1673 Indigenous Man and Woman of New Netherland
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of an Indigenous man and woman 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 man with a bow in one hand and a quiver over his shoulder turns toward a woman beside him. Both are hung with strings of beads at the neck and arms and dressed in fringed skirts with long cloths knotted at the waist. At right, a second woman carrying a bowl of fruit leans out from behind a thicket. Behind them, a figure paddles a canoe on the river toward a domed hut at left, while a long arched house stands among the trees at right and squash and a pineapple-like plant fill the foreground.
The pair follow the text below, which describes the dress of the people of New Netherland. The women are said to adorn themselves more than the men, with petticoats worked with shells, square caps woven with the same shells, and strings of them at the neck and arms, while men and women alike wear a long broad band over the right shoulder like the ones seen here. Above this, the text ends an account of Henry Hudson (Hudsohn in the text) being seated on two mats in a house where a fat dog was skinned with shells and roasted in his honor, and of his hosts breaking their arrows and throwing them into the fire to show he had nothing to fear. The reverse describes houses like the long arched one seen here, built of bent saplings and covered with the bark of elm, ash, and chestnut trees, with fifteen or more households living together inside. It also tells of sweat lodges dug into the earth, where the sick sat among heated stones before leaping into cold water, and of hilltop forts walled with crossed oak stakes.
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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