1673 Engraving of a Man on a Stone Slab Facing a Knife
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of a man on a stone slab facing a knife appears in this excerpted leaf from the "New Spain" (modern-day Mexico) section of the 1673 German edition of Arnoldus Montanus's account of the Americas.
In the center of the scene, a man lies propped on one elbow on a low stone slab while a crouching figure in a feathered headdress reaches toward his chest with a knife. At left, men in tall feathered headdresses and arm rings point toward him from beside a striped canopy, and spearmen crowd in at right. Behind a fence of stakes, a row of spectators looks on. In the distance, two warriors with shields and curved blades duel before thatched huts and a watching crowd.
The engraving is uncaptioned and neither side of the leaf describes the scene. It may show a captive about to be sacrificed while another fights in the distance, though the text does not confirm this reading. The text below turns to the province of Pánuco, where the Spaniards held the three towns of Pánuco, Santiago de los Valles, and Tampico. It draws on the account of Miles Philips, one of the Englishmen John Hawkins put ashore on the coast of New Spain in 1568, who found Pánuco—a town of two hundred Spanish citizens living mostly by the trade in salt made in pans along the river. It then turns to the journal John Chilton kept four years later, which tells of only twelve Spaniards living among thirty thousand Indians at Metztitlán. The reverse follows Chilton on to Tampico and Pánuco, where he fell gravely ill and, lost in a wild forest, was given clear water from a gilded Venetian glass by people living in small straw huts. The Spaniards at Santiago de los Valles are said to have told him that his rescuers were cannibals who had stolen the glass when they burned an Augustinian monastery, and that they had spared him only because his sickly look made them fear he carried a plague.
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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