A little Old World spin

Visitors who pass quickly by may detect nothing unusual about the 500-year-old woodcut of Brazil’s Tupinamba Indians, shown in decorative feathered garb. But those who stop and examine it will certainly notice the severed arm in the background -- and someone about to gnaw on it. In this early depiction of the New World, made following a Portuguese explorer’s trip, the natives are cannibals.

“People in Europe thought the unknown world was full of monsters and very frightening savages,” said curator Elisabeth Fairman, leading a group past the 1505 woodcut on the wall of the Yale Center for British Art.

The frightening scene is just a setup for very different scenes to come -- in the historic watercolors that gave Britain and much of the world its first images of what became known as America, images used to this day to teach school children what Native Americans looked like and how they lived before Europeans put their stamp on this land.

“These are the 18 drawings . . . the iconic images everyone knows,” Fairman said as the group stood before colorful renditions of friendly Indians in a land of plenty. Fish virtually jump from the water into their canoe. Corn grows in neat rows. Families wave. People sit around a fire. A dog romps.

Perhaps the earlier woodcut from Brazil was another era’s version of the horror film, but the suggestion is that these images -- part of “A New World: England’s First View of America” -- are something else. “Propaganda,” said Fairman, the Yale museum’s curator of rare books and manuscripts. Or perhaps they can be seen, more charitably, as a limited snapshot of a small group of people at a short-lived moment -- right before the clash of cultures began to take its toll.

The watercolors were the work of John White, a British gentleman who was on several voyages sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh to the coast of what was then called “Virginia” -- after England’s Virgin Queen, Elizabeth -- but is now North Carolina.

White’s watercolors provided visions of Native Americans that would be viewed as near gospel for two centuries, but they were based on a mere two-week encounter with one tribe, the Algonquians, during a 1585 voyage to establish an English military presence in the New World. Two years later, White returned to lead a delegation of 115 civilians, hoping to establish a permanent settlement at the “Cittie of Raleigh,” that group including his daughter Eleanor Dare, who gave birth to the first English child born in North America, the aptly named Virginia Dare. White then left them behind to go back to England for more supplies and by the time he returned, in 1590, there was no trace of them -- not his daughter, granddaughter or any member of what became known as the “Lost Colony of Roanoke.”

So the settlers vanished, but White’s watercolors endured, thanks to their use in illustrating popular books on the New World whose text (“A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia”) was written by mathematician Thomas Harriot, who also was on the 1585 expedition. Of course, that was long before there was technology to easily duplicate a painting. Mass reproduction in this case was achieved through engravings made by a Belgian goldsmith, Theodore de Bry, whose images of the same Indians also are part of the exhibit.

And there’s the catch -- the engravings made by De Bry took liberties with White’s original watercolors, pushing them in a clear direction. While the Native Americans were shown as benign to start, De Bry made them even more palatable to audiences back home and clear candidates for conversion to Christianity.

One stunning example is White’s “Indian Man and Woman Eating” (“Their Sitting at Meate”), showing the pair squatting around a platter of what appears to be boiled corn. But they are squatting in a way that may have seemed uncomfortable to the British audience, so the engraved version has their legs stretched out; and their facial features appear European.

Another White watercolor shows an “Indian Woman and Young Girl,” with the mother looking off into the distance and the girl holding a doll that’s obviously a gift from the visitors from across the ocean. In the engraving that became the circulated image, “A Cheiff Ladye of Pomeiooc,” the mother’s gaze is redirected at the girl, who now is playing not only with the doll but a Western rattle. The message to the folks back home: These people may dress differently than we do, but they are not all that different.

“What he’s paying attention to,” Fairman said of White, “is how they eat, what they eat, how they catch their food, how they treat their children, how they interact with each other . . . and how you tell who’s in charge, who the priests are . . . all the kind of information people in the Elizabethan court, and the people on the next voyages, need to know.”

The artists were eager for those next voyages to happen -- they wanted to encourage settlement and investment during what Fairman calls “that little period of innocence before the winter,” when the first military delegation clashed with the Indians. The British expected the natives to help feed them during a period of terrible drought, and an Algonquian chief wound up being killed in the dispute. Next came the 115 ill-fated settlers of the “Lost Colony.”

It was not until 1607 that another group of English men and women were able to establish a real foothold -- in Jamestown -- while still facing a tough life. Yet even the early histories of that famous settlement were illustrated with the old images of the natives White had encountered earlier, as reinterpreted by De Bry’s engravings.

A rare sighting

The White paintings are owned by the British Museum in London, where they are “among our greatest treasures,” according to Kim Sloan, who has a formidable title at that institution -- she’s the Francis Finlay curator of the Enlightenment Gallery and curator of British drawings and watercolours before 1880. Her dilemma is that the pioneering images of America, which barely survived a mid-1800s fire while in storage, are “constantly in demand” but also fragile, vulnerable to exposure to light, which would fade them. So they’re rarely on display.

In fact, they had not been shown together since 1964, said Sloan, who organized the “A New World” exhibit first at the British Museum last year, then sent it on its current “once in a lifetime” tour of the United States, with three stops: the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh, N.C.; the Yale museum, where the paintings are on display through June 1; and, finally, at the Jamestown Settlement, a museum where people can view the watercolors through the summer from July 15 to Oct. 15.

“They depict the people of North America at the point of first contact,” Sloan said as the exhibit was about to open here, “before we came around and changed them.”

“And they stand in as images of Native Americans for the next 200 years because there isn’t any other artist like John White who goes to the coast of North America and makes drawings like this until at least the 18th century,” said Fairman. “Now don’t ask me why they didn’t send any more artists. I don’t know.”

In this academic setting, they’re careful to detail the limits of these representations, mindful of the absurdity of a few Algonquians standing for all Native Americans for much of the world. “We’re not doing Jamestown. We’re not doing Plymouth,” noted Fairman. “We have very strong Indian tribes in Connecticut, and we want to make sure we’re not implying that this is their history.”

Yet there’s evidence that the subtleties important to the scholars are lost on a mainstream audience, even one of Native Americans. A short film shown here documents a 2006 trip by six chiefs from Virginia to London to view the watercolors in the Print Room of the British Museum. “It makes us immensely proud,” said one, not bothered by the exhibition’s suggestion that these were, at least in part, sales tools.

“Many things have not changed,” said another of the modern-day chiefs. “We still sit around the council fire . . . and we still dance the old-time dances.”

Fairman also admits to going to one of Connecticut’s cavernous Indian casinos and being surprised by a mural on the wall -- showing the De Bry version of the White watercolors of the far-off Algonquians.

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paul.lieberman@latimes.com