ha EE ee ie abi ge RE Sema bap ENE eens ier es 
CANNIBALISM IN AMERICA. 409 
were all but one chance discoveries. In all but a single in- 
stance there was nothing to direct attention to one place rather 
than another in making excavations, and as these were begun 
at random it is all but certain that many others escaped detec- 
tion. 
It would perhaps be going too far to say that the presence of 
human bones, under the circumstances above described, amounted 
to absolute proof of cannibalism. The testimony of eye-witnesses 
would be the only sure evidence of it. There is, however, nothing 
with regard to them which is inconsistent with this practice, nor 
does any other explanation occur to us which accounts for their 
presence so well.* 
If there were any eye-witnesses of cannibalism among the Euro- 
peans who explored Florida in the earliest days of its history, 
they have left no records of the fact. In later times Jonathan 
Dickenson, a Pennsylvania quaker, who was wrecked on the coast 
near St. Lucia in 1699, in the narrative of his sufferings, calls the 
inhabitants cannibals, but nowhere saw human flesh eaten by 
them. The most direct statement he makes is as follows: “at 
this town about a twelve-month before a parcel of Dutch men 
were killed, who having been cast away on the Bohemia (Bahama) 
Shoals, they, in a flatt which they built, escaped hither and were 
devoured by these cannibals, as we understand by the Spaniards.” 
Tam indebted to Dr. C. F. Winslow for a statement in the records 
of Nantucket that Capt. Christopher Hussey ‘was cast away on 
the Florida coast and devoured by cannibals.” This event was 
also in the latter part of the seventeenth century.t 
The reasons derived from our own observations for believing 
Np gers ae ee mE ETL 
* A statement by Le Moyne would at first sight seem to suggest another explana- 
= € natives when first seen by the French had the habit of dismembering the 
bodies of their slain enemies and carrying off the scalps and limbs as trophies. Plate 
XVI represent lebration in which th hung up on stakes and around which 
à ceremony is going on. While such a custom might account for the presence of 
human bones in the shell heaps, it would not for the fragmentary condition in which 
these are found, nor for the systematic manner in which all the bones of the limbs, as 
Well as of the other parts of the skeleton, are broken up. In addition it may be sta 
that for reasons we have given elsewhere there is some doubt whether the Indians 
Who built the chan ead pm } fe 1 when the Europeans arrived 
in Florida, and consequently a practice prevailing among the latter might not exist 
the former. 
tGod’s Protecting Providence, Man’s direct Help and Defence, etc., p. 60, 8yo. 
London, 1700, 
t See doings of the N tucket Histori logical Society, in Nantucket Inquirer 
and Mirror. Noy, 22, 1873. 
