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New Worlds, Old Worlds, Lost Worlds: Picturing Prehistory in American Culture

Timelines: Imagining the Past in Theodor De Bry’s America

Thomas Balfe

Résumés

L’ « antiquité » des sociétés amérindiennes constitue un thème récurrent dans les représentations européennes du Nouveau Monde, en particulier lorsqu’il s’agit de pratiques culturelles perçues comme énigmatiques par le regard occidental. Le présent essai met en évidence, à partir de deux gravures publiées respectivement en 1591 et 1627 et intégrées à la série de récits de voyage illustrés sur les Amériques conçue par l’éminent graveur flamand Théodore de Bry, des variations dans cette rhétorique du décalage temporel. Prenant comme sujet des formes de chasse et d’agriculture indigènes, ces gravures rattachent les sujets amérindiens au temps de la nature et à une ère antérieure à la « civilisation », soit des registres temporels qui, dans les discours artistiques et littéraires occidentaux, étaient étroitement associés à des archétypes tels que l’homme sauvage ou les peuples heureux de l’Âge d’or. L’examen de ces convergences montre que le jeu de temporalités superposées opéré par les gravures tend à instituer la différence, voire l’infériorité, des peuples amérindiens, tout en produisant, de façon paradoxale, des continuités inattendues entre le sujet européen et cet Autre lointain dont les modes de vie renvoyaient aux imaginaires occidentaux d’un passé mythique.

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Introduction

1In the aftermath of the Columbian voyages, travellers from the Christian West began to have extended contact with the indigenous peoples of the Americas, substantially for the first time. Faced with these unfamiliar societies, Europeans sought to account for difference, and to uphold their sense of their own modernity, by positing the existence of a temporal gap separating themselves from the inhabitants of the “New” World. In a wide range of literary and visual sources produced after 1492, Native American groups are represented as young or childlike communities, yet to achieve the maturity of the Christian polities, or, alternatively, as (still) “ancient,” stuck at a developmental stage that the world’s advanced civilizations had long since moved beyond (overviews are Hodgen 354-426; Dickason 61-84; Moser 71-85; Pratt 2005; for precursors to this way of thinking, see Boas 129-153). In some cases, they are compared to past Greek, Roman, biblical or Asian societies, or to mythic figures, such as the wild man, that were associated with the primordial state. In others, the representations push past metaphor to assert an actual, genealogical link between indigenous populations and Adam and Eve or the descendants of Noah (Benite 135-167; Fenton 21-54). This rhetoric of temporal segregation intensified in the sixteenth century once settlement of the Americas emerged as a clear objective for several European powers (Porter 175-224). It quickly became one of the ways that colonial ventures were (and would continue to be) justified (overviews are Kehoe 1-20; Schmidt and Mrozowski; Mackenthun and Mucher; Geroulanos).

  • 1 The volumes in America are collaboratively-assembled compilations of material and do not have a sin (...)
  • 2 All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. In the second section, the German text that accom (...)

2Keeping this political context in mind, the present essay examines two early modern depictions of Native American societies in which difference or otherness is produced by an implied temporal—and not merely spatial or cultural—dislocation of the indigenous subject (fig. 1-2). Depicting forms of hunting and agriculture, the images are copperplate engravings that appeared in separate volumes of the series of illustrated books about the Americas, titled India Occidentalis and today known colloquially as America, that was published between 1590 and 1634 by the firm of Theodor de Bry, a leading Flemish printmaker (Bucher; Van Groesen).1 Most of the parts of the America series were released in two languages: German, to reach a mainly Protestant target audience in northern Europe, and Latin, for a wider public of educated readers conversant in the language of scholarly exchange (Van Groesen 249-279). Notable for the quality of their illustrations, De Bry’s luxury volumes contained some of the first sets of engravings of the New World widely available to Western audiences. They give important insight into how printed visual materials shaped Europeans’ perceptions of foreign societies whose customs and values were very different to their own.2

Fig. 1. Theodor de Bry, Hunting of Deer, 1591

Fig. 1. Theodor de Bry, Hunting of Deer, 1591

Engraving, 17,5 x 20 cm. Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), RP-P-BI-5293.

Fig. 2. Matthäus Merian, Mount Mansell Island, 1627

Fig. 2. Matthäus Merian, Mount Mansell Island, 1627

Engraving, 14,9 x 17,5 cm. John Carter Brown Library (Providence, United States of America), J590 B915v GVG 13.

Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.

3The oblique temporal references in the engravings come to the fore when certain visual features in them are highlighted. The first image, titled Hunting of Deer (Cervorum venatio: De Bry, 1591a no. 25; Von ihrer Hirschjacht: De Bry, 1591b no. 25), shows three Timucua hunters from the Florida region using deerskin masks to stalk a group of stags (fig. 1). While the hunting technique shown here does refer to a real cultural practice (Milanich 141), the nakedness of the men’s lower bodies, the animal masks partially covering their heads, and the crouching stance they have adopted to mimic the movement of their prey also call to mind European images of the primordial wild man and other archetypes associated with the mythic past. For many of De Bry’s readers, figures such as the wild man would have represented the antithesis of civilization and modernity, even though they hailed from the Old World not the New (Bernheimer 1-20; White 3-10). The second image (fig. 2), which is untitled and which will be referred to here as Mount Mansell Island, depicts members of the Wabanaki nation hunting moose and cultivating crops in the area near Mount Mansell Island (now Mount Desert Island) in present-day coastal Maine (De Bry, 1627 15). The engraving combines these scenes with a vignette of two figures reclining on the ground (fig. 3), a detail that Olive Patricia Dickason has related to a longstanding belief that the fertility of the “Indies” enabled its inhabitants to lead a leisured existence (152-154). The engraver’s decision to represent this condition of ease as a resting couple also recalls the pairs of figures that appear in early modern depictions of the Golden Age, the idyllic era of human existence before labour and conflict entered the world. Described in the Greek poet Hesiod’s Works and Days (c. 700 BCE), and later in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (c. 6-8 CE), the Golden Age had become a popular theme in visual art by the time that De Bry launched the America series (an overview is Myara Kelif).

Fig. 3. Detail of Fig. 2.

Fig. 3. Detail of Fig. 2.

4Taking these visual elements as a starting point, it will be argued here that in the De Bry engravings differences of custom, culture, environment and temperament are mediated by ideas about time. My discussion will explore how the alterity of the indigenous subject is indicated both by their association with an antecedent temporal stage and by the fact that they are shown using time in ways that contravened ideals of productive activity which, for many Europeans, defined their own societies as more advanced. The context of European expansion into the Atlantic, which profoundly shaped De Bry’s series, is relevant here. In an era of incipient colonialism, the question of how time could best be used to extract value from land and other natural resources was fast becoming imperative, partly as a practical concern and partly as a way of distinguishing civilized from unproductive human groups, whose use of their environment seemed wasteful and in need of reform (overviews are Nash 23-43; Cronon 54-81; Sweet; Smalley 80-118). This is where the engravings’ proto-ethnographic interest in how Native Americans spend their hours and days coincides with these images’ emphasis on the untimeliness of the figures they depict, and it is also where the full complexity of their visual rhetoric becomes apparent. For example, while Mount Mansell Island might seem at first glance to establish a relatively positive association between indigenous people and mythic time, its allusions to “Golden Age” leisure take on more doubtful associations when set against the emphasis in colonial writing on developing the fertile land of the Americas through hard work and rational forms of improvement.

