1673 Engraving of a Litter Toppled in Battle
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of a litter toppled in battle appears in this excerpted leaf from the America's Discoverers section of the 1673 German edition of Arnoldus Montanus's account of the Americas.
In the center of the scene, a litter hung with garlands topples over amid billowing smoke. Soldiers in broad-brimmed hats press in from the left with muskets and pikes, firing into a crowd of men in feathered headdresses who fall back or lie heaped in the foreground with their arms flung out. Behind them, a long column of warriors with spears files down a great rocky hill, while at right, more soldiers fire through a cloud of smoke over fallen bodies. In the distance at left, the towers of a city rise on the plain.
The engraving is uncaptioned and neither side of the leaf describes a battle like the one seen here. The toppled litter may show the capture of the Inca ruler Atahualpa (Attabaliba in the text) by Francisco Pizarro's men at Cajamarca in 1532, though the text does not confirm this reading. The text below instead tells of Atahualpa's end. Some Spaniards are said to have wanted him sent to the emperor in Spain while others demanded his death, and the latter prevailed. Despite his protests of innocence, he was tied to a stake in the marketplace of Cajamarca and strangled with a cord tightened by a stick, though Pizarro gave him a royal burial. The text adds that Atahualpa had seen a terrible comet shortly before his death and read it as a sign that a great prince would soon die. It also tells how his general Rumiñahui (Ruminagui in the text) welcomed the escort that brought his body home, only to murder them all as they lay drunk and to flay Atahualpa's brother Illescas alive and stretch his skin over a drum. The reverse follows Pizarro to Cusco, which the Spaniards took and plundered after its people drove them back with stones, and describes how they tortured the inhabitants to reveal where their treasure was buried. In one story, Diego de Salazar set his dog Bezerril, trained to tear Indians apart, on an old woman he had sent with a letter to Pizarro. She is said to have sat down, held up the letter, and cried, "My lord dog, I am carrying the letter to Pizarro," at which the dog stopped, urinated on her, and turned back, making Salazar laugh and sparing her life.
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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