Thomas More, Las Casas, And Montaigne's Of Cannibals

Thomas More’s “Utopia”, Bartolomé de Las Casas’s “Destruction of the Indies”, and Michel de Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals” have the commonality of discussing mysterious territories which have certain conditions in several aspects of life which their present audience is unaware. The three authors describe foreign places with vastly different values and social standards, but they all describe the treatments or relations of the indigenous people by Europeans and outsiders, as well as the natives’ reaction to these treatments. More, Las Casas, and Montaigne reveal their personal views through descriptions of the different groups of indigenous people, and all suggest that their “advanced” societies are not necessarily better than those with different

Unlike Las Casas’s idealistic and pacifistic descriptions of the indigenous, Montaigne portrays the natives as flawed, and sometimes violent individuals. He goes on to use these flaws as criticism towards his fellow Europeans. The main topic Montaigne covers and uses to compare Indian and European practices is cannibalism. To a civilized European, cannibalism seems like a brutish, primal, barbaric practice. Montaigne defends the natives by pleading their thought process in eating another human’s flesh. “After [the natives] have long time used and treated their prisoners well… kill him with swords: which done, they roast him and eat him in common… not to nourish themselves with it, but to represent an extreme and inexpiable revenge”(Montagne Paragraph 11). Contrary to the belief that the cannibals are not unable to feed themselves, so must resort to eating human flesh, they do it out of revenge, after killing their victim relatively humanely. Montaigne goes on to compare the practices of Europeans in relation to the cannibals, and in doing so, he shows that the cannibals are no more savage than people who are considered to be more advanced: “[The Portuguese] bury [their prisoners] up to the middle, and against the upper part of the body to shoot arrows, and then being almost dead, to hang them up”(Montaigne Paragraph 12). The way the Portuguese kill their prisoners is much more torturous and dehumanizing than the method of the cannibals. Montaigne then tells the chilling fact that the natives began to follow this method of killing (Montaigne Paragraph 12). Those who are considered to be barbaric by Europeans took the method of revenge because it was “more smartful and cruel than theirs”(Montaigne Paragraph 12). This implies an awful characteristic among the explorers: their method of killing is so barbaric; that the “barbarians” themselves felt inclined to follow their example. By