  • 3 I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for this observation.

5In grappling with the overlapping timelines that permeate the engravings, my discussion draws on previous studies of De Bry’s America that have related it to an emerging interest among early modern antiquarians in recovering the histories of ancient human societies, often with a view to consolidating national identities. These have mainly focused on the first, 1590 part of the series that describes the English attempt to found a colony in Virginia in the mid-1580s (Piggott 75-85; Fleming 42-47; Moser 76-85; Hadfield, 1999 111-133; Hadfield 2002; Hingley 46-53; for a wider perspective, see Scanlan 38-67). The images in the 1590 volume begin with an engraving of Adam and Eve, continue with depictions of the Algonquian-speaking people encountered by the colonists, and end with figure studies of ancient Picts and Britons, which have been included (as the text in the volume states) “to show how that the Inhabitants of the great Bretannie have bin in times past as savuage as those of Virginia” (De Bry, 1590 n. p.). These juxtapositions reveal how ideas of temporal staging were being used in the period to comprehend indigenous societies—the Algonquian are at once close to the Edenic condition but also, in their “savagery,” akin to the fierce ancestral peoples of Britain—even as the sequencing of the images disrupts a linear historical reading, positioning a living population in the Americas before two long-vanished tribes from northern Europe.3 Similarly convoluted in their temporal references, the later engravings examined in this essay show that the construction of the New World as a mirror of the past is not restricted to the first part of America but is a recurring theme in the series, one that could be activated in other ways than through the literal pairing of Native American and (ancient) European figures.

6Looking beyond De Bry, the essay is also informed by a wider body of scholarship and theory that has discussed European attempts to reframe foreign peoples in terms of the West’s own ancient origins. Alongside the studies of early modern conceptions of prehistory and antiquity by J. H. Elliott, Stuart Piggott, Arthur B. Ferguson and Stephanie Moser, a significant contribution is Anne McClintock’s argument, focusing on the nineteenth century, that colonised lands were habitually represented as “anachronistic space: prehistoric, atavistic and irrational, inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity” (40). The trope of anachronism drew support from the influential Hegelian division of humankind into peoples with a history and peoples (notoriously, in Hegel, those in Africa) that belonged to the time of nature or biology (McClintock 39-42). In practice, however, it was applied not only to societies outside the West but also to allegedly degenerate elements at home—so that, for example, “fetish-worship” in the colonies and nonnormative sexual “fetishisms” in the metropole were consigned to the same “anachronistic space in the linear time of evolutionary progress, warranting and justifying conquest and control” (McClintock 182). Highlighting the fact that ideas of the primitive and the anachronistic served both colonial power and the internal surveillance of European populations, this aspect of McClintock’s discussion also reveals that the division between the primitive foreign other and the civilized Western self was, in reality, insecure and (to a degree) porous. This should alert us to the possibility of a similar breakdown of boundaries in the two engravings examined here, not least because—as the juxtaposition of the Algonquian and “the Inhabitants of […] great Bretannie” mentioned above indicates—in De Bry’s period indigenous otherness was often produced by comparing Native American societies to a European model, in a way that could invite speculation about similarity as well as difference (Hodgen 194-201; Dickason 49-54).

  • 4 My understanding of this challenging text has been informed by Robert Hullot-Kentor’s introduction (...)

7From another perspective, the opposition between nature and history that underpins the Hegelian framework has been subjected to a searching critique in the thought of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, notably in their jointly written essay Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947).4 In contrast to philosophers in the Idealist tradition like Hegel, Adorno and Horkheimer present human development, not as the rise of abstract reason or the unfolding of Spirit (Geist), but as the evolving manifestation of a form of “cunning” or “adaptation” that emerged early on in human history as a means of achieving self-preservation in the face of a threatening external world (39-47). While this drive towards self-preservation is what would eventually give rise to modern societies no longer fully in thrall to external forces, its more deleterious effect, the authors argue, has been to alienate the thinking subject from nature. On the one hand, this produces an illusion of control; from the sixteenth century on, empirical science and inventions like the compass offered the promise (but only that) of detached comprehension of the nonhuman world—what Adorno and Horkheimer call, in a striking metaphor, a godlike “lordly gaze” (Blick des Herren) out onto existence (6). On the other hand, human attempts to gain ascendency over both external nature and the instinctual, all-too-natural aspects of human nature often regress into “primitive” violence, as the drive towards self-preservation ends up imitating the blind force of nature (42-47). Dialectic of Enlightenment finds a mythic analogue for this dynamic in the Homeric story of Odysseus and the man-eating cyclops Polyphemus, in which the Greek hero first aligns himself with the monster, offering him wine to accompany his meal of human flesh, before blinding him and escaping from his cave in the guise of one of his sheep (45-54). In Adorno and Horkheimer’s reading of the myth, Odysseus overcomes “nature,” represented by Polyphemus, by denying the human nature in himself, in effect eviscerating himself and becoming subject to the external forces he had initially sought to master (for discussion, see Hullot-Kentor 98-100; Cook 27-32).

8The highly idiosyncratic, materialist account of anthropogenesis set out in Dialectic of Enlightenment clarifies how ideas of skill, labour, technology and the “cunning” manipulation of nature have shaped Western understandings of civility, human progress and the antithetical condition of pre-civility. Like McClintock’s work, it also offers a model for thinking about nature and history, the categories of the primitive and the civilized, as enmeshed and in constant interchange rather than as simply opposed. Given this essay’s concern with visual materials, it is notable, for example, that many depictions of the Polyphemus episode, from antiquity into De Bry’s period, focus on the moment that Odysseus and his men place themselves below animal bodies in order to save their human lives (fig. 4-5). This hints that the attempt to overcome nature, even by the allegedly civilized subject, inevitably carries with it the risk of regression or loss of stable identity. Recognising this, while my discussion focuses on how the two engravings from De Bry’s America strive to establish divisions between the European self and the indigenous other, I also emphasise that neither image can perfectly sustain that separation. The first section, on Hunting of Deer, highlights the shared imitative potency of “wild” Native American hunting and European printmaking, finding convergences as well as distinctions in these ways of capturing nature. The second section, on Mount Mansell Island, examines the references to abundance, fertility and freedom from labour in the print and its accompanying text, exploring how these can be read both as features that mark out American land as distinctively foreign and as a provocation to the coloniser to enter this unfamiliar environment and make it their own.

Fig. 4. Sappho Painter (attributed), Column Krater with Scene of Odysseus Escaping from Polyphemus (detail), c. 500-475 BCE

Fig. 4. Sappho Painter (attributed), Column Krater with Scene of Odysseus Escaping from Polyphemus (detail), c. 500-475 BCE

Pottery, 32,2 x 33,7 cm (whole object). Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University (Atlanta, United States of America), 2002.28,1.

Photograph © Bruce M. White, 2004.

Fig. 5. Jan van der Straet (designer, attributed), Odysseus and his Men Escape from the Cave of Polyphemus (detail), c. 1620-1640

Fig. 5. Jan van der Straet (designer, attributed), Odysseus and his Men Escape from the Cave of Polyphemus (detail), c. 1620-1640

Tapestry, 340 x 162,5 cm (whole object). J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles, United States of America), 97.P.7.

Courtesy of Getty’s Open Content Program.

