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Their Seething of Their Meat in Earthen Pots
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
- Search LEARN NC for American Indians, colonial, cooking, drawings, fire, illustrations, John White, meat, North Carolina, and Virginia.
In the classroom
- See our collection of articles on visual literacy for ideas on using photographs meaningfully in the classroom.
“Their Seetheynge of Their Meate in Earthen Pottes.” Theodor de Bry’s engraving of two American Indians cooking over a fire, published in Thomas Hariot’s 1588 book A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. In the center of the image, a large pot full of food stands on wooden planks in a fire, with smoke rising from around its edges. The Indian on the left stands holding a utensil. The Indian on the right kneels next to the fire, fanning the flames.
The text accompanying the image reads:
Their women know how to make earthen vessels with special Cunning and that so large and fine, that our potters with lhoye [?] wheels can make no better: and then remove them from place to place as easily as we can do our brass kettles. After they have set them upon a heap of earth to stay them from falling, they put wood under which being kindled one of them takes great care that the fire burn equally Round about. They or their women fill the vessel with water, and then put they in fruit, flesh, and fish, and let all boil together like a galliemaufrye, which the Spaniards call, olla podrida. Then they put it out into dishes, and set before the company, and then they make good cheer together. Yet are they moderate in their eating whereby they avoid sickness. I would to God we would follow their exemple. For we should be free from many kinds of diseases which we fall into by sumptuous and unseasonable banquets, continually devising new sauces, and provocation of gluttony to satisfy our insatiable appetite.
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, “Cooking in a Pot.”
