1673 A Unicorn, an Elk, and Other Beasts of New Netherland
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of a unicorn, an elk, and other beasts appears in this excerpted leaf from the "New Netherland" (modern-day New York) section of the 1673 German edition of Arnoldus Montanus's account of the Americas.
In the center of the scene, a unicorn rears with its long straight horn lowered and its curled tail raised, while a great bird with outspread wings looms over its back. At right, an antlered elk lowers its head among a woolly beast and other animals crowded together by the palms. At lower left, a spotted cat bares its teeth beside a long-bodied creature with a scaly tail, and hills rise beyond a domed hut and a house in the distance.
The unicorn follows the text below, which tells of animals seen on the Canadian borders that somewhat resemble horses, and the reverse, which gives them cloven hooves, a shaggy mane, a long straight horn on the forehead, a curled tail like a wild boar's, and a neck like a deer's. The antlered beast appears to be one of the elk the text places further south. Citing Erasmus Stella, it says these creatures partly resemble horses and partly deer, die of the smallest wound, and carry in their hooves a cure for the falling sickness. The spotted cat and the scaly-tailed creature may stand for the civet cat and the beaver of the reverse, though the text does not confirm this reading. The text below also claims that bears sleep through the winter in mountain caves, lying six weeks on one side and six on the other and living by sucking their paws, and tells how hunters on rafts take deer that have fled into the rivers. The reverse reports that New Netherland sent more than eighty thousand beaver pelts to market in a year, as Adriaen van der Donck himself had seen, and describes beavers felling trees with their teeth to build lodges five stories high, plastered with clay against the rain while one of them keeps watch.
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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