1673 Engraving of Cacti and a Sweet Potato Vine on Jamaica
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of cacti and a sweet potato vine appears in this excerpted leaf from the Jamaica section of the 1673 German edition of Arnoldus Montanus's account of the Americas.
In the center of the scene, a tall cactus labeled Jamacaru IIII rises in tiers of spiny pads among five more cacti numbered Jamacaru I through VI, from a broad fleshy plant at right to a leafy shrub ringed with spines at left. Across the foreground trails a vine labeled Batata (the sweet potato) with tubers showing at the edge of the bank. Behind them, figures sit before a long arched hut with houses and hills beyond.
The text below belongs to the book's account of Jamaica's plants. It closes a passage on a fruit whose royal kind is said to be the very best, good against weakness of the stomach, the stone, poison, and sadness, with a pressed juice that yields nothing to malmsey. It then turns to the island's many evergreen herbs, among them a plant with brown-red spotted leaves and a fragrant violet flower whose leaves wilt as soon as they are touched. Ginger is described as being brought to Jamaica by the Spaniards and to thrive there, ripe once its leaves wither, and cotton grows on a tree like a red fir, its red blossoms turning to pods that hide the wool and seeds like peppercorns. The page ends with the island's three Spanish towns of Sevilla, Melilla, and Oristán and notes that no trace remains of the town of Vega, from which, the text says, Columbus and his son Diego took their title of duke. The reverse tells how the English captain Anthony Shirley took Sevilla in 1596 and how, after sixty-one quiet years under Spain, Oliver Cromwell, whom the text calls the English tyrant, sent eleven ships that seized the whole island. It then opens the chapter on Puerto Rico, which Columbus is said to have named San Juan Bautista in November 1493 and which its people called Borinquen.
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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