I

9The 1591 work in which Hunting of Deer appeared was the second part of De Bry’s America series. Titled The brief relation of what befell the French in Florida (hereafter the Brief relation), it describes four voyages to La Florida (a region encompassing present-day coastal Florida and parts of Georgia and the Carolinas) that were undertaken by French explorers in the period 1562-68 (overviews are Hulton; Faupel and Lawson). Released in both a Latin and a German edition (De Bry 1591a; De Bry 1591b), the book includes translations of previously published accounts of the voyages by several of the senior crew members. Its main attraction for most readers, however, would have been the forty-two captioned engravings that depict the physical and human geography of La Florida and key events in the French attempt to colonise the area. Many of these images depict the social practices of the Timucua, the Native American group, defined by its shared language, that was dominant in La Florida when the French arrived there. The engravings are based on a set of drawings by the French watercolourist Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, who had served as the voyage artist on the second expedition of 1564. Unfortunately, since Le Moyne’s original drawings are largely lost, it is impossible to know how far De Bry, or the reproductive engraver he employed for the task, changed the compositions when turning them into prints. However, the evidence provided by the first, 1590 part of the America series, for which many of the original watercolours by the English artist John White do survive, indicates that De Bry, though generally faithful to the original compositions, was willing to nudge his Native American figures towards the European bodily types found in the Mannerist art of his own day by modifying their gestures, postures and facial expressions (Pratt, 2009 35-38).

10As images that purport to show a faraway continent and human societies that few Europeans had encountered before, the Brief narration’s engravings would have aroused fascination but also uncertainty in the minds of its first readers. De Bry sought to assuage doubts about the illustrations’ veracity in the front matter to the volume, describing them on the titlepage as having been engraved “from life” (ad vivum) and informing the reader in his preface that they have been included “so that the story should not just be told but should seem to be enacted vividly before the eyes” (ut res non narrari tantum, sed et geri coram luculenter videatur: Hulton 88, 117, translation modified). These phrases, which adapt established rhetorical conventions that were used to assert the connection between the visual image and its source in the living world, present the book’s static, monochrome plates as vitalised likenesses that directly evoke the experiences of the voyagers. Crucially, premodern understandings of the ad vivum image could include representations, such as engravings, that were known to be based on preexisting visual materials (Balfe and Woodall 1-19). This accords with the reframing of the Brief narration in recent scholarship, which has recognised that its images are not simply crystallisations of geographical and ethnographic data, derived from first-hand witnessing, about La Florida, but are also strongly shaped by Western attitudes, ideas and visual traditions (Lestringant; Olson). Studies that have examined Hunting of Deer have, similarly, found it to be densely layered and allusive, engaging with themes such as the stereotype of dishonest Indians as “wolves in sheep’s clothing” (Martel), art as the mirror of nature (Gaudio 28-30), and earlier European traditions of hunting and fable imagery (Balfe). Following a brief description of the print and its caption, this section proposes a further set of visual and thematic precedents for De Bry’s depiction of the hunters that brings their indeterminate position between nature and history into view.

11Hunting of Deer depicts a traditional Native American stalking technique in which the dried skin of the head or whole body of an antlered stag is used by the hunter as a mask or decoy (overviews are Swanton 312-321; Milanich 141; Parrish 243-244). The purpose of this device was to merge the hunter with his surroundings in order to enable him to get close enough to the prey animal to strike it with an arrow—the vital moment depicted in the print. Set on a gently rising plain divided by a central stream, De Bry’s scene shows three masked hunters crouching down in order to point their armed bows towards several deer on the other side of the water. The two hunters in the foreground have advanced to the edge of the stream so that the masked head of the leading man is reflected in the water, beside that of one of the stags. Emphasising the way the man has adapted himself to the slowness or stillness of the natural world, the undisturbed reflection—which, tellingly, lacks any sign of a bow and arrow—also suggests the stags’ obliviousness to the danger they are in. The only indication that the animals might perceive the threat posed by the hunters comes in the form of the solitary female deer, faintly visible among the trees at upper right, who has turned to flee into the forest. Her male companions appear unaware of what is about to happen. The stag nearest the treeline bends its head to drink from the stream, while the two animals in the foreground continue to amble forward on cantering legs, looking quizzically at the men moving into position opposite them.

12The caption below the engraving begins with a short description of mask stalking, one that emphasises its novelty from a European point of view, before directing the viewer to the temporal dimension of the image. “Having observed the time [tempore observato] when the deer came down to the river to drink,” it reads, “the Indians, dressed like this, were able to approach and get close to them without arousing their suspicions” (Faupel and Lawson 24, translation modified; cf. Hulton 147; De Bry, 1591a no. 25). Even as the image underlines the visual merging of human and animal bodies via the zoomorphic masks, the text registers a distinction between the deer, whose lives exist within a diurnal cycle that brings them predictably to the water, and the hunters, who are able to note this behaviour in advance and to take advantage of it. The text then broadens its perspective, presenting the scene as evidence of the abundance of a foreign territory to which the hunters are fully accommodated:

There were a lot of deer in that region so they [the hunters] were easily able to shoot them with their bows and arrows. In doing this they had learnt to protect their left arm with tree bark from the string of the bow, as they were taught by nature [ad natura ita edocti]. They were able to remove the deer skin and prepare it without any metal knife, just shells, with such skill that I doubt there was anyone in the whole of Europe who could do it better. (Faupel and Lawson 24, translation modified; cf. Hulton 147; De Bry, 1591a no. 25)

13Here, Native American expertise in stalking and in preparing deerskins is praised but also rendered questionable by being attributed to the hunters’ affinity with nature. This is indicated both by the materials they use (tree bark rather than fabric or leather when handling the bow, and sharpened shells rather than metal knives for skinning), and by the fact that these skills have been “taught by nature” rather than learned through active, rational deliberation.

14The ambivalent characterisation of the Timucua in Hunting of Deer deepens when possible iconographic parallels for the figures are considered. With regard to the hunters’ masks, first of all, it is relevant that animal skins worn so that they partially cover the head also appear in a 1547 edition of Vitruvius’s Architecture, illustrated by Jean Goujon, in two engravings that depict stages in humankind’s early development: the discovery of fire and the construction of the first rudimentary dwellings (fig. 6). As Moser has shown, these images underscore the greater advancement of the groups that have gained knowledge of fire and building by contrasting them with figures who are naked or dressed in animal-skin headgear (56-59). The skin garments in Goujon’s Vitruvius were probably inspired by earlier representations of Hercules (or Herakles) clad in the hide of the Nemean Lion, an attribute that indicates the hero’s inchoate capacity for violence that must be directed by reason and virtue (for visual examples and discussion, see Moser 28-30, 56-57). It is clear that Europeans readily associated this mythological figure with Native Americans. The French author André Thevet’s 1584 collection of biographies of famous men and women, for example, includes a portrait of Satouriona, a Timucua leader who also appears frequently in the Brief narration (De Bry, 1591a no. 14), clad in a hood with a prominent animal head that looks back to the Hercules type (fig. 7). The traveller Marc Lescarbot, for his part, likened the indigenous men he saw in Acadia to “pictures of Hercules, who killed a lion and put the skin on his back” (vol. 3 372). Beyond the visual correspondence that Lescarbot perceived, his comment may also have been prompted by his sense that New World people possessed the same redoubtable, but potentially excessive, vitality represented by the archetype of the labouring Hercules, who, like the Timucua hunters, masters the external forces in his environment by assimilating to himself the potency of nature.

