1673 Victory Rite in Florida
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of a victory rite 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 towering man in a feathered headband and shell ornaments pours water from a bowl in a long arc, a club at his side and a fire blazing behind him. Beyond him, bodies lie on the open ground where a figure dances inside a drawn circle and another bends over the fallen. In the distance, a crowd sits beneath a row of poles topped with tufts of hair while two figures dance with raised arms on a platform before a many-armed idol. Warriors with spears and feathered headdresses fill the foreground, one bearing a shield painted with a sun.
The scene appears to gather together the rites described in the text below. A diviner is said to roll his eyes and twist his limbs inside a drawn circle until exhausted, then step out to tell the king the strength of the enemy. After a victory, the text says, warriors cut the scalps from the slain with knives of reed, dried them by the fire, and carried them home on long poles that were set up in a field where men and women sat around them. A priest with a wooden image then cursed the slain while one of three kneeling men struck a stone at every curse and the other two rattled gourds filled with pebbles. Widows of the fallen are said to have come before the king with their faces covered to ask for vengeance and to have cut their hair at their husbands' graves, remarrying only once it reached the shoulders again. Neither side of the leaf explains the pouring of water. The reverse describes Florida's peoples, among them the Jaguaces who ran faster than deer, and tells how hunters flipped crocodiles onto their backs by thrusting a spiked tree into their jaws. It also tells how René de Laudonnière found the chief Saturiona honoring a French column with laurel wreaths and flowers, and how the Floridians raised a stuffed deer hide on a tall pole each year as an offering to the sun.
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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