Spaniards, Cannibals, and the Eucharist in the New World

A recurrent feature of Spanish colonial discourse in the early modern era is the lament that Amerindians from Florida to Patagonia suffered from two grave defects: they were hopeless drunks and they were prone to cannibalism. Examples of such allegations are legion. Drunkenness, insisted one seventeenth-century writer, “is such a common vice among Indians, that you scarcely find a single one who having some wine or chicha [maize beer], which is what they usually drink, does not get drunk.”² “Wine,” wrote the sixteenth-century chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, is “the thing they esteem most.”³ The Spanish Council of the Indies