Date: 01-04-2007
Owning Institution: The British Museum
Publication:         Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2011  
Subject:   Renaissance  18th Century  16th Century    

In the late eighteenth century the Earl of Charlemont acquired a mysterious album of watercolours, filled with curious images of the flora, fauna and people of a distant land. Some fifty years later, his descendants put it up for auction at Sotheby’s. There was a fire at the warehouse in which it was stored pending the sale, as a result of which the book’s spine was singed and several of its pages damaged by water from firemen’s hoses. But the volume survived, slightly the worse for wear, and was eventually purchased by the British Museum .

It turned out to be a rare and extraordinary treasure. What it contained was the collected work of one of the very first English watercolourists, John White, who was not only an accomplished artist and student of the natural world, but also happened to be one of the first gentlemen-adventurers. A friend of Sir Walter Raleigh, he made several voyages to the New World . The multitude of images in the battered book acquired by the British Museum include a remarkable group of pictures of the natives of North America whom White saw on his voyages. They are the earliest surviving documents of the encounter between Europeans and native Americans, in this case the Algonquians of North Carolina. But because of their extreme fragility, they are only placed on public display once every thirty or forty years. So “A New World: England ’s First View of America” is no ordinary exhibition. In the words of the British Museum ’s Director, Neil MacGregor, it represents “our generation’s chance to think again about these astonishing documents of an encounter filled with curiosity and wonder.”

Little is known about John White outside of his activities as draftsman and colonist during his trips to the New World . He seems to have been well-educated, a gentleman-“limner” rather than a hack artist. Born some time in the 1540s, he was destined to play a part in the Elizabethan drive to expand into the New World and found an empire. Spain , Portugal and France were growing rich from their overseas territories, and England wanted a piece of the action. As the poet Thomas Churchyard wrote, in praise of Martin Frobisher’s pioneering voyages to Canada in search of the Northwest Passage , “The earth was made for the children of men, and neither the Spaniard, nor the French, hath a prerogative to dwell alone as though God appointed them a greater portion than other nations.”

It is possible that White may have accompanied Frobisher on one of his trips in the 1570s, since two striking watercolours contained in the British Museum ’s album are portraits of Inuits. The first shows Kalicho, a doughty figure in a suit of sealskin, who stands tall but has a furrowed brow and a worried expression on his face. The second shows a woman with a child nestling within the hood of her own costume, their names recorded as Arnaq and Nutaaq. White’s portraits of these human beings from a frozen and hostile world have a restrained dignity that seems to border on melancholia. He has posed them, hand on hip or thigh, much as his contemporary, the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, posed Queen Elizabeth’s courtiers. They could almost be characters in a court masque, but for their solemn and bewildered faces. They had been captured against their will by Frobisher and brought back to England , both as trophies and as evidence of the type of human beings to be encountered in cold and distant climes. Kalicho was persuaded to demonstrate his prowess with a bow and arrow by killing a pair of ducks on the River Avon, in front of an audience that included the Mayor of Bristol. He died shortly afterwards, most probably from injuries caused when he was captured, while Arnaq outlived him by only a few days, succumbing to an unknown disease which caused boils to erupt all over her skin.

It is not known whether White’s pictures of Inuits, the earliest recorded images of the peoples of the Arctic , were painted in Bristol or actually on board Frobisher’s ship. But while he may or may not have travelled to the frozen wastes of Canada and Baffin Island , he certainly did set sail for the Americas on five separate occasions in the 1580s. In March of 1584, Sir Walter Raleigh had received letters patent from Queen Elizabeth, entitling him “to discover search find out and view such remote heathen and barbarous lands countries and territories not actually possessed of any Christian Prince and inhabited by Christian people.” In particular, the purpose of such voyages was to be “the inhabiting and planting of our people in America .” White was selected as artist by appointment to the expeditions. His tasks were to include mapping potential territory for colonisation, paying particular attention to springs and other sources of fresh water. He was to record “soils, minerals, trees, herbs, beasts, birds, fish and insects and how they differ in kind or colour from those of Europe ”. When it came to the peoples or tribes the expedition encountered he was to note “their manner of taking birds, fowls, fish and beasts, the manner of their planting and manuring of the earth, their stature, apparel and manner of food” as well as, more ominously, “what manner they arm and order themselves in war”.