Fig. 6. Jean Goujon, The Discovery of Fire, 1547

Fig. 6. Jean Goujon, The Discovery of Fire, 1547

Woodcut, 36,5 x 25,5 cm. Metropolitan Museum (New York, United States of America), 22.65.1.

Rogers Fund, 1922.

Fig. 7. Anon. engraver (France), Paraousti Satouriona, Roy de la Floride, 1584

Fig. 7. Anon. engraver (France), Paraousti Satouriona, Roy de la Floride, 1584

Engraving, 12,7 x 15,5 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris, France), RES-G-732, p. 663.

15In the realm of European folklore rather than classical mythology, skin garments are a defining attribute of the wild man, the cousin of the satyrs, fauns, centaurs and woodland demigods of the Greco-Roman tradition who first appears in European art in the Middle Ages (Husband 1-18). Images of the wild man had a formative influence on early depictions of Native Americans, whose nomadic lifestyle and lack of technologies such as firearms evidently struck Europeans as similar to the forest people of their own folklore (White 28-30; Dickason 70-84; Vaughan). While the figure’s parallel association with the temporality of nature, or cyclical periodicity more generally, would have been tacitly understood (Cohen 63-66), it is made explicit in images that personify Time, or Annus, as a heavily bearded, muscular figure holding a solar disk or sundial (fig. 8). These representations can be distinguished from others in which the wild man is presented as the antagonist of the Christian knight or the urbane world of the court. While his connection with nature remains strong in these cases, what is also stressed is his status as an anachronism: a relict perplexingly still active in the present, either as a manifestation of the conditions that civilization has moved beyond or as a counterforce to its weaknesses and excesses (for visual examples and discussion, see White 3-10; Silver).

Fig. 8. Wild Man-Annus, façade statue, c. 1300-1500

Fig. 8. Wild Man-Annus, façade statue, c. 1300-1500

Marble and Istrian stone, 300 x 780 cm. Palazzo Bembo-Boldù, Campiello Santa Maria Nova (Venice, Italy).

Photograph © René Seindal.

16Hunting of Deer intersects suggestively with the wild man tradition in the way the stooping posture of the hunters recalls depictions in which the forest figure’s position at the margins of humankind is signalled by a crawling, crouching or squatting stance (fig. 9). This subtype, which may have emerged as a pragmatic means of fitting the wild man into the ornamental spaces of the illuminated manuscript page, was quickly adapted to representations of other abject figures, such as the Old Testament king Nebuchadnezzar who was reduced to crawling like an animal after being punished for his pride by God (fig. 10). The distinctive gait of De Bry’s hunters, who have crooked their knees and bent their backs so that the feet of the deerskins appear to walk on the ground, resonates especially strongly with a strand of crouching wild man imagery in which the figure’s stooped lower body is juxtaposed with its raised arms and hands with five perceptible digits (fig. 11). As in these more humanoid renderings of the wild figure, the posture of the Timucua, which falls somewhere in between a quadrupedal and a fully upright bipedal stance, signals their status as intermediate beings who are human but who also fall short of the most complete versions of humanity.

Fig. 9. Anon. maker (Provence, France), Wild Man, c. 1440-1450

Fig. 9. Anon. maker (Provence, France), Wild Man, c. 1440-1450

Illumination on vellum, 3 x 4 cm. Book of Hours, The Morgan Library & Museum (New York, United States of America), MS 358, fol. 153 (detail).

Photograph © The Morgan Library & Museum.

Fig. 10. Anon. maker (Spain), The Folly of Nebuchadnezzar, 1197

Fig. 10. Anon. maker (Spain), The Folly of Nebuchadnezzar, 1197

Illumination on vellum, 7,5 x 10 cm. Pamplona Bible, Bibliothèque Louis Aragon (Amiens, France), MS 108, fol. 136 (detail).

Fig. 11. Anon. maker (England), Wild Man, c. 1310-20

Fig. 11. Anon. maker (England), Wild Man, c. 1310-20

Illumination on vellum, 7 x 11 cm. Queen Mary Psalter, British Library (London, United Kingdom), Royal MS 2 B VII, fol. 173 (detail).

Photograph © British Library.

17By the sixteenth century, the crouching or crawling posture seen in medieval depictions of the wild man had begun to appear in a wider range of printed images of monsters, prodigies, the mad, and the morally degenerate. In all these cases, it frequently carried a didactic charge. A notable case is the iconography of the lycanthrope (fig. 12), where the figure’s descent onto all fours indicates that their transformation is not merely physical but the outcome of their “bestial” capitulation to Satanic temptation (Husband no. 25, 110-112). A similar association with the effects of sin or temptation is found in a 1531 German edition of Cicero’s Offices, which uses a woodcut of a crawling man to make vivid the predicament of the person dominated by their passions (fig. 13), with the accompanying text warning that “When evil desire seduces us, Man turns into an animal” (book 3 81). The connection raised in this image between animality, literal proximity to the ground and the failure to master the all-too-natural aspects of human nature is also a subtext in engravings depicting Saint John Chrysostom by Lucas Cranach, Albrecht Dürer, Sebald Beham and other German printmakers (fig. 14). These works juxtapose a naked female figure with a child in the foreground—a reference to Chrysostom’s sinful early life—with a squatting or crawling depiction of the saint in the background (Husband no. 24, 107-109). A version of this split composition was included in an emblem book published by the De Bry firm in 1592-93, suggesting that the engravers in the workshop were aware of the iconographic type of the abject desert saint, entrapped by his own earthy impulses, when the Brief narration was being compiled in the early 1590s (De Bry, 1592 n. p.).

Fig. 12. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Lycanthrope, c. 1510-1515

Fig. 12. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Lycanthrope, c. 1510-1515

Woodcut, 16,2 x 12,6 cm. Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), RP-P-OB-4430.

Fig. 13. Hans Weiditz, A Man Transformed by Evil Passions, 1531

Fig. 13. Hans Weiditz, A Man Transformed by Evil Passions, 1531

Woodcut, 9,8 x 15,8 cm. Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), RP-P-1874-11-142-1.

Fig. 14. Sebald Beham, The Penance of Saint John Chrysostom, c. 1525-1550

Fig. 14. Sebald Beham, The Penance of Saint John Chrysostom, c. 1525-1550

Engraving, 5,3 x 7,7 cm. National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C, United States of America), 1941.2.5.

Gift of Dr Paul J. Sachs.

18While it is possible that images like the above were one of the sources of inspiration for Hunting of Deer, the wider point they bring to light is that in a premodern world attuned to the resonances of human posture, departures from full uprightness were freighted with complex, and often strongly negative, moral connotations (Stoczkowski 73-77; Steel 45-46). In Hunting of Deer, the question of how the hunters’ posture is to be interpreted hinges, as in the prints depicting Chrysostom, on a pointed visual contrast. If the hunters’ stooped bodies and intent gazes imply their immersion in nature, their constrained outlook on the world is also implicitly differentiated from the all-encompassing lordly gaze of the image itself, with its detached viewpoint elevated above the central stream. At one level, this difference in perspective strengthens our suspicion that the hunters’ attempt to extract value from their environment has put them at risk of losing their ontological distinction from nature and the animal, in a version of the dynamic of self-entrapment described by Adorno and Horkheimer (fig. 1 cf. fig. 4). Yet the irony, of course, is that De Bry’s engraving invites the same kind of intent, engrossed and narrowly directed scrutiny of the New World environment that it attributes to the Timucua hunters. Replete with absorbing details, it pulls in a viewer eager to discover more about the three men, the masks they are using, the plants and animals, and all the other clues it offers about what life is like in La Florida. Moreover, when the image is inspected in this careful way, discrepancies mount up that disrupt the viewing experience and undermine the Brief narration’s promise of a truthful vision of America taken directly “from life.”

