1673 Crowned Idol in a Virginian Temple
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of a crowned idol in a temple appears in this excerpted leaf from the Virginia section of the 1673 German edition of Arnoldus Montanus's account of the Americas.
In the center of the scene, a towering crowned idol stands on a high altar with an arrow in its mouth. In one hand it holds a wheel beneath a bell-shaped cover, and in the other a half-dark ring topped by a small column and a head. Bodies lie prostrate on the altar at its feet while attendants tend a fire that sends smoke billowing up at left. Below, worshippers in feathered headdresses and scaled cloaks crowd the floor of the hall, some kneeling and some bearing bowls and baskets, as archers look on from the left. Figures fill the galleries along the walls, and an arched doorway at right opens onto the hills outside.
The idol appears to be the Virginian god of the winds, whose description ends at the top of the text below with its clothes and stockings all black. The text calls the devil Oke the chief of all Virginian idols, honored with Pawooranzes (idol mounds raised in the fields) where blood, deer tallow, and tobacco were offered after hunting or war. It then turns to the English settlement of Virginia, from the voyages of Walter Raleigh, Ralph Lane, and Thomas Hariot to Bartholomew Gosnold's efforts with King James and John Smith, and the three ships under Christopher Newport that sailed from the Thames on 19 December 1606. The reverse follows the building of Jamestown, the deaths of fifty of the hundred settlers within four months, and Smith's capture on the Chickahominy River (Kichamine in the text). It also describes the court of Powhatan at Werowocomoco, where the king sat on a bed of mats and Newport gave him an English boy in exchange for his trusted servant Namontack, and the fire that destroyed most of the settlement in winter.
Arnoldus Montanus and De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld
Arnoldus Montanus (ca. 1625–1683), a Dutch minister and schoolmaster, compiled De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld from earlier chronicles and travel accounts without ever crossing the Atlantic. The Amsterdam publisher Jacob van Meurs issued it in 1671 with a wealth of engravings. John Ogilby's English adaptation followed the same year, and Die Unbekante Neue Welt, the German edition attributed to Olfert Dapper, followed in 1673. Its illustrations were drawn by artists who had mostly never seen the Americas either. They mix reported detail with European invention, and they shaped how a generation of European readers pictured the New World.
CONDITION
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