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The Manner of Making Their Boats
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
See this illustration in context
- Two worlds: Prehistory, contact, and the Lost Colony: First part of a North Carolina history text for secondary students, covering the land, American Indians before contact with Europeans, Spanish exploration, the Roanoke colony, and the Columbian Exchange. (Page 4.5)
Related media
Learn more
- Search LEARN NC for American Indians, boats, canoes, colonial, drawings, illustrations, John White, North Carolina, and Virginia.
In the classroom
- See our collection of articles on visual literacy for ideas on using photographs meaningfully in the classroom.
“The Manner of Makinge Their Boates.” Theodor de Bry’s engraving of American Indian men making boats, published in Thomas Hariot’s 1588 book A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. In the foreground, two men are working on a hollowed-out tree, from which smoke and flames are rising. In the background two other men are working on a fallen tree. A third tree to their right has a fire burning at its base.
The text accompanying the image reads:
The manner of making their boats in Virginia is very wonderful. For whereas they want instruments of iron, or other like unto ours, yet they know how to make them as handsomely, to sail with where they list in their rivers, and to fish withall, as ours. First they choose some long, and thick tree, according to the bigness of the boat which they would frame, and make a fire on the ground about the root thereof, kindling the same by little, and little with dry moss of trees, and chips of wood that the flame should not mount up too high, and burn too much of the length of the tree. When it is almost burnt through, and ready to fall they make a new fire, which they suffer to burn until the tree fall of its own accord. Then burning of the top, and boughs of the tree in such wise that the body of the same may retain his just length, they raise it upon potes [sticks] laid over cross wise upon forked posts, at such a reasonable height as they may handsomely work upon it. Then take they of the bark with certain shells: they reserve the, innermost part of the lennke [?], for the nethermost part of the boat. On the other side they make a fire according to the length of the body of the tree, saving at both the ends. That which they think is sufficiently burned they quench and scrape away with shells, and making a new fire they burn it again, and so they continue somtimes burning and sometimes scraping, until the boat have sufficient bottoms. Thus God endows these savage people with sufficient reason to make things necessary to serve their turns.
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.
