1673 Engraving of Taíno Musicians Dancing on Hispaniola
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of Taíno musicians dancing appears in this excerpted leaf from the Hispaniola section of the 1673 German edition of Arnoldus Montanus's account of the Americas.
In the center of the scene, two dancers step to their own music. At left, a man in a feathered headdress and a skirt of leaves shakes a small ring hung with bells above his head, with a belt of round beads at his waist and feathers tied below his knees. Beside him, a second man in a tunic hung with strings of beads beats a drum slung at his hip and raises a rattle in his other hand. At right, two onlookers in feathered headbands look on, one with a quiver on his back, while figures stand before a long building in the distance.
The scene appears to illustrate the songs described on the reverse. The people of Hispaniola are said to have known nothing of reading or writing, so children learned the origins of the island and the deeds of their ancestors by heart in songs called areitos, sung while dancing to trumpets and drums. The reverse also explains the island's names: Haiti for its rugged peaks and, before that, Quisqueya, meaning immeasurably great, because its people believed it to be the whole world. It recounts the Spaniards' destruction of the island's first inhabitants as told by Bartolomé de las Casas, including the fates of the cacique Guacanagarí and Queen Anacaona. The text below describes Santo Domingo with its long straight streets, its square marketplace and cathedral, and the walls and castle that reach into the Ozama River. It recalls the trade in hides, tallow, sugar, horses, and pigs before the silver fleets began calling at Havana and Francis Drake's capture of the city with twelve hundred Englishmen in 1586.
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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