1673 Engraving of Armadillos, an Opossum, and a Peccary on Puerto Rico
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of armadillos, an opossum, and a peccary appears in this excerpted leaf from the Puerto Rico section of the 1673 German edition of Arnoldus Montanus's account of the Americas.
In the center of the scene, an armadillo labeled Tatou I noses through the grass in its banded, scaly shell while a second, Tatou II, lies curled into a ball beneath a fruiting branch at right. A long-tailed Opassum prowls along the rise behind them, and in the foreground a bristly peccary labeled Javaris roots at the ground beside an open husk scattered with seeds.
The text below begins at the end of a description of an animal that carries its young in a pouch (apparently the opossum seen here) and then turns to the tatou. Armored with hard scales, it is said to have a snout like a pig's and five sharp claws on each foot, and when it sleeps or is chased it tucks its head, legs, and tail under its shell like a ball, as Tatou II here has done. The text goes on to recount a yearly feast that the people of Puerto Rico are said to have held before the Spaniards came. At their lord's drumbeat they gathered at the idol house, the men painted in many colors and hung with shells, to dance and sing in the idol's praise. They then purged themselves with small sticks pushed down their throats and sat cross-legged to sing a mournful song while the women carried baskets of bread that the priests blessed and distributed. The text closes by noting that this worship vanished along with the native people whom the Spaniards destroyed with great cruelty. The reverse describes the enslaved Africans brought in to work the mines and sugar mills in their place, the brutal punishments the text says they suffered, and the runaways who banded together on Hispaniola. It then opens a chapter on Bermuda, named for the Spanish captain Bermúdez and also called the Somers Isles after George Somers, whose ship was wrecked there.
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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