1673 Engraving of an Aimoré Cannibal Seizing a Victim
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of an Aimoré cannibal seizing a victim appears in this excerpted leaf from the Brazil chapter of the 1673 German edition of Arnoldus Montanus's account of the Americas.
In the center of the scene, a pale man with long hair hoists a dark-skinned man in a feathered skirt upside down and bites at his thigh. A child stands just beyond them and to their right, a man in a hide skirt bends over a ribcage. Behind them, pale archers draw enormous bows from behind a ridge, aiming at warriors in feathered headdresses who brandish spears on the slope opposite, one of them tumbling backward.
The scene appears to show the Aimoré, whom the text below calls the Guaimurer and describes as the wildest and most savage of all the peoples of the Americas. They are said to have been as big and strong as giants, with white skin and frightfully large bows and arrows like the ones seen here, and to have lived without houses or huts under the open sky. The text claims they devoured human flesh like tigers and even ate their own children, and that rather than fighting in bands, each lay in wait alone to fall upon a person or an animal unawares. Driven from the coast between the São Francisco River and Cape Frio by the Tupinambá and Tupiniquim, they are said to have raided the captaincy of Ilhéus so relentlessly that the Portuguese abandoned several sugar mills and then the whole region. The reverse describes five kinds of what it calls Brazilian rabbits, among them the paca, which grunts like a pig, and a small spotted cavy so tame that it demands its food by grunting and thrives when carried to distant lands (apparently the guinea pig). It also describes the palms of Porto Seguro, whose fruit fattened monkeys and pigs, and the town of Ilhéus with its eight sugar mills and Jesuit house.
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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