The tropics bring images of luxurious holidays with magnificent sunset views, the romance of lost civilizations, the allure of exotic flora, fruits, and spices. Epic seafaring adventures were made in order to obtain the most precious spices grown only on the most remote islands of Southeast Asia, all the while proving that after all, the earth was round. The Portuguese poet Luís de Camões wrote in The Lusiad, which chronicled Vasco da Gama’s 15th-century voyage to India, praising the beauty of Chiampa and Anam, present-day Vietnam:
“Chiampa there her fragrant coast extends,
There Cochin-China’s cultur’d land ascends:
From Anam Bay begins the ancient reign
Of China’s beauteous art-adorn’d domain;
Wide from the burning to the frozen skies,
O’erflow’d with wealth, the potent empire lies.”
Yet, as much romance as a poet could bestow upon a land, there was also no shortage of tales of barbarism and savagery. For once, accounts of cannibalism abounded among the countries between India and China. The Lusiad reported with dread:
“Lo, distant far, another mountain chain
Rears its rude cliffs, the Guio’s dread domain;
Here brutaliz’d the human form is seen,
The manners fiend-like as the brutal mien:
With frothing jaws they suck the human blood,
And gnaw the reeking limbs, their sweetest food;
Horrid, with figur’d seams of burning steel,
Their wolf-like frowns their ruthless lust reveal.”
Marco Polo, in his 13th-century travelogue, told of a man eating custom of a Kingdom of Dragoian, which was likely Ayer Rajah, present-day Singapore: “When a man falls sick, his relations send for the magicians, and inquire if he will recover, as these deceivers profess to know, by their enchantment and idols, whether he will live or die. In the latter case, the friends send for persons who place something over his mouth, by which he is suffocated. Then they cook the body, and all the kinsmen come and eat his flesh, taking care not to leave the smallest portion. … They next collect the bones, and place them in a large and beautiful chest, which they carry to caverns in the mountains, beyond the reach of wild beasts or any other injury.”
The practice of cannibalism was not unique to Southeast Asia. It was reported in 757 China, when An Lushan’s rebellion forces laid siege to a town and starved it of provision, the town’s inhabitants ate their children, breaking and roasting their bones to get at the marrow. First the concubines, then all other women, and afterward young and old men were slaughtered to feed troops, totalling up to 30 thousand deaths. Sometimes it was done out of pure hatred and anger. A chieftain in southeastern China was said to have ordered a dandy to serve the ale during a feast, in which the fop committed some offense, enraging his master. The chieftain thus ordered him butchered and boiled to tender, and then served this soup to his guests. During the Battle of Thermopylae in 279 BC, the Greek geographer Pausanias reported that the Gauls “butchered every human male of that entire race, the old men and the children at the breast; and the Gauls drank the blood and ate the flesh of those of the slaughtered babies that were fattest with milk. Any woman and mature virgins with a spark of pride killed themselves as soon as the city fell; those who lived were subjected with wanton violence to every form of outrage by men as remote from mercy as they were remote from love.”
Other than a culture of eating human flesh were accounts of lustful vices. Like the Lusiad’s depiction of savagery, the 3rd-century BC Chinese poet Song Yu told the tale of the South in his poem Summons of the Soul:
“O soul, come back! In the south you cannot stay.
There the people have tattooed faces and blackened teeth;
They sacrifice flesh of men and pound their bones for meat paste.
There the venomous cobra abounds, and the great fox that can run a hundred leagues,
And the great nine-headed serpent, who darts swiftly this way and that,
And swallows men as a sweet relish.
O soul, come back! In the south you may not linger.”
During the reign of the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid (786–809), a similar account was told by Sinbad the Seaman, who voyaged to the Indian Seas, of an island five days’ journey in length from cape Comorin, present-day Kanyakumari of India. Even more fragrant than the Comorin aloes-wood, here grew the Chinese lign-aloes, that of which Champa had been famous. It was said by Sinbad the people of this island were fouler of condition and religion than those of the other, for that they loved fornication and wine-bibbing, and knew not prayer nor call to prayer. The French theologian and Orientalist Eusèbe Renaudot, in his translation of the two Mohammedan’s travelogue to India and China in the 9th century, concurred: “Debauchery is at this Day very prevalent in China, not only as to Women, Polygamy and the Numbers of common Prostitutes, but also as to the abominable Vice, so much practiced among the Bonzes. In the Dutch Embassy you have a Representation of their public Women as they are led about the Town veiled and upon an Ass; they are many in Number. Father Martini relates, that the Women fold themselves openly at Yang-cheu. Debauchery runs to a great height in Vancheu, where they without Shame gratify the Rage of their Lust.”
It should be noted that certain sexual practices considered immoral today were at times common in the past. For example, brother-sister incest was a common practice among the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, both during dynastic and Hellenistic times. Father-daughter incest was also at times accepted during the dynastic period. Pederasty, a sexual relationship between an older male and a teenage boy, was popular in ancient Greece and spread to Central Asia through Alexander the Great’s conquests. Among the most gruesome rituals of raping was a Rus chieftain’ funeral rite reported by Ibn Fadlan, secretary of a delegation sent by the Caliph al-Muqtadir in 921 to the king of the Bulgars. It included a sacrificial female slave who was forced to drink copious amounts of alcohol, then raped by every man in the village as a tribute to the deceased. From there, she was strangled with a rope, stabbed by a matriarch of the village, then placed in the boat with her master and set on fire.
Hardly anyone would contest today that these sexual practices are immoral and illegal, but the majority consensus certainly has not prevented them from occurring. In 1975, psychiatry text put the frequency of incest at one in a million. However, recent advances in DNA testing has proved incest to be far more common than admitted. An analysis by the University of Edinburgh found one in 7000 people born to parents who were first-degree relatives – a brother and a sister or a parent and a child. This statistic only accounts for successful pregnancies, but not for miscarriages or abortions. And the tropics of Southeast Asia continue to be the popular destination for people to satisfy their devious, lustful vices.
Human intelligence has given the tools to transform ourselves into the dominant species on earth. Yet, thousands of years of technological advancement has neither placed us far from the beast. Sadly along the way, we have also endowed ourselves with some very unsavory and despicable characteristics, like anger, hatred, envy, and incessant lying. Are we really the advanced species, or are we merely monkeys with rockets?
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