19In the dense field of lines that describe the forest at upper right, the pronounced visual similarity between the drinking stag’s antlers and the tree trunks behind them elides objects within different planes of recession, forcing us to recognise that we are looking at marks on paper rather than real entities in volumetric space. Similar anomalies trouble the reflection in the stream. As well as the inconsistent absence of the bow and arrow, the two heads in the water appear identical in size and close enough for the tips of the antlers to be touching, even though the masked head of the real hunter is noticeably larger than that of the stag and separated from it by a space of about a foot. These incongruities, which are difficult to pass off as unintentional lapses by the printmaker, undermine any certainty that the engraving offers a faithful reflection of the New World. At these points in the image, the lordly gaze seems to falter as the viewer becomes aware of the limits of what the engraving can show by virtue of its status as a material object—one fashioned from ink and paper by artistic skill, but one that is also fallible, inconsistent and, in an important sense, fictive. Adopting this materialist perspective on the engraving might even lead us to see a parallel, as Michael Gaudio has suggested (29-30), between a depiction of nature produced by a copperplate pressed against paper and an imitation of an animal created by a human body that enlivens a deerskin mask. Insofar as the image encourages us to think about this similarity, it resists, despite itself, the distinction between indigenous and European ways of knowing and mastering nature that it otherwise attempts to uphold.

  • 5 The authors discuss in detail the transition from early nomadic communities, with their relatively (...)

20What brings this aspect of Hunting of Deer into focus is the recognition that the lifelikeness of the engraving and the hunters’ cunning imitation of deer are, in different ways, skilled forms of work. Ideas about work and the productive expenditure of time have also been part of the story of how indigenous societies have been cast as belonging to nature rather than history, and in understanding this Dialectic of Enlightenment is again instructive. In the essay, Odysseus is presented not only as the epitome of cunning but also as a prototype of the bourgeois individual. An owner of estates and slaves who commands others to their tasks (Adorno and Horkheimer 9-10), he seeks profit on his adventures by pitting himself against the external world, outwitting “the natural deities as the civilized traveller was later to swindle savages, offering them colored beads for ivory” (39). While the Eurocentric language of savagery used in such passages demands to be questioned (Baum), Adorno and Horkheimer’s suggestion, drawing ultimately on Marx (Cook 27-28), that the “primitive” has often been defined in opposition to a class-based social structure, one founded on a logic of exchange enabled by the manipulation of nature to produce surpluses, remains important and relevant for the present discussion.5 How the identities of the civilized self and the foreign other are connected to different ways of generating value from nature is a central issue in my second example (fig. 2).

II

21The engraving referred to here as Mount Mansell Island was first published in the thirteenth part of the America series. This work appeared in the form of two German volumes, with the same content but different titlepages, that were released in 1627 and 1628, with a Latin translation following in 1634 (De Bry 1627; De Bry 1628; De Bry 1634; for the bibliographic descriptions, see Van Groesen 480-482, 485-486). The penultimate instalment of America, the thirteenth part was mainly a compilation of popular texts and images from earlier volumes in the series. It contains seven travel accounts dealing with sites of European colonial encounter in the Atlantic: New England, Virginia, the Bermudas, Brazil, Guiana, Terra Australis, and Bahia de Todos de Santos in Brazil. Alongside the material that had appeared before, the work features new plates by the Swiss engraver Matthäus Merian, who, from 1626, was principally responsible for coordinating the America series (Van Groesen 343-344).

22Mount Mansell Island is one of three new prints that Merian produced for the first section of the thirteenth part, which deals with New England. The German text that accompanies this section is largely a compilation of translated extracts from four previously published accounts of English colonial settlements within an extensive area stretching from Plymouth harbour up to coastal Maine, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland Island; “New England” in this instance thus refers to those parts of North America that were under English control or targeted by English colonists in the early seventeenth century. The De Bry workshop used the abbreviated versions of the source texts that were included in the second, 1625 edition of Samuel Purchas’s popular collection of voyage accounts, Purchas his Pilgrimes (Gilbert 264-266; De Bry, 1627 14). The four English authors are Edward Winslow, a Protestant separatist who was one of the founders and leaders of the Plymouth colony (Purchas vol. 19 344-394); John Guy, the governor of the first significant English colony in Canada in Cupids, Newfoundland (406-424); Richard Whitbourne, a Devon sea captain who had run a cod-fishing operation in Newfoundland (424-442); and Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who never travelled to North America but who was active in promoting English colonisation of Maine during his lifetime (269-284). The engravings in the New England section focus on notable events in the four sources: a sighting of a mermaid reported by Whitbourne, trading between the English and the local people, and the technique of using fire to hunt moose on Mount Mansell Island (fig. 2).

23Merian’s depiction of the moose hunt is based on a description that had originally appeared in Gorges’ 1622 book A Briefe relation of the discovery and plantation of New England, which was intended to stimulate investment in Maine and migration to the area by working-age English subjects. In line with Gorges’ aim of presenting New England positively to potential investors and colonists, his account highlights the rich natural resources of the area. These include several kinds of deer, including “some that bring forth two, three, and foure young at once, which is a manifest proofe of the fertility of the Soile” (Gorges vol. 1 230; cf. Purchas vol. 19 281; De Bry, 1627 16), as well as another curious animal:

a certaine Beast, that the Natiues call a Mosse [Moose], he is as big bodied as an Oxe, headed like a fallow Deere, with a broad Palme, which hee mues euery yeere, as doth the Deere, and necke like a Red Deere, with a short mane, running down along the raines of his backe, his haire long like an Elke, but esteemed to be better then that for Sadlers vse, he hath likewiſe a great bunch hanging downe vnder his throat, and is of the colour of our blacker sort of fallow Deere, his leggs are long, and his feet as bigge as the feet of our Oxen, his taile is longer then the single of a Deere, and reacheth almost downe to his huxens, his skinne maketh very good Buffe, and his flesh is excellent good food, which the Natiues use to Jerkin, and keepe all the yeere to serve their turne, and so prooves very serviceable for their use. (vol. 1 230-231; cf. Purchas vol. 19 281-282; De Bry, 1627 15)

24Many of these animals have been seen, Gorges states, “in a great Iland upon the Coast, called by our people Mount Mansell,” where the local hunters capture them by making

seuerall fires, and setting the Countrey with people, to force them into the sea, to which they are naturally addicted, and then there are others that attend them in their Botes with bowes and weapons of seuerall kindes, wherewith they slay and take [them] at their pleasure. (vol. 1 231; cf. Purchas vol. 19 282; De Bry, 1627 15)

25This precise report draws on European lore about the moose or elk (Jackson 37-90) and may also incorporate elements of indigenous folk wisdom, such as the belief that the animal, with its liking for water, originally came from the sea (Franzmann and Schwartz 39-40). While it contains hints of admiration for the hunters’ expertise, Gorges was in no doubt that the moose could be employed more productively as a working animal within a Western-style regime of planned agriculture: “there is hope that this kinde of Beasts may bee made seruiceable for ordinary labour with Art and Industry” (vol. 1 231). His emphasis on how the animal might be exploited by Europeans is carried through into the thirteenth part of America in the form of the list of products (leather for buff coats, meat and jerky, and hair useful for saddlers) mentioned in his initial description of the animal (De Bry, 1627 15).

