Images of a New World: the Watercolors of John White

This is a cross-posting from a piece I recently wrote for the Public Domain Review. For this version of the post, I've supplemented the original with quite a few more images which are sourced from the British Museum and are reproduced here under its fair use agreement. As a side note, I've been remiss in updating Res Obscura lately because I've been in the thick of my dissertation research, and have also been traveling. But I'm working on a couple new posts at the moment so I expect to start updating more regularly again.  - BB

“As lucklesse to many, as sinister to myselfe.” Such was the Elizabethan colonist John White’s gloomy assessment of his tenure as the first governor of Britain’s fledgling colony on Roanoke Island, Virginia. As White lived out his final days on an Irish plantation in 1593, he struggled to come to terms with his ambivalent legacy in the “Newe found Worlde.”

Anonymous portrait of Sir Richard  Grenville
 from the National Portrait Gallery.

Just eight years earlier, White had set out for North America as part of an expedition lead by a fiery-tempered courtier named Sir Richard Grenville. This voyage was not without its challenges – White recalled laconically that in a battle with Spanish mariners he was “wounded twise in the head, once with a sword, and another time with a pike, and hurt also in the side of the buttoke with a shot.” Yet in this time White also witnessed natural marvels, helped build a new colony, and even celebrated the birth of his now-famous granddaughter, Virginia Dare, the first child of English/Christian parentage to be born on American soil. Ultimately, however, White’s ambitions ended in catastrophe, with the mysterious disappearance of the ninety men, seventeen women, and eleven children who comprised the Roanoke colony – a group that included his daughter and granddaughter.

In the centuries since White’s death, his story has diverged in an interesting way. Generations of schoolchildren raised in the United States can probably recall reading about the “Lost Colony” at Roanoke in textbooks. In these simplified accounts, White and his fellow colonists typically figure as doomed but visionary pioneers in a larger narrative of British-American exceptionalism. Among professional historians, White is equally famous, but for rather different reasons. In recent histories of colonial British America, it is John White the artist, rather than John White the colonial governor, who takes center stage. This is because White was a watercolor painter of extraordinary talent whose works number among the most remarkable depictions of early modern indigenous Americans ever created.

'The Flyer', a Secotan Indian holy man or "conjuror" (as the British often called them) painted by John White in 1585. British Museum, London.

To be sure, many other European contemporaries of White offered up visual depictions of native Americans. Readers of André Thevet’s early account of Brazil, Les singularitez de la France antarctique (Paris, 1557), for instance, could expect to be treated to renderings of Tupí Indians harvesting fruit, singing songs (complete with musical notation recorded by Thevet) and even munching casually on barbequed human thighs and buttocks.

Yet White’s illustrations stood out among those of his peers. Rather than working via woodblock printing or engraving, White produced paintings in vivid watercolors. This allowed him to achieve a level of lifelike detail which printed illustrations couldn’t hope to match. One of the most striking examples of White’s eye for detail is found in his tender depiction of an Algonquian Indian mother with her daughter.

John White, "A cheife Herowans wyfe of Pomeoc and her daughter of the age of 8 or 10 years." (1585) British Museum, London.

In 1585, one of White’s companions in Virginia, the natural philosopher and inventor Thomas Harriot, remarked that the indigenous children he encountered in America “greatlye delighted with puppets and babes which are broughte oute of England.” White’s painting actually offers a direct visual proof of this observation: in the hands of the woman’s child, one can spot a tiny female doll wearing Elizabethan dress.

As the historian Joyce Chaplin notes in her book Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Harvard University Press, 2003), this image was later recreated by the Dutch printmaker Theodore de Bry, who used White’s watercolors to create engravings for Thomas Hariot’s A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (1590). De Bry’s depiction shows the Indian girl holding not only “an English doll in Elizabethan clothing,” but “an armillary sphere,” which served as “an instructional and decorative representation of the globe and heavens” (Chaplin 36).

Engraving by Theodore de Bry after John White's watercolour, from Thomas Hariot’s
A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (1590)

Remarkably, according to the British Museum, this engraving served as the inspiration for a Mughal Indian watercolor painting in the 1630s! This copy-of-a-copy wonderfully illustrates the globalization that was beginning to occur in this period. I took the liberty of arranging the three variations end to end so the resemblance could be seen (the Mughal painting is at the far right).

