1673 Engraving of Balboa's War Dogs at Quarequá
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of Balboa's war dogs at Quarequá appears in this excerpted leaf from the America's Discoverers chapter of the 1673 German edition of Arnoldus Montanus's account of the Americas.
Beneath the arches of a columned hall, a Spaniard in a plumed hat, holding a round shield, points as war dogs maul men sprawled on the floor. One of the men throws up his arms in terror, musketeers look on from the right, and a man in a ruff bends over a fallen figure. Through the openings behind them, Spanish troops fire on a fleeing crowd. The engraving appears to show Vasco Núñez de Balboa at Quarequá (modern-day Panama) in 1513, the episode that ends the reverse. There the text says that six hundred of the inhabitants were cut down or torn apart by forty Spanish dogs. In the king's palace, Balboa found the king's brother and other men in women's clothing and had them thrown to the dogs for what the text calls the sin of sodomy. The text below carries Balboa on to the South Sea. It credits him as the first European to see it, from a mountain peak where he raised a heap of stones and a cross, and it follows him to the bay he named for St. Michael. The reverse opens with Pedrarias Dávila's voyage of 1514 and the starving colony at Veragua, where, the text says, a toad was bought for a great lump of gold.
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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