Asia in the sixteenth century — specifically to the 1880 English translation of the work by Walter de Gray Birch for the Hakluyt Society (III:87). This translation was based on the 1774 Portuguese edition of the Commentarios, which was in turn based on the 1576 edition written by the aforementioned Brás, son of Afonso de Albuquerque, the conqueror of Melaka.
Brás de Albuquerque had written a draft of the Commentarios in 1557, using his father’s letters and the stories told by men who had known him as his sources. This basic text was then extensively edited and expanded for the 1576 edition. (See Earle and Villiers 1990:25–49 for an overview of the text’s history.) The work self-consciously mimicked Caesar’s Commentaries, and it presents a lively and interesting description of the 1511 Portuguese conquest of Melaka, among a great many other fascinating topics, all apparently based on the elder Albuquerque’s experiences and observations.
Fortunately a copy of the 1576 edition has been digitised (Figure 2), which means we don’t need to rely on the potentially flawed Hakluyt Society translation here. The relevant section occurs in part III, chapter XVIII, on page 358 of the 1576 printing; the topic is crime and punishment in Melaka before the conquest. I’ve included an image of the text here (Figure 3) as well as a transcription and original translation below:
p.358:
[…] Em Malaca auia diuer-
sas maneiras de justiça, segundo a calidade do crime: hũs espetados, outros acotouelados nos peitos: delles enforcados:outros cozidos em agoa: ou-
tros assados & dados a comer a hũs homẽs, que sam como saluagẽs, de hũa terra q̃ se chama Daru, que o Rey trazia em Malaca pera comerem estes
taes:& de todo o homem que morre por justiça tẽ o Rey ametade de sua fazẽda, tendo herdeiros; &nã nos tendo leua tudo.
‘In Melaka there were diverse methods of punishment according to the nature of the crime: some (criminals) were impaled; others ‘hanged’ by compression of their chests;* others boiled in water; others roasted and given as food to men from a land called Daru, who are like savages, and whom the king brought to Melaka to eat such (criminals). And from every man who dies by (such) punishment, the king takes half of the property if they have heirs, and all of it if they have none.’
(*This clause is tricky; taken literally it says ‘others elbowed in their chests, by them hanged’. Thanks to Eleanor K. Jones (@EleanorKJones1) for help with the interpretation here.)
Aru/Daru
This is all rather lurid — but it does at least corroborate the notion that people may have been eaten by resident cannibals as a legal punishment in pre-Portuguese Melaka.
Albuquerque Jnr.’s Daru is unlikely to have been a place in or around New Guinea, however. It can instead be identified with a kingdom more commonly known as Aru or Haru in Sumatra, a polity governed by speakers of Karo, a language in the Batak branch of the Austronesian language family.
Aru appears in several Portuguese accounts from the early sixteenth century as well as on a number of maps — sometimes, significantly, with the spelling ⟨daru⟩ (Figure 4). It occurs as ⟨亞路⟩ (pinyin: yàlù) on the Mao Kun map, a map made in China in the seventeenth century but supposedly based on the routes and insights of the early-fifteenth-century ‘treasure fleets’ under Zhèng Hé (鄭和) (Figure 5). And it is mentioned under the name Haru as one of the vassals of the Javanese kingdom of Majapahit in Mpu Prapañca’s poem of 1365 CE, the Deśawarṇana (13:1 — Pigeaud 1960:I:11; Robson 1995:33), as well as in the sixteenth-century Malay historical text Sulalat al-salāṭīn (aka Sejarah Melayu ‘The Malay Annals’).
This Aru is more likely to have been the source of the Melaka man-eaters than any location in New Guinea or around it (like the Aru Islands in eastern Indonesia, which are nonetheless also mentioned in Portuguese accounts as a source of bird-of-paradise plumes). The identification is secured by a reference to the Sumatran Aru in a book written by Duarte Barbosa, a Portuguese clerk and conquistador, in around 1516. Barbosa says that the people of Aru (Aru, Haru, Harue, etc.) were notorious for their consumption of human flesh. The specifics of the account vary in different manuscripts (see Barbosa 2000[1516]:II:380); the text here is taken from that of Lisbon, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, ms. Brasil 25:
E outro reyno que se chama Harue de gemtyos hos quaes comem carnes humanas quallquer pesoa que podem tomar e haver comem ho sem nenhũa pyadade e hasy tem outros muitos reynos de gemtyos per ho sertam.
‘There’s another kingdom that they call Harue, the heathens of which eat human flesh. Any person they can take and have they eat without any pity. And there are many other kingdoms of heathens in the hinterland.’
I would say, therefore, that if consumption of criminals’ flesh actually was used as a punishment in pre-Portuguese Melaka, then the cannibals were more likely Sumatran than Papuan.
Cannibalism in Sumatra
Accusations of cannibalism in Sumatra go back at least as far as the second century CE, when the Alexandrian geographer Claudius Ptolemy claimed that the people of a number of islands in the Indian Ocean ate human flesh, including notably the residents of βαροῦσαι, identifiable with Barus in Sumatra (Figure 6).
Such claims are also found in the fifteenth-century account of the Venetian traveller Niccolò de’ Conti, which I discussed in the last post on the blog. Conti — or rather Poggio Bracciolini, the person who actually transcribed Conti’s account — says that the ‘Bathech’ people of Sumatra were cannibalistic headhunters. ⟨Bathech⟩ is clearly an attempt to transcribe the word ‘Batak’, commonly used to label a number of distinct ethnic groups in upland Sumatra (including the Karo).