White also had a remarkable ability for “zooming out” from a scene to create an imagined isometric perspective. His painting of an Algonquian village stands out as one of the most detailed depictions of indigenous American village life to survive from the sixteenth century.

Village of the Secotan Indians in North Carolina, by John White in 1585. British Museum, London.

As the detail of the dancing circle in the lower right of this image suggests, White seems to have had a particular interest in Algonquian religious ceremonies. Another painting by White along similar lines gives a precious glimpse of pre-contact American Indian religious practice and daily life:

Ceremony of Secotan warriors in North Carolina. Watercolour painted by John White in 1585. British Museum, London.

What, then, was White’s final legacy? In a narrative first printed in Richard Hakluyt’s Voyages, White described his return to Virginia in 1590 in search of the colonists he had left at Roanoke (he had returned to England three years earlier in efforts to obtain “supplies, and other necessities”). His account evokes the haunted landscape of a ghost story, and its eerie details have made it part of American folklore ever since. On the 17th of August, White recalled, three ships under his command reached Roanoke, where they “found no man, nor signe of any that had been there lately.” The next evening, one of White’s sailors spied “a fire through the woods” and the men “sounded a Trumpet, but no answer could we heare.” The light of the next daybreak revealed that this was “nothing but the grasse, and some rotten trees burning.”

Finally, however, White found evidence of the colonists’ wherabouts. In a tree, he discovered “three faire Roman Letters carved C. R. O.”: this was a pre-arranged maker which White understood “to signifie the place where I should find them”: Croatan. White’s suspicion was confirmed with the discovery of a scene that is now almost mythical:

We found no signe of distresse; then we went to a place where they were left in sundry houses, but we found them all taken downe, and the place strongly inclosed with a high Palizado [i.e. a palisade of wooden stakes], very Fortlike; and in one of the chiefe Posts carved in fayre capitall Letters C R O A T A N, without any signe of distresse, and many barres of Iron… and such like heavie things throwne here and there, overgrowne with grass and weeds…

Interestingly, White’s account here connects his two identities as governor and painter. He remarks that his men “found diverse Chests which had been hidden and digged up againe” surrounding the palisade. Among these chests, White was surprised to find objects which he knew “to be my owne”: “books” and “pictures” he had created in the years before, now “scattered up and downe…[and] spoyled.”In the end, White was unable to follow up on these strange clues: storms forced the expedition’s ships to turn back before reaching Croatan, and he returned to Britain with the mystery unresolved. The ultimate fate of the Roanoke colonists continues to be debated. Some have conjectured that White’s fellow colonists may have opted to join a local Algonquian Indian tribe and adapt themselves to the very different (and rather more effective) Amerindian methods of contending with the harsh American landscape.

It is unlikely that we’ll ever know what happened – but if White’s daughter and granddaughter really did become incorporated into an Indian tribe, it would have made a strange sort of sense. Few sixteenth century Europeans looked upon indigenous Americans with anything other than a jaundiced and prejudiced eye. Yet White’s sensitive and humane portrayals of daily life among the Algonquians tell a different story, and suggest that his own stance toward the native peoples he encountered in the New World was rather more complex. In White’s sensitive depiction of the Algonquian woman and her child holding a European doll, perhaps we can discern a foreshadowing of the hybrid Euro-American fate of his own daughter and grandchild. The intertwined tales of the failed colony White governed, the family he raised, and the artworks he created offer one of the earliest examples of the mingling of cultures that would define the history of the Americas in the centuries to come.

I'd like to close by sharing some further illustrations, which have been traditionally associated with White. According to the British Museum, the traditional attribution of these works as copies after lost originals by John White is debatable. However, even if White was not directly involved in their production, they seemingly still were produced in the Roanoke colony, perhaps by an assistant of Thomas Harriot:

In his will, Harriot mentioned his long-time servant Christopher Kellett, a ‘Lymning paynter’, and it is just feasible that these are his work, though his name is not recorded in the list of Lane colonists for 1585–6. It would be natural for a set of these to end up in White’s volume if they did eventually intend to publish them.  

