PJ Vogt

And so since they're not finding gold, the Spaniards just start looking for people to enslave.

And that will be the resource that they go after.

So now, even when they're in Arawak country, they'll just label people there as cannibals.

Anytime someone resists them, anytime it's convenient, it's like this magic word, cannibal.

You call someone a cannibal, you can take their rights away.

There's actually another complicating story here.

The whole time the Europeans are obsessed with cannibalism, they're practicing cannibalism, just like in a slightly different form.

So the thing they were accusing the cannibals of doing was ritual cannibalism.

It's like...

I eat you because I won in combat, because it symbolizes something, because I think that I get strength from doing it.

What the Europeans had been doing was medical cannibalism, which is when you eat people or body parts because you think there's a medical benefit to it.

So there had been a trend from the 11th century through the 17th century in Europe of eating something called mummia.

Which was a material made from ground-up powdered mummies, which was supposed to be good for you.

Yes.

Are these ethically sourced mummies?

These were not ethically sourced mummies.

These were deeply unethically sourced mummies.

They were robbing mummies from Egyptian graves.

So it is a valuable product, and it quickly becomes a problem, which is that they exhaust the finite supply.

Did they call it peak mummy?