1673 Engraving of Pinzón's Men Capturing a Strange Beast
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of Pinzón's men capturing a strange beast appears in this excerpted leaf from the America's Discoverers section of the 1673 German edition of Arnoldus Montanus's account of the Americas.
In a palm forest by the sea, with a ship lying offshore, a large long-tailed animal with a heavy pouch beneath its belly noses at a tree while two young forage at its feet. Spaniards in broad hats close in from behind the trunks, one readying a noose. The scene follows the text below on Vicente Yáñez Pinzón's voyage of 1499–1500. Among trees so thick that sixteen men could not encircle them, he found a wondrous animal with a fox's forequarters, a monkey's hindquarters, nearly human feet and ears like an owl's, which carried its young in a pouch under its belly. The creature is widely identified as an opossum. Pinzón caught one with three young. The young died on the way, but the mother reached the Spanish king at Granada alive. The same page tells of footprints twice the size of a man's and a skirmish in which eight Spaniards were lost. The reverse follows Pinzón through a storm so severe that his men proposed killing one another, then opens Amerigo Vespucci's voyage to Paria.
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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