Pyrrhus and other Greeks called Romans barbarians until they saw Roman order and changed their minds. Montaigne warns against trusting vulgar opinion and prefers the plain witness who lived in Brazil, corroborated by other sailors, to cosmographers who embellish travel tales. He would have every writer report only what he knows firsthand, not physics from a glimpse of one river.
By that account the Tupinambá live close to nature: shared goods, little artifice, strong bodies, dancing, plain food, and wars fought for valour rather than conquest. Their prophets preach only resolution in war and affection to wives; false prophecy is punished, and divination is treated as a serious office.
Their ritual killing and eating of prisoners horrifies Europe, yet Montaigne argues our tortures while victims still live are worse. He even notes Europeans adopted crueller executions after seeing Portuguese methods.
He praises their constancy, their refusal to flee, and their estimate of a man by heart and will rather than arms or luck. Prisoners mock their captors to the end; a song taunts eaters with the taste of their own ancestors' flesh without losing dignity.
Three visitors at Charles IX's court then ask why armed men obey a child and why the starving poor tolerate rich neighbours without revolt. Their captain says his privilege is to march first to war and to have paths cleared when he visits villages.
Montaigne notes their language is soft, their love poetry not barbarous, and their captain's authority modest by European standards. He ends that there is a vast difference between their manners and ours, and that we call savage whatever is not our custom. The essay is a mirror: civilisation names itself by contrast and often misses its own cruelty.
Coming Up in Chapter 31
After judging cultures by custom, Montaigne turns to a harder limit. He will warn against pretending to know God's mind or reading divine will into every victory and defeat Montaigne says imposture thrives on the unknown: we believe most firmly what we understand least, and alchemists, astrologers, and those who claim to read God's will all trade on that darkness. He prefers the Indian.
