Blafard

Also Known As: French, “pallid, wan”; also nègre blanc and Maure blanc, “white Negro” and “white Moor”; the same people were called Dondos in Kongo, Bedas in Ceylon, and Chacrelas or Kakerlaques in the Dutch East Indies
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: European Mythology, Literary Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: Chalk-white skin and white hair, eyes too weak for daylight and said to see clearly by moonlight, and a body its describers insisted was degenerate in every joint.
Role in Mythos: The blafard was the star exhibit in an eighteenth-century European argument that the New World corrupted whatever lived in it.
Relation to Humans: There is no relation, because the blafard was never anything other than human. It was assembled out of real people with albinism in Panama, Kongo and island Southeast Asia, and the writers who assembled it had, with a single exception, never met one.

Twilight on the isthmus of Darién, and a household that has spent the whole hot day behind woven walls comes out into the cool. Their skin is the white of skimmed milk, paler than any European’s. Their eyebrows and hair are the same milky white. Their eyes have been running all afternoon, and only now, with the glare off the water gone, do they stop flinching. When the moon comes up they can see. Lionel Wafer, a buccaneer surgeon left behind at Darién with a wrecked knee around 1680, watched them for four months and wrote that he and his shipmates fell into calling them moon-eyed. He also wrote the detail that should have settled everything: a white child was sometimes born to two copper-skinned parents, and he had seen one himself, not yet a year old.

Ninety years later those people had been turned into a creature, and the creature had a name.

The blafard belongs to a specific stretch of European writing and to nobody else. Buffon put the first version of it into the third volume of his Histoire naturelle in 1749, quoting Wafer at length and concluding that these white bodies could only be individuals who had degenerated from their race by some accidental cause. Maupertuis had already got there in verse-shaped prose four years earlier, in the Vénus physique, where the people of the isthmus are what bats and owls are among birds, waking when the sun goes down to praise their gods and fill the emptiness of the night. Voltaire went further and made them a separate race entirely, a small weak nation vegetating in caves in the middle of Africa, with eyes like a partridge’s and nothing human about them beyond the shape of the body and a low grade of speech and thought. Linnaeus filed the albino as Homo nocturnus and set him among the anthropoid apes. Then in 1768 Cornelius de Pauw, a Dutch canon writing in French about a continent he had never seen, gave the blafards a chapter of their own in his Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains, seating them directly after the Patagonian giants he had just spent forty pages demolishing.

De Pauw’s chapter is the fullest portrait, and it is the one worth reading, because it shows the machinery working. He opens by insisting the blafards of Darién are the most remarkable men discovered in America, then spends the next seven pages taking the word men back. They stand under four feet five. Their colour is a faded white like paper or muslin, present from birth and never changing. Their sight is so weak they cannot bear the broad day, so they keep close and go out at twilight or by moonlight, ranging the forests and hunting even the larger game with alacrity. Their eyes resemble a cat’s. Their hair is woolly in Africa and long and pendent in Asia, either white as snow or reddish verging on yellow. Their whole form announces a feeble and vitiated constitution. The hands are so ill made out, he writes, that they are more properly to be called paws, the finger joints knotted, the movements slow and distressing. The lower jaw juts past the upper so badly that chewing is labour. Even the ears are wrong: thinner tissue, a more contracted shell, a long pendent lobe.

None of this is invention exactly. Strip the contempt and most of it is a rough clinical description of oculocutaneous albinism, including the photophobia and the reduced acuity, written by someone working from travellers’ reports he trusted. What De Pauw supplied was the explanation, and his explanation was that the pallor came from the discolouration of Black men’s semen, which everyone knew to be black. Buffon preferred climate and accident. The Dictionnaire de Trévoux, which finally admitted the word albinos into French in 1771, reported that their neighbours regarded them as monsters and would not let them multiply. The Encyclopédie copied that line almost word for word into its 1776 supplement.

The whole apparatus met its subject exactly once. In 1744 an albino boy born to enslaved African parents was brought to Paris and shown to the Académie royale des sciences, with Maupertuis and Buffon in the room. Maupertuis came away with a theory of heredity a century ahead of anyone else. Voltaire, who saw two such children in his life, came away describing small white animals with a muzzle.

What the blafard could do was all borrowed from real bodies and then bent. It owned the dark. It hunted by moonlight in forests where nobody else could see, and its weakness at noon was the exact measure of its strength at midnight. What it could not do was survive daylight, or apparently reproduce itself, since the record kept insisting these creatures either could not breed or did not breed true. That second limitation was the useful one, because a thing that cannot make more of itself is not a people. It is a fault.

There was never any such creature.

De Pauw’s own chapter contains the sentence that undoes him, and he does not notice it. Wherever these people are found, he writes, they are held in the highest degree of respect and even veneration, not by the common sort alone but by the sovereigns of Africa and the Indies, who keep them at court as an article of magnificence and look on them as beings distinguished, not disgraced, by Nature. At Loango they said prayers before the king. Cortés had reported the same thing from Mexico two and a half centuries earlier, in a letter to Charles V describing a hall in Moctezuma’s palace set aside for people white in face, body, hair and brows. De Pauw records the veneration, calls it curious, and returns to the degeneracy.

The Guna are still at Darién. They have the highest recorded rate of oculocutaneous albinism in the world, and the children born with it are called children of the moon.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a blafard?

A blafard is not a real creature. It was an eighteenth-century European pseudo-scientific category, built out of accounts of real people with albinism in Panama, Kongo and island Southeast Asia, and used as evidence that the New World made living things degenerate. The word is French for pallid or wan, and the same people were also called nègres blancs, Dondos, Bedas and Kakerlaques.

Who invented the blafard?

No single person did, but Cornelius de Pauw gave it its fullest form in his Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains of 1768, in a chapter titled “Of the Blafards, and White Negroes.” He was building on Buffon’s Histoire naturelle of 1749, on Maupertuis’s Vénus physique, and on Voltaire, who had already argued that such people were a separate race barely qualifying as human.

Where did the blafard supposedly live?

Chiefly the isthmus of Darién in Panama, where the buccaneer surgeon Lionel Wafer described pale, light-sensitive people among the Guna around 1680. De Pauw also placed them at Loango, Kongo and Angola in Africa, at Ceylon, Borneo and Java in Asia, and in New Guinea, and treated all of them as beings of one and the same kind.

Why were blafards said to come out at night?

Because the people the descriptions were taken from have albinism, which causes severe light sensitivity and reduced visual acuity in bright sun. Wafer’s shipmates called them moon-eyed for this reason. European writers turned an ordinary medical fact into proof of a defective nature, with Voltaire placing them in caves and Linnaeus classing the albino as Homo nocturnus among the apes.

Did anyone in the eighteenth century actually meet one?

Barely. In 1744 an albino boy born to enslaved African parents was displayed to the Académie royale des sciences in Paris while Maupertuis and Buffon watched, and Voltaire claimed to have seen two in his lifetime. De Pauw, who wrote the longest description of all, never set foot in the Americas.