1673 Engraving of Taíno Turtle Fishing and a Spanish Landing on Cuba
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of Taíno turtle fishing on the coast of Cuba 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 the foreground, Taíno fishermen in a canoe hunt a sea turtle with a guaican, which one of them grips in his hands as it latches onto the turtle's shell. Behind them, snakes hang from the trees along the shore and fish roast on a wooden rack outside two huts, while a band of men watches from the clifftop as Spanish soldiers and a boat of oarsmen approach from the anchored fleet. The scene matches the narrative on the reverse of Columbus's voyage along the coast of Cuba in 1494. There his men found fish roasting on spits beside empty huts, snakes hanging by cords from the trees, and some seventy men watching from a high rock. The same page describes the guaican itself, an eel-like fish with a great sacklike head that the Taíno used to seize fish and turtles. The text on the front recounts the founding of Isabela on Hispaniola, the remarkable fertility of its fields, and Columbus's march inland in search of gold, where he built the fort of Santo Tomás.
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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