Indorum Religio. XXIIII.

Title

Indorum Religio. XXIIII.

Description

View shows a religious ceremony of the locals on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola.

ca. 1594

Artist

Bry, De- White (1540-1593)

John White ( 1540- 1593) was an English colonial governor, explorer, painter, and cartographer. White was among those who sailed with Richard Grenville to colonize Roanoke Island in 1585. He also acted as the expedition's painter and mapmaker. He produced many paintings and sketches of the lands, native peoples, flora, and fauna of the region, and 23 of his paintings were later used to illustrate Thomas Harriot's A Letters and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. White was briefly governor of the English settlement on Roanoke Island. The colony was abandoned in June 1586 under future Governor Ralph Lane, and White returned to England.----Theodorus de Bry (1528-1598) Frankfurt a.M. Around 1570, Theodorus de Bry, a Protestant, fled religious persecution south to Strasbourg, along the west bank of the Rhine. In 1577, he moved to Antwerp in the Duchy of Brabant, which was part of the Spanish Netherlands or Southern Netherlands and Low Countries of that time (16th Century), where he further developed and used his skills as a copper engraver. Between 1585 and 1588 he lived in London, where he met the geographer Richard Hakluyt and began to collect stories and illustrations of various European explorations, most notably from Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues. Depiction of Spanish atrocities in the New World, as recounted by Bartolome de las Casas in Narratio Regionum indicarum per Hispanos Quosdam devastatarum verissima. In 1588, Theodorus and his family moved permanently to Frankfurt-am-Main, where he became citizen and began to plan his first publications. The most famous one is known as Les Grands Voyages, i.e., The Great Travels, or The Discovery of America. He also published the largely identical India Orientalis-series, as well as many other illustrated works on a wide range of subjects. His books were published in Latin, and were also translated into German, English and French to reach a wider reading public.

Historical Description

Until 1492, the Indian peoples of the Arawak, Ciboney and the Caribs lived on Hispaniola. In 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered Hispaniola. Searching for gold deposits, Columbus discovered the ports of Valparaiso (today Port-de-Paix), Punta Santa and, before returning to Europe, built a small fort near the latter with the help of the Arawak from the rubble of the stranded ship Santa Maria. La Navidad, in which he left a crew of 40 men. La Navidad was the first Spanish colony in America. When Columbus started his journey home in 1496, his brother Bartolomeo founded a new city in the south, at the mouth of the Ozama River, Santo Domingo, which became the capital of the island and later gave its name to it (or the eastern part). Since La Isabela was abandoned, Santo Domingo is the oldest surviving European-founded settlement in America. In 1498 Columbus reached the city of Santo Domingo again. He tried to settle disputes between the settlers and his brother and intensified Christianization and the search for gold. In 1517 Pedro d’Atenza brought sugar cane from the Canary Islands to Haiti, and Gonzalez gave the impetus to plantations and sugar mills. [2] To operate it, Ovando brought 40,000 Tainos from the Bahamas, as many of the native Indians had already perished. But even these soon died as a result of the epidemics, whereupon (from 1503 or 1505) people were brought from Africa and imported as slaves. In 1509 Diego Colón, the son of Christopher Columbus, became governor and later viceroy of Hispaniola. In 1512 the inauguration of the University of Santo Domingo, the first university in the New World, took place. From 1625 onwards, French and English pirates (called buccaneers or flibustiers) settled on the nearby island of Île de la Tortue in the north. They were later expelled, but a remnant of them, consisting mainly of French, settled as planters on the deserted north coast of Hispaniola and asked France to support them against the Spaniards. Louis XIV then sent Bertrand d'Ogeron as governor to Hispaniola in 1661 and founded a French colony in the western part of the island in 1665, which was destroyed by the Spanish in 1686. As early as 1691, however, a new French colony was founded by Jean Baptiste du Casse. In the Treaty of Rijswijk in 1697, Spain renounced the western part ("Saint Domingue") of the island in favor of France. The French and the remaining Spanish part of Hispaniola developed very differently. In 1776 the border between the two parts of the country was regulated, which roughly corresponds to today's.