1673 Procession Under a Canopy in Florida
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of a procession under a canopy appears in this excerpted leaf from the Florida section of the 1673 German edition of Arnoldus Montanus's account of the Americas.
In the center of the scene, a woman with long flowing hair and strings of beads walks beneath a fringed canopy raised on a pole, while beside her a man in a feathered headdress wears a long striped cloth carried behind him by a boy. At left, women with streaming hair raise their arms as a smaller figure holds up a basket of fruit. At right, warriors in feathered headdresses follow with spears beneath the palms.
The engraving is uncaptioned and neither side of the leaf describes a procession like the one seen here. It may show a woman of rank being brought before a chief, though the text does not confirm this reading. The text below tells how Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón (Vaskes in the text) lured Indians aboard his ships with a show of gratitude and sailed off with them, most dying of hunger before they reached Hispaniola, and how he later lost a ship in the river Jordan and saw two hundred of his men killed or wounded ashore. It then follows Pánfilo de Narváez, who sailed from Cuba in 1528 with six hundred men and eighty horses. In a large house his men are said to have found a golden bell hidden under nets, chests of goods each holding a corpse wrapped in painted hides, and pieces of gold the Floridians said came from distant Apalache. The reverse traces his march to Apalache, a village of two hundred forty straw houses, and describes natives who ran naked, slender as deer, and dove under water when the bullets flew. It ends with the wreck of boats rigged with shirts for sails and horses' tails for ropes, and with the four survivors, among them Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and Estevanico, who reached Mexico overland.
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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