Detailed Information on Publication Record

Jacques le Moyne de Morgues came to Florida in 1564 as the draughtsman of a French Huguenot expedition. His task was to elaborate a cartographic plan of the East coast up to Virginia. Thanks to his undeniable talent, he happened to depict the state of nature, the various plants and the local indigenous people. He became the first European illustrator whose testimonies about the 16th century Florida have been preserved until the present day. The fact that Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues and a Central-European publisher Theodor de Bry tried to picture faithfully the native indigenous culture in both textual and pictorial part of their travel books on the discovering of Florida gives credit to them. The choice of the book illustrations is not at all restricted to the extreme phenomena in a cultural conflict between the European civilization and the natives. Part of the chalcographies is focused on the representation of their everyday life - their way of hunting, cooking, treatment of the diseases, or soil cultivation. For a 16th-century reader, one of the most important questions was the question of the essence of newly discovered lands, and whether their inhabitants were human beings or monsters. The second most important question was the faith the savages believed in, their religious rituals, and their ability to adopt the faith in God; and thirdly, their way of life.