Return to story

THE FIRST LOOK Jamestown Settlement offers a rare exhibit of John White's early images of New World IF YOU GO EXHIBIT CATALOG

July 26, 2008 12:15 am

FOR THE FREE LANCE-STAR

JAMESTOWN

This is a once-in-a-lifetime moment: The original John White watercolors, owned by the British Museum and last on public view in the mid-1960s, are actually on display upstairs at the Jamestown Settlement Museum, the final venue in a year's tour in this country.

Of all the exhibits of the John White paintings, 75 pieces done in black lead, ink and watercolor in 1585, this is the simplest and purest yet, with the focus squarely and solely on White. To preserve the paintings, the lighting is controlled and limited, but the works are simply grouped to make it easy to view and comprehend White's achievement.

WHO'S JOHN WHITE?

Today the name John White is not widely recognized among museum goers, yet this English gentleman-adventurer made five voyages to the New World between 1584 and 1590, sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh. The watercolor drawings in this show--painted 22 years before the Jamestown Colony--gave specific vision to the English and European imagination about the New World for the next 200 years.

Together with explanations written by Thomas Harriot, an accomplished mathematician who accompanied White, these watercolors recorded plants, animals, fish, birds and people present in what was claimed as "Virginia," after the Virgin Queen Elizabeth, but was really Roanoke Island in the Outer Banks, what we know today as North Carolina.

The works in this exhibit all come from a single album acquired by the British Museum in 1866, and it's here. The album was in Sotheby's warehouse in 1865, where it was damaged by water in a fire. As a result, the original binding is gone, so we aren't certain for whom this album was done in the first place, probably Sir Walter Raleigh, under whose six-year patent from Queen Elizabeth (1584-1590) these voyages were made.

Raleigh's coat of arms is also on one of the maps made by White and Harriot. The wonderful thing is that this single John White album gives us such an early and complete view of the New World, its people, its flora and fauna, as early as 1585.

There were other such albums, either copies by White or by an assistant, and in fact, the "Hans Sloane album," which was in the possession of White's descendants, as well as some of its art, are included in this show.

WHAT MADE THEM DO IT?

The first agenda in Raleigh's expeditions to "Virginia" was to claim and colonize territory in the New World in the name of the queen, as Protestant realm. The two seafaring Catholic powers, Spain and Portugal, were both ahead of England in exploring and settling. Apart from the continuing search for a trade route to the East, "Virginia" offered Raleigh's Protestant England a big prize.

The second theme is the marketing or promotional challenge, to make "Virginia" seem an appealing and bountiful place in which to settle or invest.

However, you can't settle, colonize, civilize or convert successfully without attracting adequate numbers of capable people with the right dispositions. The initial settlers in the second expedition, in 1585, mostly military personnel, at first got along well enough with the Algonquins living in "Virginia," trading beads for food, which they seemingly did not want to procure for themselves.

There came a predictable time, however, as should have been obvious, when every Algonquin man, woman, and child would likely have all the beads they could wish for, and tired of supplying the settlers with food.

Sir Francis Drake, who had been exploring to the south, stopped by in 1586, and offered the military personnel a lift home, which they gladly took. By the time of the 1587 expedition, the intention was to settle a bit to the north, in Chesapeake, but the colonists were again put down at Roanoke, which would be the beginning of the end for the settlement.

White, governor of that 1587 settlement, left for England with the intent of returning with ships, people and provisions to support the troubled colony. The all-out attack by the warring Spanish Armada in 1588, however, prevented him from obtaining any ships at all from the Crown, and it was 1590 before he got back to "Virginia."

He returned to the "lost Colony of Roanoke," finding few signs of the settlers, including his own family. No one knows where they went.

The next English attempt to colonize and settle the New World didn't come until the founding of the Jamestown Colony in 1607. Jamestown, in the "real" Virginia, would not have succeeded as it did without the lessons of John White's pictures, Harriot's written accounts, and their maps.

White's Algonquins defined the ideas England and Europe had of American Indians for two centuries. His plants, animals, fruits, birds and fish formed the basis not just for naturalists' catalogs, but also for the classification of species, influencing even Linnaeus.

We still aren't entirely sure who John White really was, where he was born (his family was Cornish), or where he died (he was last heard from in a letter from Ireland in 1593, in which he makes reference to his five voyages to America).

The most concrete biographical detail we have is that his daughter, Elinor White, married his assistant, Ananias Dare (June 24, 1583), and their daughter, Virginia Dare (born in 1587), was the first English child born in America.

ENGLISH POINT OF VIEW

White's faithful first views of New World plants, fruit, animals, birds and fish were intended to convey not only bounty, but show how to recognize useful and edible plants and animals. White's intent was to be scientific as best he could, but practical, too.

The watercolors would have been seen by a very limited group of people initially, even with multiple versions of the album. In 1590, however, Theodor de Bry, a German engraver with a workshop in London, published albums with Thomas Harriot's written accounts of the New World, and engraved versions of John White's pictures.

A committed Protestant, de Bry undertook distribution of engraved and printed versions in English, French, German and Latin, and these were widely seen fairly quickly. The exhibition references but doesn't show de Bry's engraved versions of Harriot and White pictures and commentary.

THE PAINTINGS

Nearer the beginning of the album, but at the end of this show, are pictures, many quite elaborate, of costumery of the global players on the known world's stage.

