1673 Engraving of European Soldiers Watching an Indigenous Brazilian Ritual
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of European soldiers watching an Indigenous ritual 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, Indigenous men sit on the ground in a loose half circle while one hunches beneath a draped cloth and a bearded man at right gestures with his mouth open. At left, a European officer in a plumed hat and a long sashed coat stands with one hand on his hip beside a stand of pikes, a bare-chested man at his shoulder. Below him, two seated soldiers turn toward the gathering, one gripping a musket and the other raising his hand. Beyond them, more figures sit, lie, and stand with arms outstretched on the plain, and a fort with two domed towers crowns a cliff among palms.
The scene appears to show a gathering described in the text below, which draws on the account of the Polish nobleman Krzysztof Arciszewski, who commanded troops for the Dutch in Brazil. Leading part of the garrison of the fort at Rio Grande on a surprise attack against the Spanish fort the text calls Barra-Kanium, he took along fifty Tapuya on condition that they not step a foot out of line. Over the three days of the march they are said to have performed their usual worship in full view and Arciszewski asked to be called when the devil appeared to them. When the army was rested and ready to move on, he was summoned to find the Tapuya seated by the road in a half circle with their legs spread wide and a priest seated on the ground opposite them. The priest questioned them and they him, but no one could make out the answers for want of a proper interpreter. The same page tells how Tapuya serving the Frisian cavalry captain Sapo Amama foretold that his lieutenant and a trooper would be killed by a cannonball the next day, which the text says came true. The reverse describes the Tapuya as wanderers without fixed dwellings between Ceará and Maranhão, who honored only the Pleiades with three days of dancing and mock combat at harvest time. It adds that they cared so little for gold and silver that they traded chests of it, buried by the Portuguese, to the Dutch for hunting dogs.
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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