The trouble with wilderness summary

1:31 . On the Cannibals 31. On the Cannibals [The cannibals mentioned in this chapter lived on the coasts of Braz il. Montaigne had read many accounts of the conqiust of the New World, including Girolamo Benzoni's Historia de! mondo novo (Venice, 1565) in the French translation by Urbain Chauveton, the very title of which emphasizes the dreadful treatment of the natives by the Conquistadores: A New History of the New World containing all that Spaniards have done up to the present in the West Indies, and the harsh treatment which they have meted out to those peoples yonder .. . Together with a short History of a Massacre committed by the Spaniards on some Frenchmen in Florida (two editions in 1579). Montaigne's 'primitivism' (his respect for barbarous peoples and his admiration for much of their conduct, once their motives are understood) has little in common with the 'noble savages' of later centuries. These peoples are indeed cruel: but so are we . Their simple ways have much to teach us: they can ser~e as a standard by which we can judge Plato's Republic, the myth of the Golden Age, the cruelty, the corruption and the culture of Europe, and show up that European insularity which condemns peoples as barbarous merely because their manners and their dress are different. J [A] When King Pyrrhus crossed into Italy, after noting the excellent formation of the army which the Romans had sent ahead towards him he said, 'I do not know what kind of Barbarians these are' (for the Greeks called all foreigners Barbarians) 'but there is nothing barbarous about the ordering of the army which I can see!' The Greeks said the same about the army which Flaminius brought over to their country, [C] as did Philip when he saw from a hill-top in his kingdom the order and plan of the Roman encampment under Publius Sulpicius Galba.1 [A] We should be similarly wary of accepting common opinions; we should judge them by the ways of reason not by popular vote. I have long had a man with me who stayed some ten or twelve years in that other world which was discovered in our century when Villegaignon made his landfall and named it La France Antartique. 2 This discovery of a 1. Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus and Life of Flaminius. 2. Durand de Villegagnon struck land, in Brazil, in 1557. Cf. Lettres sur la navigation du chevalier de Villegaignon es terres de l'Amerique, Paris, 1557, by an author who calls himself simply N .B. 229 boundless territory seems to me worthy of reflection. I am by no means sure that some other land may not be discovered in the future, since so many persons, [CJ greater than we are, [A] were wrong about this one! I fear that our eyes are bigger than our bellies, our curiosity more 3 than we can stomach. We grasp at everything but clasp nothing but wind. Plato brings in Solon to relate that he had learned from the priests of the town of Sai's in Egypt how, long ago before the Flood, there was a vast island called Atlantis right at the mouth of the Straits of Gibraltar, occupying an area greater than Asia an~ Africa combined; the kings of that country, who not only possessed that island but had spread on to the mainland across the bre;idth of Africa as far as Egypt and the length of Europe as far as Tuscany, planned to stride over into Asia and subdue all the peoples bordering on the Mediterranean as far as the Black Sea. To this end they had traversed Spain, Gaul and Italy and had reached as far as Greece when the Athenians withstood them; but soon afterwards those Athenians, as well as the people of Atlantis and their island, were engulfed in that Flood.• It is most likely that that vast inundation should have produced strange changes to the inhabitable areas of the world; it is maintained that it was then that the sea cut off Sicily from Italy [BJ Hax loca,