...money. Europeans claimed that such native Americans lacked civilization, that is, in Montaigne's words, 'these people are wild in the same way as we say that...has produced them by herself and in her ordinary way . . .'12 This claim cut two ways. Some observers, Montaigne included, held up native peoples as an...

...(Essays, 113). Montaigne takes this to be less a sign of their "horrible savagery" (113) than a sign that "[t]hese people are wild in the same way as we say...from the common order, that we ought to call wild" (109). He declares that it is "more barbarous to eat a man alive than to eat him dead; to tear by rack...

...system, the perfect and most accomplished way of doing everything. These people [the Brazilian Indians] are wild in the same way as we say that fruits are wild, when nature has produced them by herself in her ordinary way . . . they are still very close to their original simplicity . . . they are still...