Interestingly, the famed editor Richard Hakluyt ultimately came into possession of the paintings and provided them to none other than Edward Topsell, a writer on animals whose Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes was the subject of the very first Res Obscura post. All of the following images are owned by the British Museum. See here for a further discussion of their provenance and here for the complete collection of 117 paintings.

Further reading: 

• Michael Gaudio, Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (University of Minnesota Press, 2008)
• Joyce Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Harvard University Press, 2003)
• Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country (Harvard University Press, 2001)
• Kim Sloan et al, A New World: England’s first view of America (University of North Carolina Press, 2007)

"They are very expert in Diabolical Conjurations": Magic and Medicine in Panama, 1681

A detail from an engraving by Theodor de Bry showing indigenous Brazilians tormented by devils. 

"I sat awhile, cringing upon my Hams among the Indians, after their Fashion, painted as they were, and all naked but only about the Waist, and with my Nose-piece… hanging over my mouth. … 'Twas the better part of an Hour before one of the Crew, looking more narrowly upon me, cried out, Here's our Doctor; and immediately they all congratulated my Arrival among them. I did what I could presently to wash off my Paint, but 'twas near a Month before I could get tolerably rid of it." — Lionel Wafer, 1681

The pirate-surgeon Lionel Wafer (1640-1705) has won some modest attention from historians and fans of pirate lore due to his participation in the South Seas voyages of more famous buccaneers like William Dampier and Bartholomew Sharp.

Surprisingly, however, by far the most interesting era of Wafer's life — which hinges on a period of four months during which Wafer lived with the Kuna people of Panama, adopting their mode of dress, customs, and language — has gone without much notice. Wafer's account of this period is utterly fascinating, abounding with intriguing details about Kuna spirituality, surgical techniques, and even what Wafer, rather uncharitably, called the "Diabolical Conjurations" of the Kuna elders who nursed him back to health following a freak accident in the jungle. 

Title page of Wafer's Voyage.    

When Lionel Wafer published his New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America in 1699 (which you can read in full thanks to the Internet Archive), he was working as a surgeon in London. But if we go back to the fall of 1681, we find Wafer living not as an Englishman, but as a member of a Kuna village in what is now Panama. Grievously wounded by a gunpowder explosion that damaged his knee, Wafer had been abandoned by his fellow buccaneers on a trek across Mesoamerica.

After a few delirious days wandering in the jungle, Wafer was lucky enough to make his way to a village led by a Kuna leader named Lacenta, where he was given shelter and his injuries were slowly healed. By Wafer's account, at least, he then proceeded to learn the Kuna language, befriend Lacenta, and gain much knowledge of local plants and medicines. Wafer even claimed that he used his surgical skills (specifically, his practice of phlebotomy, or blood-letting) to “save the life” of one of Lacenta’s wives.

And he had witnessed the work of shamans who had predicted the circumstances of his own eventual return to the Christian world with uncanny accuracy. They had done so, Wafer claimed, by summoning the devil.

Lacenta with his family and attendants. From Wafer, New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America, 140.

The Kuna method of blood-letting, performed on one of Lacenta's wives (Wafer, 28).

“The Indians in their Robes in Councel, and Smoaking tobacco after their way" (102).

Wafer’s vision of the indigenous cultures of the New World as haunted by Satanic magic was not new. Spanish and Portuguese chronicles of American conquest described indigenous Americans who wielded the power of the devil both to curse and to cure. But Wafer’s account further provoked unsettling questions about the potentially supernatural (and Satanic) origin of knowledge about the Americas in a specific time and place – Britain during the Scientific Revolution – when such knowledge had never been more valuable.

As David Livingstone, Simon Schaffer and Harold Cook have shown, traveler’s accounts provided the first-hand reporting of phenomena that fueled the development of the natural sciences. The big question among early modern European scientists was not about whether travel accounts were scientifically valuable. It was which ones to trust. Who was an acceptable source for scientific data? Could indigenous knowledge be trusted if, as many Christians believed in the seventeenth century, it had been shaped by witchcraft, magic, or Satan himself?