  • 6 On the basis of comparison with Native American communities living further to the south, the ground (...)

26Besides the hunting scene, Mount Mansell Island contains several other visual elements. It combines a profile depiction of a single moose, which occupies the left foreground as if it has just stepped out of the bushes and vines at the edge of the space, with a view out across a patch of furrowed ground and a stretch of water towards Mount Mansell Island, where the hunt is taking place. In the central area on the right, a Native American man holds several fish that he is methodically distributing on the patch of ploughed earth. This detail was based on a passage in Winslow’s account of New England and the Plymouth colony where he states that the English enhanced the productivity of the soil by fertilising it with fish (Purchas vol. 19 393; cf. De Bry, 1627 14). As is commonly taught in the United States today, this agricultural technique might have been learned by Europeans from Native Americans, although the matter remains controversial historically and the direction of cultural diffusion is uncertain (Cronon 44-45). Be that as it may, in a change of emphasis from both Winslow’s statement and the De Bry firm’s German text that was based on it, the engraving shows an indigenous farmer implementing the improvement rather than a settler. Beyond the farmer, the stalks of a food crop can be seen growing at the water’s edge, indicating the area’s potential for agriculture as well as hunting. In the distance, partially hidden by the fires that the hunters have set along the coastline, Mount Mansell Island rises out of the sea. Armed with bows and clubs, hunters on the island pursue moose into the water, where other members of the group chase down the animals in canoes. The tall clouds of smoke and fleeing animals, details that recall Goujon’s Vitruvian image of the first primitive societies (fig. 6), imply that this activity lacks the rational organisation of a European hunt. This impression is strengthened by the De Bry firm’s German text, which slants Gorges’ report in a sensationalising direction by stating that during the annual moose hunt the island is “entirely consumed in fire as if by a wall of flame” (De Bry, 1627 15).6

27A final important motif in the image is the pair of Native Americans reclining on the ground (fig. 3). Positioned between the realm of nature of the wild vines and the moose on the left, and the cultivated land to their right, they are at once centralised within the composition and detached from the movement occurring elsewhere in the scene. As Dickason has suggested (152-154), their inclusion references the topos of indigenous leisure enabled by a favourable, abundant environment, an idea that can be traced back to comparisons between the Americas, and other temperate places far from Europe, and the paradisal Golden Age (Gravatt 97-137; Myara Kelif 466-471). The opposition between leisure and work was also a common structuring principle in early modern print series that depict the ages of humankind, which typically use the Ovidian pattern of four temporal stages. These begin with the Golden Age and proceed through the lesser ages of silver, bronze or copper, and iron, tracing the gradual intrusion of labour and conflict into human life (for visual examples, see Myara Kelif 33-89). While Merian would have been familiar with these series, a more specific set of visual models for his couple can be found in the depictions of the Golden Age by Dutch Mannerist painters, including Roelandt Savery and Abraham Bloemaert. The latter’s celebrated drawing of the Golden Age (fig. 15), which shows pairs and groups of figures reposing in an idealised landscape filled with peaceful animals while a personification of Time looks on from a cloud, would almost certainly have been known to the engraver since it had been turned into a circular print by the De Bry workshop in 1608 (fig. 16).

Fig. 15. Abraham Bloemaert, The Golden Age, 1603

Fig. 15. Abraham Bloemaert, The Golden Age, 1603

Drawing (brown ink and wash over black chalk on paper), 44,3 x 69,3 cm. Städel Museum (Frankfurt am Main, Germany), 2878.

Fig. 16. Johann Theodor de Bry, The Golden Age, 1608

Fig. 16. Johann Theodor de Bry, The Golden Age, 1608

Engraving, diameter 16,2 cm. Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), RP-P-1942-118.

28Beyond these visual precursors, Merian’s decision to furnish his depiction of New England with figures that evoke the Golden Age also had a broader cultural basis. The stereotype that indigenous people in the Americas enjoy an existence free from any strenuous activity apart from hunting—a pursuit that in Europe was itself linked to aristocratic leisure—was still current in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The French traveller Binot Paulmier de Gonneville, for example, noted that the Indians he encountered in Brazil wanted “only to lead a joyful life without much work […] living by hunting and fishing and from what their land gives them of its own accord” (cited in Myara Kelif 468). The English author Richard Blome described the Algonquian of Virginia as “not much addicted to labour, being too great lovers of their ease” and “much given to Hunting” (154), a sentiment that is echoed in the De Bry firm’s own publication about the region (De Bry, 1590 no. 13). Variations on the same idea of an environment that provides continuously without the need for labour also appear in the German text that accompanies Mount Mansell Island. In the summer, the reader is told, the land produces delicious legumes and beans “in short time and with little effort” (in kurtzer zeit und mit geringer Mühe: De Bry, 1627 2), and each season brings forth medicinal plants “without any work or planting by the inhabitants” (ohne einige Arbeit und Pflanzung der Inwohner: De Bry, 1627 3). The paradisal associations of the area are reinforced by an anecdote taken from Whitbourne’s text, which is based on the author’s experiences of cod-fishing in Newfoundland. When the English fishermen were processing their catch on the seashore, it would sometimes happen that wild animals would come down out of the countryside and threaten them. However, when the narrator’s mastiff approached them in order to ward them off, “the one began to fawne and play with the other, and so [the dog] went together into the Woods, and continued with them […] and did return unto us without any hurt” (Purchas vol. 19 434; cf. De Bry, 1627 3). As many readers would have known, prelapsarian Eden and life in the Golden Age were untroubled by animal predation.

29Embodying the ease, conviviality and harmony with nature experienced during the Golden Age, Merian’s indolent couple ramify the temporal complexity of Mount Mansell Island. Their presence invites the viewer to see in the depicted scene a series, or even a hierarchy, of developmental stages relating to how the land of New England has been used, in the past and the present. The couple themselves, who have laid down their weapons, allegorise a mythic stage of human existence when life could be sustained without violence or labour. Moving forward in time, the engraving juxtaposes the recent introduction of planned agriculture into the area—a change exemplified by the man fertilising the field, a technique he has presumably learned from the English colonists (De Bry, 1627 14)—with the preceding era of impromptu hunting. While the time of hunting may have been less useful as a driver of commerce, it evidently provided more opportunities for social cohesion: unlike the isolated farmer, the hunters approach their task collaboratively, trapping their prey through a coordinated action involving groups working on the land and in the water. Finally, we might see a reference to an earlier, “prehistorical” stage when New England was still under the sway of nature, signified by the moose stepping out of its bushy, tangled habitat. Merian based his depiction of this animal on a woodcut of the German moose (or elk) that had appeared in the 1550 edition of Sebastian Münster’s popular encyclopaedic geography, the Cosmographia (fig. 17)—a decision that inadvertently contributes to the way the creature appears disconnected, in time and space, from the parts of the landscape inhabited by human beings.

