Visual and textual representations of the New World proliferated widely and played a fundamental role in shaping European perceptions and, therefore, the events of conquest. Commonly, cannibalism was the subject of such texts that simultaneously helped to create and reinforce perceptions of New World savagery. Many early images of the Americas represented the perceived savagery of Natives both through acts of cannibalism as well as through their (perceived) innocence. Thus, savagery is represented, both visually and textually, through the “natural man.” Furthermore, texts and images produced about the New World in the first fifty years after its “discovery” emphasized gendered and sexualized understandings of the land and its inhabitants. Images of the initial encounter between Europeans and Natives, such as the well-known engraving “Nova Reperta: Vespucci Awakens a Sleeping America” temper the violent “savagery” of Indigenous Americans through the simultaneous representation of an edenic paradise in which America, in the guise of a nude female, gives herself freely to Amerigo Vespucci and, by association, to European domination. In this image the cannibal is relegated to the background, a minor challenge to be overcome, and so it predicts a relatively peaceful European invasion. The fear of consumption by cannibals is mediated by the sexualized conquest of the body/landscape of America. Vespucci does not arrive with an army, but rather with the tools of civilization with which he is able to arouse America from her slumber. The violence of anthropophagy is mirrored in the sexual conquest of the allegorical figure of the continent. Through an analysis of texts and images associated with the dubious journeys of Amerigo Vespucci to the Americas, we can witness the ways in which representations of cannibalism demonstrate a gendered understanding of the New World, as well as the ways in which they helped to foment sexualized conquest.