Final Day at Sea: Final Seminar Aboard the Explorer

Seminar in the Chart Room

The final reading selection for the Aspen seminar groups was Montaigne’s essay on cannibals. Because of tight scheduling, the two seminars met as a combined group for one last seminar in the Explorer’s Chart Room. While the topic of cannibalism didn’t appeal to several participants, the mid-afternoon cocktail hour hosted by the ship’s captain eased their pain.

http://courses.csusm.edu/hist318ae/Montaigne%20essay.htm

As the participants discussed Montaigne’s essay and their own understanding of cannibalism, there were frequent but minor and jubilant incursions into the conversation from outside on the bow—whales were breaching at 10 o’clock! The unquenchable appetite to watch these magnificent mammals overcame a number of the participants, who quietly slipped away from the discussion and just as quietly returned some time later.

Meanwhile, the stalwarts of the seminar groups persevered with their examination of human behavior in its many strange and horrific illustrations. What were we to think of Montaigne’s assertion that cannibalism hardly exceeds the terrors and murderous rampages inflicted on the “savages” of the New World by the esteemed explorers from the Old? Are there various forms of cannibalism? Might the systematic destruction of the New World’s inhabitants by the Europeans be seen as consuming one’s enemies—metaphorically if not literally? How do we see ourselves some four hundred years later?

The sun moved low on the horizon and the seminar ended. We all retired to the next celebration and our final evening together as fellow explorers.

Before dawn the next morning, we pulled into port in Salvador Bahia. We had taken the Middle Passage. But unlike the millions of enslaved peoples who crossed before us, we were free to step off the ship—to choose how and where and when to continue our exploration, to live every day as we wish.