Fig. 17. Anon. engraver (German), Elk, 1550

Fig. 17. Anon. engraver (German), Elk, 1550

Woodcut, 20 x 30 cm. Universitätsbibliothek Basel (Basel, Switzerland), UBH EU I 79, p. 1424.

  • 7 While the suggestion must remain speculative, Merian may have taken this visual idea, via a reprodu (...)

30Mount Mansell Island, however, harbours a further temporal dimension that complicates this chronological schema. While it alludes to discrete phases in the long history of New England, correlating these with different types or degrees of labour, it also urges the idea that the events it depicts are all happening now, in an ongoing present. Once again, it is the two reclining figures that bring this aspect of the image into focus. Unlike most of the couples in representations of the Golden Age, Merian’s pair do not look at or interact with each other. The man on the left has turned to watch the hunt taking place near the island, while his companion glances in the opposite direction towards the farmer tending the field.7 Through this division of gazes, the image suggests that the two figures are witnessing these activities, which seem to be taking place at the same moment. For all that the engraving calls to mind a series of temporal stages, then, it also implies that in New England today indigenous people who have adopted European norms are living side-by-side with others who continue to survive through traditional forms of hunting, or even in a state of total indolence.

31The engraving’s orientation towards present time is where its ambivalences about fertile New World space come most dramatically into view. While the freedoms of the Golden Age were celebrated in Western art and literature, the prospect of a life of ease lived in the here and now raised more doubts for early modern Europeans interested in colonial projects. The English authors whose works provided the material for the text about New England included in the thirteenth part of America exemplify this mentality. Guy, for example, in a passage defending the healthfulness of the region, asserts that the few settlers who died or became sick did not succumb to the climate (a common worry), but could have avoided their fate if they had been more industrious: “if they had had as good will to worke, as they had good stomackes to their victuals, [they] would long since have bin recovered” (Purchas vol. 19 412). Gorges, similarly, notes that what the Maine colony lacks is “industrious people, to reape the commodities that are there to be had,” even though the living is so good that the current group of settlers are reluctant to leave, proving “there is no labour well imployed, but hath his reward” (Purchas vol. 19 282-283). These remarks argue for the superiority of hard work over ease even as they register the anxiety that exposure to the plenitude of American nature will induce forms of regression—towards laziness, discontent and ill health—in the less committed colonists.

32While the De Bry firm’s redaction of Gorges and the other three sources suppresses many of the specific agendas of the English colonial writers, it too, like them, endorses the position that the territory of New England could be improved by a directed application of hard work geared towards generating surpluses for profit and international trade. A passage listing the plants that provide food, horticultural products, medicine, wine and beer, for example, is followed by an invitation to the reader to speculate about how the region might be used in the future:

From this one can deduce how fertile this land would be if it were to be cultivated [wann es wol solte gebawet werden]. Indeed, how fertile this land is can be seen from the fact that the English, who began to farm the land a few years ago, every year gain a rich harvest of fruits with great profit and benefit. (De Bry, 1627 3, emphasis added)

33The English are in fact presented as a model of this ongoing drive towards improvement: the text reports that they have already “set up four or five colonies or communities, and are refurbishing and strengthening them every year,” benefitting not only themselves but also French and Dutch settlers in the area as well as the indigenous inhabitants (De Bry, 1627 14). The newcomers’ more advanced agricultural knowledge also means that they are better placed than the Native Americans to exploit the region’s fertility:

The inhabitants have a type of corn that they call Ginny Wheat that they plant very laboriously. The English, on the other hand, plant wheat, barley, beans and oats with little trouble and labour, and afterwards harvest all of them, each in its proper season and in great quantity and abundance. (De Bry, 1627 14)

34Inverting the earlier descriptions of harvests gathered by the local people “in short time and with little effort” (De Bry, 1627 2), this statement presents the English as the natural inheritors of an area that remains underexploited because of the Native Americans’ ignorance of seasonal planting.

35These comments on the productive capacity of New England, and Europeans’ greater ability to benefit from it, cast the reclining couple at the centre of Mount Mansell Island in a starker light. If at first glance they seem merely a visual reiteration of a tenacious stereotype about the simple life of indigenous people, their presence takes on bleaker implications when set against the imperative to develop “unused” land that was increasingly a preferred line of reasoning in seventeenth-century colonial discourse (Cronon 26; Smalley 26-30). For many readers, the indications of fertility in the image, such as the wild vines in the uncultivated area occupied by the moose, would have been not only attractive in themselves but also a provocation to expansion and settlement, or to investment in those activities. This stance is epitomised by the Maine colonist John Smith, who characterised the Penobscot River area as underpopulated and vacant—a “plaine spectacle of desolation”—before going on to note that its “barren Iles” have “good woods, springs, fruits, fish, and foule” that could, if developed, sustain a large population (25). Seen in this light, Merian’s sedentary couple encode conflicting attitudes towards the prospects offered by colonisation of Maine. They evoke simultaneously the easy profits that Europeans stand to benefit from and a condition of unproductive stasis which, like the Golden Age itself, is notionally appealing but obsolete—a way of living which, in the here and now, can only exist in a superannuated mythic imaginary. Encircled by the busy movement of the hunters, the moose loping towards the centre of its ridge, and the farmer advancing into the field, the figures’ inactivity is presented as out of step with the world of the present, an anachronism that calls for replacement by a more energetic regime.

36By contrast, the farmer improving his land seems more closely aligned with the agenda of reorienting Maine towards commercialised agriculture and trade. Depicted at the edge of the ploughed field, with his left leg cropped by the image frame, he is presented as contiguous with the wider world beyond New England, in keeping with his use of a technique for fertilising soil also favoured by Europeans (recall here the enthusiasm of the English for this practice, which is noted in the De Bry firm’s text). Insofar as the man’s activity demonstrates continuities between European and indigenous agricultural knowledge, he offers an amenable vision of how the interaction between Native Americans and settlers might work. Equally, however, his position on the borderline separating the New World from the Old World also underlines the fact that the contact zones and forms of cultural mixing that accompanied expansion inevitably put pressure on the view of Native American societies as inflexibly committed to older ways of living on the land—the very view that often legitimated the takeover of their territories in the first place (Cronon 54-81). With his dedication to enriching the soil and generating future value, the farmer mirrors settler interests, introducing these into an image where no European figure is represented.

37The presence of the farmer points to an underlying tension in the engraving’s attempt to hold the foreign at a distance. While its synoptic, lordly overview of different ways of extracting value from the land promises comprehensive knowledge of New England, it also places these activities on a single continuum, one that encompasses forms of improvement that European colonial writers themselves endorsed as forward thinking. At a visual level, this is reinforced by the way that the hunters, the resting couple and the farmer are scattered into different sectors of the composition, impeding any attempt to read into the image a sequential narrative of progress, from “wild” hunting to civilized forms of agriculture. In place of this kind of narrative, Mount Mansell Island offers a more equivocal view of its Native American figures. Alongside its emphasis, via the resting couple, on the stasis of the Wabanaki and their immersion in nature, it also points up, through the inclusion of the farmer, their evolving capacity for self-preservation in the face of powerful external forces, which in their case included the arrival of foreigners who brought with them both threats and opportunities.

