ABSTRACT
Travelling bodies therefore lie at the heart of the relationship between colonialism and the emergence of race. This chapter charts the ways in which settlers sought to mitigate against the threats to health and corporeal integrity, using the Spanish experience in the new world to illustrate broader attitudes characteristic of travellers and colonists from many parts of western Europe. From the earliest days of Spanish overseas expansion colonists constantly asserted that European food was an essential defence against illness and early death. In 1493, Columbus had insisted that his settlers would die were they not provided with 'the usual foods we eat in Spain', and countless subsequent colonists echoed his sentiments. The humanist scholar Peter Martyr for example noted that of the ten indigenous interpreters taken from the Caribbean to Spain after Columbus's second voyage, 'only three survived; the others having succumbed to the change of climate, country, and food'.
