‘Tapir’ is a name taken from Tupi, the native lingua franca used in the Portuguese New World dominions. Today this name covers five extant species, including one from Malaya. Whereas the name ‘tapir’ was first used in manuscript and print in the second half of the 16th century, the Spaniards had seen and mentioned the animal that the Tupi word named before, comparing it with cows, tigers and asses; in such analogies it was called vaca (cow), vaca montés (forest cow), tigre danta (danta Tiger), vaca danta (danta cow), sachavaca (jungle cow), vaca mocha (wild cow) or anteburro (anta donkey). Apparently, it was first seen by Spanish navigators Martín Fernández de Enciso (c.1470–1528), Alonso de Ojeda (c.1468–1515) and Diego de Nicuesa on their expedition to the Isthmus of Darien (Panama) from 1509. In 1514, Peter Martyr (1447–1526) future chronicler of the Council of the Indies in Spain, described the strange animal in these terms:

But there is especially one beast engendered here, in which nature hath endevoured to shewe her cunnyng. This beaste is as bygge as an oxe, armed with a long snoute lyke an Elephant, and yet no Elephant. Of the colour of an oxe and yet noo oxe. With the house of a horse, and yet noo horse. With eares also much lyke unto an Elephant, but no soo open nor soo much hangying downe, yet much wyder then the eares of any other beaste.

Enciso in his Suma de geografía named the animal vaca mocha (behorned cow), a name that according to the Cuban intellectual Juan Ignacio de Armas (1842-1889) was later adopted by other Spanish authorities.¹ In 1526, the Spanish explorer of North America Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón (c.1475–1526) first observed the American moose or elk, calling it danta. In the same year, Fernández de Oviedo in his 1526 Natural History of the Indies recorded what seems to be the first transfer of an Old World name to the tapir. Oviedo remarked that the Spaniards from Tierra Firme or mainland South America had been using ‘danta’ to refer to an animal that the natives called beori for the quality of its hide. ‘But they are not dantas’, Oviedo underlined. That appellation coexisted with other native names, such as vagra (Peru), maipouri (Guiana) and mborebi (Paraguay).²

As early as the 1520s, Spaniards and Portuguese started calling two New World animals – the moose of North America and the tropical tapir – anta, adanta or danta, which were names for the elk of the Old World. In turn, that name had been the eventual result of a late medieval transfer of words and properties of African animals to rather distinct ones of Northern Europe. ‘Anta’ and the several versions of this word derived from the Arabic lamt or lamta, which denoted the oryx of the Sahara, a kind of ‘anta-lope’. Arab geographers referred to the large Berber tribe of the Lamta, who were particularly famous for the light and solid shields they made from an animal of that name. These prized hides were offered to the kings of the Maghreb and al-Andalus.

The transfer of names, virtues and objects happened more than once and involved regions far beyond the Americas. Through a process that involved comparison, analogy and translation, the fauna and flora of the Americas were incorporated into a novel ordering of knowledge and representation where, as Michel Foucault noted, names were an inherent element of things.³ In this order of words and things, large animals from different regions of the globe were subsumed under the name of the ‘great beast’, a source for a remedy against epilepsy.

Also known as the falling sickness, epilepsy, characterised by sudden convulsion and seizures, was one of the world’s most intriguing maladies. The nature of epilepsy, often seen as mystical, combined naturalistic and spiritual causes, and so did its treatment. Many animal and vegetal substances were reputed as anti-epileptic remedies. Already in the 18th century many were condemned as useless, despite still being in use. Among the chief of them were earthworms, powdered human skull, scrapings of human vertebrae, human brain, unicorn horn, burnt ivory and the foot of an elk, substances mentioned in books and found in nearly every early modern cabinet of curiosity or apothecary. When the Jesuit order was expelled from Spain and the Americas in 1767, nails of the great beast were recorded in apothecaries’ shops throughout the continent. In Africa, on the other hand, the names ‘the great beast’ and alce were used for the Congo animals that the Portuguese called macoco and the locals ncocco or néollo. According to the Capuchin Italian missionaries to East Africa, the nails of the right foot of these beasts had peculiar virtues. Paris in 1709 offered pied d’élan and ongle d’élan; German apothecaries from the second half of the 17th century, Elchsklauen. Ungula alces, vulgarly called ‘the elk claw’, was a cloven hoof, moderately large, of a shining black colour, very hard and considerably heavy. The druggist generally took care to have a part of the leg of the animal to show that it was truly the foot of the elk and not of some similar animal.