Many of the most beautiful of White’s watercolours document the flora and fauna that he encountered, first en route to America , in the West Indies , then in North Carolina itself. His depictions of unfamiliar animals and fruit – a shimmering blue and silver flying-fish, a great pink land crab, plantains, a pineapple – have a trembling brilliance about them that speaks of wide-eyed wonderment. Among the many words used to describe the New World were Utopia and Arcadia, and looking at these images it is possible to sense White’s genuine belief that he had indeed found himself in a world of such natural plenty, such unfamiliar beauty, that it was indeed a kind of paradise on earth. Often, he was so struck by the bright colours of a particular fish that he actually painted over its scales in silver pigment that has now tarnished to a faint grey – a tangible relic of the artist’s excited determination to do justice to the wonders before his eyes.

Most extraordinary of all, however, are his images of the North Carolina Algonquians whom he and his fellow voyagers encountered. They are pictures that seem, at first sight, to show a people living a carefree life in an American Eden. In one watercolour, a group of Algonquians steer their canoes through waters teeming with fish that seem almost to jump out of the water on to their spears. In another, White shows their village, a well ordered enclosure of tents bordered by fields that he has helpfully labelled “their ripe corne”, “their greene corne” and “corne newly sprung”. He shows them sitting around fires and carrying food and also pays attention to their rituals. He depicts a priest, a medicine man – “the flyer”, so called because of the stuffed bird that he wore as an ornament in his hair – and an Alqonquin charnel house, where the bodies of dead chiefs were dried and preserved.

White’s pictures of the Algonquin were intended partly to be used as a kind of advertisement, to encourage subsequent waves of English settlers to make the journey to America . So they by no means tell the whole truth. They are the visual equivalent of the description given by Richard Hakluyt in his The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation: “The island had many goodly woods, full of deer, conies, hares, and fowl, even in the midst of summer, in incredible abundance … we found the people most gentle, loving and faithful, void of all guile, and treason, and such as lived in the manner of the golden age. The earth bringeth forth all things in abundance, as in the first creation, without toil or labour.”

White’s pictures furnish rare, tantalising glimpses of a society long since extinguished, but they are just as telling for what he chose to leave out of the picture. There is no evidence, for example, of the devastating toll that European diseases rapidly took on the native American population; no indication that far from arriving in a land of uncomplicated plenty, White and his fellow seafarers had come to a part of America suffering its worst drought for many years; and no hint of the simmering tensions that built between would-be settlers and Algonquians as a result both of transmission of disease – believed by the native Americans to be caused by invisible bullets or arrows fired by the Englishmen – and the shortage of food.

In the event, White used his pictures of an American Eden peopled by smilingly compliant natives to recruit more than 100 settlers – including his daughter, his son-in-law and his grandchild Virginia – to “the city of Raleigh”, as it was to be called. The reality that they encountered bore precious little resemblance to the images that had tempted them there. Trouble soon broke out between the settlers and the Algonquians and as governor of the colony White was dispatched back to England to seek reinforcements. His return was delayed by the Spanish Armada and when he did finally manage to return to America, some three years after he had left, he found no trace whatsoever of any of the settlers.

White is last heard of in Ireland in the early 1590s, surveying the estates of Raleigh in the aftermath of the brutally suppressed revolts of Munster and Ulster . His last recorded words are to be found in a remarkably stoical letter written in reply to Hakluyt’s enquiries about the loss of his entire family, and the fate of the “Lost Colony”: “Thus may you plainly perceive the success of my fifth and last voyage to Virginia, which was no less unfortunately ended than forwardly begun, and as luckless to many, as sinister to myself … Yet seeing it is not my first crossed voyage, I remain contented.” John White was clearly not a man much given to shows of sentiment. His watercolours, which remain his monument, are breathtakingly vivid and full of poignancy. They encapsulate an extraordinary moment in history while ominously foreshadowing all the incipient tragedies of colonisation.