Tupi Indians in Brazil fighting with demonic beings (detail). Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars (Frankfurt, 1592), 223.

By the close of the seventeenth century, ‘buccaneer ethnographers’ such as Lionel Wafer’s travel partner William Dampier had demonstrated that even pirates could collect empirical data that was acceptable to scientists like the members of the Royal Society of London. Yet the personal histories of such individuals, who frequently resided among non-Christian indigenous peoples for extended periods, put them in the complex position of serving as mediators between what historians call "scientific travel" and indigenous spirituality. 

Wafer was among the most dramatic examples of this unfolding story. As Britain’s preeminent firsthand witness of the Panama region, he was a key figure in early attempts to understand the American tropics — and in efforts to exploit tropical resources via new colonies. Indeed, in July of 1687 Wafer had been interviewed regarding the Darién’s colonization potential by none other than John Locke. Wafer’s account had also been printed and bound together with an account of Darien written by an unspecified “member of the Royal Society,” suggesting close links between Wafer and that institution.

What can these negotiations tell us about the transformations of science and of the British Empire at the dawn of the eighteenth century?

Wafer served as a courier of knowledge about a tropical world that was still largely unknown to European science. But Wafer’s time in this space had bestowed on him a form of indigeneity that also rendered his testimony suspect among European Christians. Wafer’s adoption of Kuna dress and ceremonial body paint, in particular, raised concerns among Europeans that were tied to larger debates about demonology.

Take John Bulwer’s 1656 frontispiece to Anthropometamorphosis, or the Artificial Changeling, for instance.

This utterly fascinating and bizarre image shows a European woman, a hair-covered man and a South American Indian with full body paint standing side by side. They are being judged by Nature, Adam and Eve and a body of disapproving magistrates (including the ghost of Galen) for transforming their bodies, while the devil flies above them laughing and saying, “In the image of God created he them! But I have new-molded them to my likeness.”

Europeans and indigenous Americans being judged by Nature for modifying their bodies. 

Wafer had written that his Kuna body paint eventually rubbed off, often with the “peeling away of flesh and all,” to reveal a European underneath.

But did his time in the world of the Kuna leave traces of the indigenous that took longer to disappear?

In the preface to the second edition to the New Voyage and Description, printed in 1704, Wafer attempted to reaffirm his status as a credible Christian observer, writing that he wished to “vindicat[e] my self to the World” regarding his previous account of “the Indian way of Conjuring,” which, he explained vaguely, had “very much startled… several of the most eminent Men of the Nation.” In this preface Wafer continued to maintain that the Kuna shamans practiced Satanism, and he buttressed his authority by citing parallel accounts produced by Scottish settlers in the Darién.

He pointedly refrained, however, from defending his earlier claims about the accurate predictions this method had supposedly produced.

In the end, Wafer decisively abandoned the Kuna version of his identity. His face paint was wiped off, his nose piercing removed, his tropical clothing replaced with the scratchy wool and close-bound cotton of a seventeenth-century Englishman. But his story reminds us that place can powerfully reshape identity, not just in the globalized present, but even during the height of European colonialism, when religious bigotry and prejudice ran rampant.

For a brief period, a British pirate surgeon became a Kuna healer. And then, just as suddenly, that identity was stripped off and discarded, no more permanent than the paint and piercings which had once sustained it.


Further reading

You can read Wafer's New Voyage and Description free of charge on Google books here. Ignacio Gallup-Diaz's The Door to the Sea and the Key to the Universe: Indian Politics and Imperial Rivalry in the Darién, 1640-1750 is the best account of the region's colonial history that I have found - it comes highly recommended, and is available free as a Gutenberg e-book via Columbia University Press.

The University of Ohio library has a great blog post on its copy of Bulwer's Anthropometamorphosis with accompanying scans here. Finally, for those interested in the larger questions surrounding exploration, indigenous-European interaction and science, I highly recommend William Hasty's essay "Piracy and the Production of Knowledge in the Travels of William Dampier."

Originally written: April, 2011. Last updated: January, 2020.