LEARN NC

K–12 teaching and learning · from the UNC School of Education

Classroom » Multimedia

Their Manner of Carrying the Children

About this illustration

Creator
Theodor de Bry
Date created
1585–1586
License
This work is believed to be in the public domain. Users are advised to make their own copyright assessment and to understand their rights to fair use.
Source
Original image housed by Documenting the American South / UNC Libraries

Related media

Learn more

In the classroom

  • See our collection of articles on visual literacy for ideas on using photographs meaningfully in the classroom.
Black and white drawing of two American Indian women standing with babies held on their backs. In the background is a body of water in which people are rowing canoes.

Size: 650×460

“Their Manner of Careynge the Childern and A Tyere of the Cheiffe Ladyes of the Towne of Dasamonquepeuc.” Theodor de Bry’s engraving of an American Indian woman, published in Thomas Hariot’s 1588 book A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. In the foreground, the woman is depicted from both the front and back, holding a baby on her back. She is bare-chested and wears a fringed garment. In the background is a body of water in which people are rowing canoes.

The text accompanying the image reads:

In the town of Dasemonquepeuc distant from Roanoke 4 or 5 miles, the women are attired, and pounced [tattooed], in such sort as the women of Roanoke are, yet they wear no wreaths upon their heads, neither have they their thighs painted with small pricks. They have a strange manner of bearing their children, and quite contrary to ours. For our women carry their children in their arms before their breasts, but they taking their son by the right hand, bear him on their backs, holding the left thigh in their left arm after a strange, and unusual fashion, as in the picture is to be seen.

Theodor de Bry was a Flemish-born engraver and publisher who based his illustrations for Hariot’s book on the New World paintings of colonist John White. These depictions of the landscapes and residents of North Carolina provided Europeans with some of their earliest notions of what the North American continent looked like. This engraving was based on White’s watercolor painting, “Indian Woman and Baby of Pomeiooc.”