This was a time when fascination with anything "other" and far-flung, as well as with exploration, was great, and growing. One picture is of a wild and uncivilized ancestor of the modern English person, a Pictish warrior holding a severed head. White meant to convey that as the English had overcome and advanced beyond their savage and uncivilized past, so the New World could become civlized--with English colonization.

White and Harriot were charged with mapmaking in the New World, and made significant contributions to the cartography of the day.

The rather fabulous map of the New World shows the broad approach to the area they visited, while the map of America's eastern coastline, Outer Banks and Chesapeake, shows the same territory in more detail. The usual route across the Atlantic was from Britain to the Canaries, Cape Verde, then a southern crossing to Dominica and Puerto Rico, the eastern side of the West Indies, to Florida, and up the coast of America.

The map of the New World has offset images due to water and being folded within the album. This is most easily seen in the fainter offset compass face on the left of the map corresponding to the real, original one on the right.

White landed in what is now North Carolina, the Outer Banks. Farther north is the "real" Virginia, and Chesapeake Bay. On the map White indicates pictorially that the oceangoing vessels stayed outside, while tenders were used inside the Outer Banks.

Two Algonquin settlements are marked, Secotan and Pomeiooc. Sir Walter Raleigh's coat of arms is on the map, and above that original one, is the slightly paler offset one, upside-down.

Speaking of offset images, the third album in the show is of wet offset prints left on the interleaves placed between the "real" pages. These are all very finely detailed, paler and reversed, and create a fascinating second album from the unfortunate dousing and theft of pigment from the original one.

Images Made impression

The pineapple was prevalent in the Caribbean, or West Indies, where it was placed at front doors as a sign of hospitality. Owing to White's drawings, English architecture incorporated the theme, reflected in the decorative stone pineapples and smaller decorative banister heads seen historically and today in front of English homes and estates.

The pictures of the "pyne fruite" as well as the "platano, or planten," the banana, show darkened, muddled areas, due to water damage. White shows a cross-section of the banana, to point out "food inside."

The flying fish (bolador) shows White trying very hard to capture and convey detail and colors fully, as well as anatomy. The flying fish's wings were probably rendered in silver pigment that has literally tarnished, oxidized, or lead white, which has chemically degraded. Now we can only imagine the way White managed to convey the shimmering silvery appearance the wings would have had. The dorsal fin is fairly detailed, the wings are now more impressionistic-looking. The iridescent blue body color has also dissipated in offset. The same tarnishing of shimmering silvery bellies is clear in the groupers, too (Garopa and Mero).

Part of White's intended mission was scientific, but partly, too, he was pointing out edible species he saw, making them recognizable, fresh caught.

With his iguana, White furnishes a needed sense of scale, otherwise difficult for those at home to guess at or imagine. His legend says "some of these are 3 feet in length," and that they live on land. The iguana shown is found in the West Indies, where the 1585 expedition landed. This animal was seen as a source of food, both the meat and the eggs.

Some of his paintings from the 1585 voyage, however, are more narrative in nature, to convey what was "going on" in "Virginia" and who was there.

His picture of the Indian village of Secotan shows open organization and habitation. We see the same ring of dancers with their tobacco pouches and rattles in greater detail in another picture (with offset). Maize is growing here, and White shows huts for those who keep birds away from the corn.

A ritual temple honoring dead chiefs at Secotan again suggests that as socially advanced as the Algonquins are, religious conversion in the New World would be an admirable mission to contemplate.

White shows the closed organization of Pomeiooc village, a bit to the north, with concentrically arranged longhouses, open to the center. White's pictures reflect the Indians' very fully developed civic, community, social, and family lives--clearly hierarchical. This would have been reassuring to viewers in England.

The mother-and-daughter picture suggests that the English and Algonquins got along well enough to start. This is the wife of a Pomeiooc chief with her daughter. The beads the woman has her arm through are native ones. The daughter, however, is showing her mother a doll that has come from the English, an expensive, elaborately dressed one. The daughter is also wearing a type of highly prized beads from the English. The suggestion is of ample opportunities for trade and commerce.

The picture of an ordinary young couple sitting to eat hominy would have intrigued an English or European audience, because Europeans simply didn't sit this way. De Bry's later engraving of this scene added copious detail to White's simple, straightforward picture.

Two views of Indian cooking methods would have shown that Algonquin cooking isn't much different from that of 16th-century British villagers, with rack grilling and perpetual pot stewing--entirely familiar, in fact.

The panoramic fishing picture shows recognizable fish, where they're found in the salt marsh, and the method used--weirs, nets and spears. Ironically, a reasonable hypothesis is that excessive reliance by the English on the Indians for food may have pushed the relationship to deteriorate into conflict, probably unnecessary had the English done an adequate job of fending for themselves in the first place.

REMARKABLE ACHIEVEMENT

Seen from the Jamestown Museum's point of view and documenting the world of 1607, there is no source or resource comparable to White for understanding this period and region.

From the English and European points of view, there was no comparable influence--White's was the main vision of the New World for two centuries.

Beyond being wonderful art, John White's Roanoke paintings are an unparalleled and astonishing visual record of the discovery of the New World.

Bill Sharfman is a writer, consulting strategist, automotive journalist and radio personality. His doctorate is from Columbia University, and he lives in New York City. E-mail him in care of
Email: gwoolf@freelancestar.com