Before becoming a source of medicinal nails, elks had been highly valued for their skins. The Russians obtained them from the Siberian Khanty and Nentsy peoples, trading in hides with China. The trade in elk skins from Russia and Livonia was in part managed by the Dutch, who transported them to Spain and Portugal, where anta – as mentioned before – became the general name for the elk, the buffalo and all animals ‘which had an armour’, namely animals whose skins, reputed for their quality, were used for crafting shields, armours, breeches and jackets for soldiers. Like the skins of rhinoceros, the African ncocco and the American tapir, oil-tanned elk skin was highly prized for clothing since it was considered bulletproof. Not surprisingly, Félix de Azara was still attributing this property to the Paraguayan tapir in the late 18th century, emphasising that ‘the gun never succeeds in killing them’. Azara, apparently, was simply gathering the observations of previous authors, notably the 17th-century chronicle on Paraguay written by Jesuit father Antonio Ruiz (1585–1652).

According to Armas, Ruiz was the first to attribute anti-epileptic virtues to the tapir – so Azara was neither the first nor the only one. Beginning in the 17th century, every time the tapir was described in no matter which region of South America, the medical virtues of its hoof reappeared. The Jesuit Father José Gumilla (1686–1750), for instance, in 1731 reported on its medical use in the Orinoco missions. Continuing into the 19th century, on the upper Essequibo in Guyana, the hoofs of a tapir were used as charms for snakebites, ray stings and fits of all kinds. Creole residents used the gran bestia in Jamaica and Ecuador. Gumilla’s observations would be incorporated into European remedy books and were included in the 18th-century translation into Spanish of the Charitable Remedies of Madame Marie Mapéau Fouquet, that ‘hotchpotch of traditional pharmacy (excrement, animal oils, echoes of old astrological medicine) and the fashionable remedies from the seventeenth century (mercury, antimony)’.⁴ When originally published in French in 1675, Fouquet’s book said nothing about either the South American tapir or the great beast. However, the French edition from 1696 listed the so-called poudre merveilleuse as one of the many recipes for curing epilepsy. Translated into Spanish in 1739, the collection of recipes incorporated the great beast twice: first, in the translation of the above-quoted recipe, where the ongle d’élan was translated as uña de la gran bestia, and second in Father Gumilla’s observations, where the gran bestia was defined as the anta of Venezuela. Similarly, in Spanish dictionaries from the late 18th century, the elk (or anta) is replaced by the tapir: anta became an animal from the Indies, whose left nail was known as uña de la gran bestia.

At the end of the 18th century, the French anatomist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) decided to compose the name megatherium (‘great beast’ in Greek) for a skeleton of a ‘rare animal’ found in the environs of Buenos Aires and mounted as an almost complete skeleton in the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid. In so doing, Cuvier made the extinct mammal from South America the only and unequivocal ‘great beast’ (see ‘Megatherium’ in this volume). Perhaps Cuvier decided to baptise a new species with a name of such vague meaning specifically to close a long-existing debate. Did he find inspiration in the report of the Spanish officer who, at the moment of the discovery, described the fossil bones to be shipped to Spain? The draughtsman had compared the unknown animal not only with the elephant but also with the anta or gran bestia. Buffon had called the tapir ‘the elephant of the New World’. Now, with the new principles of Cuvierian comparative anatomy, there was no doubt that the greatest beast from South America had passed away long ago. Nevertheless, the beast continues to live in the global history of science, in which Cuvier’s anatomy is but one important episode in a long chain of events.

FURTHER READING

Azara, F. (1838) The Natural History of the Quadrupeds of Paraguay and the River la Plata (Edinburgh: Black).

Cook, H. (2007) Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).

Gade, D. (1999) Nature and Culture in the Andes (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press).

Temkin, O. (1994) The Falling Sickness: A History of Epilepsy from the Greeks to the Beginnings of Modern Neurology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press).

Wear, A. (2000) Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

¹ M.F. de Enciso, Suma de geographia, q[ue] trata de todas las partidas y prouincias del mundo: en especial de las indias: y trata largame[n]te del arte del marear: juntame[n]te con la espera en roma[n]ce: con el regimie[n]to del sol y del norte: nueuamente hecha (Sevilla: Jacobo Cronberger, 1519).

² G.F. de Oviedo y Valdés, General y natural historia de las Indias, islas y Tierra-Firme del Mar Océano (Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, 1852), vol. 3.

³ M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1970).

⁴ M. Ramsey, ‘The popularization of medicine in France, 1650–1900’, R. Porter (ed.), The Popularization of Medicine (1650–1850) (London/New York: Routledge, 1992), 103.