Читать книгу Art in Theory - Группа авторов - Страница 45

Thomas Harriot was an Elizabethan scientist and mathematician who, after studying at Oxford, became a tutor to Sir Walter Raleigh. In this capacity he became involved in Raleigh’s attempts to establish an English colony in North America, following the example of the French and Spanish. This colony – which failed – was named ‘Virginia’ after Queen Elizabeth I. Its location on the island of Roanoke is to the south of present‐day Virginia, on the coast of North Carolina. Harriot’s work included navigation and map‐making, as well as the preparation of a report on the plants, animals and native inhabitants. In this, he worked with the artist John White (fl. late 1540s–after 1593), who produced the first scientifically informed visual representations of the people of North America. Harriot’s text was first published in 1588 but achieved fame when it was republished two years later, along with White’s illustrations, as the first part of Theodor de Bry’s important multilingual series of volumes collectively titled America. Harriot’s job, at bottom, was to encourage further colonists, so he played down the difficulties involved in establishing a settlement, as well as the possibilities of conflict with the indigenous inhabitants. Nonetheless his work remains valuable as a detailed account of a now‐lost people, the Algonquians, describing their religious practices and aspects of their material culture ranging from crops and houses to clothes, dances, tattoos and hairstyles. The three paragraphs which conclude the present extracts accompanied illustrations by John White. The extracts are taken from A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, with a new introduction by Paul Hulton, New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1972, pp. 24–7, and 46, 47 and 71. (This edition also contains White’s illustrations.)