1673 Engraving of an Indigenous Chilean Man and Woman
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of an Indigenous man and woman appears in this excerpted leaf from the Chile section of the 1673 German edition of Arnoldus Montanus's account of the Americas.
In the center of the scene, a man in a long striped garment with a beaded collar and his hair tied up on top of his head shoulders a club, his free hand held open toward the figures at right. Facing him at left, a woman with rings in her long curling hair reaches out a hand, her floor-length gown pinned at the throat and open over her breasts. Between them, a kneeling woman with a child bound to her back grips a long stick. At right, two figures in shaggy cloaks lean beside a low table set with a basket and a jug. Low roofs show behind them, and in the distance a man and a child walk along a ridge beneath a steep cliff.
The figures follow the text below on the dress of the Chileans. The men are said to wear wide loose trousers tied at the loins and over them a woolen garment three and a half ells long and two wide, with a hole in the middle for the head, so that it hangs from the shoulders much like the one the man wears here. The women wear the same woolen cloth in another way, tying an apron around the loins and pinning a long skirt that reaches the ground at the throat with silver or brass pins, leaving the head, breast, and feet uncovered as the woman at left does. These garments are described as striped in white, red, blue, and egg yellow. The text calls the women very hard and strong by nature and cites Heinrich Brauer (the Dutch commander Hendrik Brouwer), who reported that women aboard his ship walked about half an hour after giving birth and that some nursed the children tied to their backs by throwing their long breasts over their shoulders. It adds that families lived in very low huts of straw, reed, and rushes, grouped by clan under a chief they called the karaka, and kept little at home beyond two or three jugs of chicha, a horn cup, a grinding stone, and a stool or two. The reverse describes how whole neighborhoods plowed and sowed together each October while the weeding and harvest were left to the women, and how a suitor bought his bride from her father with sheep, cattle, and barrels of chicha. It also tells of the wedding song sung to the god Maruapeante and of the lamb, called chiluraque, slaughtered for a feast after a birth.
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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