1673 Engraving of Ulloa's Men Fighting Warriors by a Great Fire
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of Ulloa's men fighting warriors by a great fire appears in this excerpted leaf from the "California" (modern-day Baja California) section of the 1673 German edition of Arnoldus Montanus's account of the Americas.
In the center of the scene, a great fire sends flames and a towering column of smoke into the night sky as warriors in tall feathered headdresses crowd around it with clubs and bows, one raising a spiked club above the throng. At right, a line of Spanish musketeers fires into them from beneath a hedge of pikes while a dog lunges at the fallen in the foreground. More bands of warriors gather on the plain and the hills beyond.
The engraving appears to show a clash during Francisco de Ulloa's voyage along the coast of California, described in the text below. Sailors who went ashore for fresh water are said to have been set upon so suddenly by two bands of very tall Indians that the sentries noticed nothing until the fighting had begun. The attackers shot arrows and hurled stones while dancing and shrieking until Ulloa came to the rescue and drove them back with gunfire. Three fierce Spanish dogs, the text adds, did great slaughter among them, and the survivors built a great fire like the one seen here and kept still around it before slipping away after dark, each carrying a burning brand. The same page tells of an Indian who escaped capture by diving under the water and of the pilot Juan Castellón rowing by moonlight into the mouth of a sea that seemed to stretch more than thirty miles. The reverse follows Ulloa past the Cape of the Holy Trinity to Isla de Cedros, where the fleet's dogs ran down two Indians whom he then released with gifts. Most of his men turned back for New Spain but Ulloa sailed on, and the text notes that no one ever learned where he ended up. The reverse then opens the 1539 overland journey of the friar Marcos de Niza, who heard of a land called Cíbola with seven great cities of stone houses whose doors were set with turquoise.
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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