History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil

4 ideas

1. The Tupinamba elder questions brazilwood trade

   An old Tupinamba man asked Léry why the French and Portuguese sailed so far to fetch brazilwood (ibirapitanga) and whether they had no wood at home. When Léry explained that one merchant might hoard more cloth and dyewood than the elder could imagine, the man called the Europeans great fools for enduring dangerous voyages to pile up wealth for children who would outlive them. He said the Tupinamba trusted that the same earth that fed them would feed their children, so they left no hoard.

2. Turning the cannibal charge back on Europe

   After describing Tupinamba ritual cannibalism in detail, Léry refuses to treat it as the peak of savagery. He argues that European usurers 'eat' widows and orphans more cruelly. He also recalls French Catholics eating the livers and hearts of Huguenots during the 1572 St. Bartholomew's massacre, and starving people eating human flesh during the siege of Sancerre, which he witnessed. Setting the foreign atrocity next to a domestic one removes the observer's claim to moral distance and makes 'barbarian' a label that describes the one using it.

3. Eucharist quarrel destroys Villegagnon's Huguenot colony

   The French colony at Guanabara, led by Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon, split over whether Christ's body is literally present in the communion bread. Villegagnon turned against the Calvinist ministers and expelled Léry's group to the mainland, where they lived among the Tupinamba. Three who returned were later executed for their confession of faith. Léry points out that Europeans were fighting to the death over the eating of divine flesh while they condemned the Tupinamba for eating human flesh.

4. Eyewitness authority against armchair cosmographers

   Léry grounds his account in having lived for a year among the people he describes. He attacks the royal cosmographer André Thevet for inventing and garbling details he never saw. He also admits that some experiences, such as hearing hundreds of Tupinamba voices chanting in a village, moved him in ways no written description could pass on to a reader. Authority comes from direct presence, yet the text can only partly carry what presence gave.

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