I’ve transcribed the relevant section here from a manuscript of Bracciolini’s work dated to 1460 CE (Rome, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb.lat.224 — Figure 7). The text below corresponds to lines 143–147 in the 2004 edition and French translation by Michèle Guéret-Laferté:
[…] In eius insule quam dicunt bathech par-
te, antropofagi habitant, continuum cum uicinis bellum gerentes. Capi-
ta humana in thesauris habent, que ex hostibus captis abscisa, esis carni-
bus recondunt, iisꝙ utuntur pro nummis, si quid emunt uno aut plurib9
pro ut res extimatur, cui plura capita domi sunt ditior habetur.
‘In a part of this island [of Sumatra] that they call Bathech live cannibals in constant war with their neighbours. They hold human heads to be treasure, which they cut off captive enemies. They eat the flesh and stow the heads; these are used as currency. When they want to buy something they bring out one or more heads depending on the value of the item. He who has the most heads at home is held to be the richest.’
Cannibalistic Tropes
Similar accounts of both cannibalism and headhunting can be found in descriptions of upland Sumatra from much more recent times, and the sheer weight of the evidence does seem somewhat compelling. It would be surprising if all of these accounts turned out to be false. It is hard to be sure of the veracity of any stories of cannibalism, however, whether in Southeast Asia, South America, Africa, the Pacific, or elsewhere, and while the consumption of human flesh has been documented ethnographically, there is no consensus as to how common the practice ever was in the past.
The topic is a tricky one; accounts written by cannibals themselves are extremely rare and we’re often forced to rely on descriptions by outsiders or by Christianised/Islamised people writing about their pagan ancestors. Such texts can hardly be said to be neutral. Parallels in foreigners’ accounts of cannibalism frequently occur: Are these the products of shared folklore about non-Christian ‘savages’? Are they descriptions of genuine cross-cultural commonalities resulting from universal attitudes to the consumption of human flesh? Or are they tropes deployed rhetorically to justify conquest and colonialism?
I’m not qualified to resolve these problems — but it is apparent, at least, that stories of cannibalism are wont to foster persistent tropes. In Western popular media, for instance, you can find a huge number of images of people being boiled in large cauldrons while cannibalistic natives dance or crowd around them (Figure 8). Images like these can be found in exploitation movies, neo-Nazi propaganda, and comics in the Sunday papers — and all of them can ultimately be traced back to a single original picture, a woodcut from the account of the German mercenary Hans Staden, who was held captive by a Tupinambá community on the coast of what is now Brazil in the middle of the sixteenth century.
The sensationalism of such pictures and stories clouds the topic, and I am loath to come to any firm conclusions about cases like the one described by Albuquerque, where the only evidence (of which I’m aware, at least) comprises a few lines of text written by a foreigner decades after the event.
Interestingly, the Spanish cronista Juan de Betanzos records an instance of cannibalistic allies being used to eat the king’s enemies in his Suma y narración de los yngas (‘Narrative of the Incas’), a history of the Inca empire in South America written, like Hans Staden’s grim travelogue and Brás de Albuquerque’s first draft, in 1557. The Incas abhorred the consumption of human flesh, in the same way that the Muslims of Melaka must have been shocked by the idea — but according to Betanzos the emperor Atawallpa had three Cañari nobles eaten in front of their soldiers by his allies, the Quillacingas, for siding with his rival Waskar in the Inca Civil War (D’Altroy 2015:338).
This is somewhat similar to Albuquerque’s claim about judicial anthropophagy in Melaka. But is that because it was a real punishment predicated on a common human fear, or is it because the two accounts employ the same artificial trope in an attempt to justify conquest and colonisation?
Finally, I should point out that even though these supposed cannibals were probably from Sumatra, if they existed at all, the island of New Guinea does nonetheless appear to have been known by name in Melaka at the time of the Portuguese conquest in 1511. (See here for some earlier references to the island.) The apothecary Tomé Pires, writing c.1515, says that the Melakans claimed that ‘on the island of Papua, which would be eighty leagues [≈444 kilometres] from Banda, there are men with big ears who cover themselves with them’ (na Jlha De papua que sera oitemta leguoas de bamdam Dizem que ha os omeẽs das orelhas gramdẽs que se cobrem com ellãs — Cortesão 1944:222, 449). Pires doubted the story, and was right to — but this is nonetheless a very early reference to the island, antedating the voyage of Jorge de Menezes to New Guinea in 1526.
I’m not sure when I’ll update the blog in the future because I’m supposed to be doing other things, but sometimes a topic just grabs me and I have to write it up (as happened here). So who knows?
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A. J. West — Leiden, June 2020
REFERENCES
Albuquerque, Afonso Brás de. 1576. Commentarios do grande Afonso Dalboquerque. Lisbon: Ioão de Barreira.
Barbosa, Duarte. 2000 [1516]. O livro de Duarte Barbosa. Edited by Maria Augusta da Veiga de Sousa. Two volumes. Lisbon: Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical.
Bracciolini, Poggio. 2004 [1448]. De l’Inde. Les voyages en Asie de Niccolò de’ Conti. Turnhout: Brepols.
Cortesão, Armando (ed and trans). 1944. The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires and the book of Francisco Rodrigues. Two volumes. London: Hakluyt Society.
D’Altroy, Terence N. 2015. The Incas. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Second edition.
Earle, T. F. and Villiers, John. 1990. Albuquerque. Caesar of the east. Warminster: Aris and Phillips.
Pigeaud, T. 1960. Java in the fourteenth century. Five volumes. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Robson, S. O. 1995. Desawarnana. Leiden: KITLV Press.