Conclusion

38Tracing multiple timelines in the De Bry firm’s America, this essay has discussed the way that two engravings from the series place their Native American figures in an uncertain relation to the present. Hunting of Deer interrogates the otherness of the three Timucua hunters by highlighting their naif cunning and their immanent connection to nature and the animal. These were traits that viewers sensitive to the layered visual references in the print might have associated with the wild man and other mythic figures who stood apart from civilization and modernity. Mount Mansell Island, an image strongly tied to texts promoting colonisation of the Americas, underscores the amenities of New England by presenting it as a place where the local inhabitants enjoy abundance reminiscent of the Golden Age, and where much of the land has yet to be reclaimed from original nature—a state of affairs which, paradoxically, invites the kinds of “improvement” that only Europeans can bring.

39The temporal references in the engravings contribute to their portrayal of Native American people as unmoored in time as well as distant in space, exemplifying a theme that would persist in later ethnographic and colonial discourse. At the same time, these attempts at differentiation remain partial and unresolved. Beyond the convergences between European and indigenous cunning and labour that the essay has discussed, a broader reason for this lies in the fact that many of the images and prototypes that Europeans had for “primitive” foreign peoples were drawn from the stories they had told themselves about the rise of humankind out of a wild or fortunate primordial state. As the scenes from America demonstrate, this could produce uncanny continuities between self and other even in representations of societies that were, on the face of it, entirely remote from their Western viewers.

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Notes

1 The volumes in America are collaboratively-assembled compilations of material and do not have a single author in the modern sense. Here, I have adopted the convention of designating Theodor de Bry as the corporate author, including of those parts of the series that postdate his death in 1598, on the basis that he was the founder of the printing firm and the originator of the project.

2 All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. In the second section, the German text that accompanies Figure 2 (De Bry, 1627 1-16) is cited via its four English sources (in Purchas vol. 19) except where the German version differs significantly or where the passage does not occur in the sources.

3 I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for this observation.

4 My understanding of this challenging text has been informed by Robert Hullot-Kentor’s introduction to Adorno’s unpublished 1932 essay “The Idea of Natural-History” (97-110) and by recent explications of the philosopher’s views about nature (Cook) and the philosophy of history (O’Connor).

5 The authors discuss in detail the transition from early nomadic communities, with their relatively flat social structures, to more hierarchical modern societies governed by “civilized man,” whose disenchanted view of nature has turned the entire universe into his “modest hunting ground […] in which nothing exists but prey” (Adorno and Horkheimer 15, 6).

6 On the basis of comparison with Native American communities living further to the south, the ground fires set by Wabanaki groups to flush out animals during hunting or to regenerate the soil are likely to have been, in general, well controlled (Pyne 47-55; Cronon 49-52; Francis).

7 While the suggestion must remain speculative, Merian may have taken this visual idea, via a reproductive print, from the figures in the right foreground of Bloemaert’s drawing of the Golden Age who turn to look in different directions (fig. 15-16).

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Table des illustrations

Titre Fig. 1. Theodor de Bry, Hunting of Deer, 1591
Crédits Engraving, 17,5 x 20 cm. Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), RP-P-BI-5293.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27184/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 523k
Titre Fig. 2. Matthäus Merian, Mount Mansell Island, 1627
Légende Engraving, 14,9 x 17,5 cm. John Carter Brown Library (Providence, United States of America), J590 B915v GVG 13.
Crédits Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27184/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 582k
Titre Fig. 3. Detail of Fig. 2.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27184/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 181k
Titre Fig. 4. Sappho Painter (attributed), Column Krater with Scene of Odysseus Escaping from Polyphemus (detail), c. 500-475 BCE
Légende Pottery, 32,2 x 33,7 cm (whole object). Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University (Atlanta, United States of America), 2002.28,1.
Crédits Photograph © Bruce M. White, 2004.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27184/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 261k
Titre Fig. 5. Jan van der Straet (designer, attributed), Odysseus and his Men Escape from the Cave of Polyphemus (detail), c. 1620-1640
Légende Tapestry, 340 x 162,5 cm (whole object). J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles, United States of America), 97.P.7.
Crédits Courtesy of Getty’s Open Content Program.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27184/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 563k
Titre Fig. 6. Jean Goujon, The Discovery of Fire, 1547
Légende Woodcut, 36,5 x 25,5 cm. Metropolitan Museum (New York, United States of America), 22.65.1.
Crédits Rogers Fund, 1922.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27184/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 498k
Titre Fig. 7. Anon. engraver (France), Paraousti Satouriona, Roy de la Floride, 1584
Légende Engraving, 12,7 x 15,5 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris, France), RES-G-732, p. 663.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27184/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 457k
Titre Fig. 8. Wild Man-Annus, façade statue, c. 1300-1500
Légende Marble and Istrian stone, 300 x 780 cm. Palazzo Bembo-Boldù, Campiello Santa Maria Nova (Venice, Italy).
Crédits Photograph © René Seindal.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27184/img-8.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 350k
Titre Fig. 9. Anon. maker (Provence, France), Wild Man, c. 1440-1450
Légende Illumination on vellum, 3 x 4 cm. Book of Hours, The Morgan Library & Museum (New York, United States of America), MS 358, fol. 153 (detail).
Crédits Photograph © The Morgan Library & Museum.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27184/img-9.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 206k
Titre Fig. 10. Anon. maker (Spain), The Folly of Nebuchadnezzar, 1197
Légende Illumination on vellum, 7,5 x 10 cm. Pamplona Bible, Bibliothèque Louis Aragon (Amiens, France), MS 108, fol. 136 (detail).
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27184/img-10.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 497k
Titre Fig. 11. Anon. maker (England), Wild Man, c. 1310-20
Légende Illumination on vellum, 7 x 11 cm. Queen Mary Psalter, British Library (London, United Kingdom), Royal MS 2 B VII, fol. 173 (detail).
Crédits Photograph © British Library.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27184/img-11.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 236k
Titre Fig. 12. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Lycanthrope, c. 1510-1515
Légende Woodcut, 16,2 x 12,6 cm. Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), RP-P-OB-4430.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27184/img-12.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 969k
Titre Fig. 13. Hans Weiditz, A Man Transformed by Evil Passions, 1531
Légende Woodcut, 9,8 x 15,8 cm. Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), RP-P-1874-11-142-1.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27184/img-13.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 414k
Titre Fig. 14. Sebald Beham, The Penance of Saint John Chrysostom, c. 1525-1550
Légende Engraving, 5,3 x 7,7 cm. National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C, United States of America), 1941.2.5.
Crédits Gift of Dr Paul J. Sachs.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27184/img-14.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 519k
Titre Fig. 15. Abraham Bloemaert, The Golden Age, 1603
Légende Drawing (brown ink and wash over black chalk on paper), 44,3 x 69,3 cm. Städel Museum (Frankfurt am Main, Germany), 2878.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27184/img-15.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 415k
Titre Fig. 16. Johann Theodor de Bry, The Golden Age, 1608
Légende Engraving, diameter 16,2 cm. Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), RP-P-1942-118.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27184/img-16.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 545k
Titre Fig. 17. Anon. engraver (German), Elk, 1550
Légende Woodcut, 20 x 30 cm. Universitätsbibliothek Basel (Basel, Switzerland), UBH EU I 79, p. 1424.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27184/img-17.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 476k
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Thomas Balfe, « Timelines: Imagining the Past in Theodor De Bry’s America »Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2025, consulté le 16 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/27184 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15i28

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Thomas Balfe

Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London

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