The Tomb of Their Werowans or Chief Lords

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

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“The Tombe of Their Werovvans or Cheiff Lordes.” Theodor de Bry’s engraving of an American Indian tomb, published in Thomas Hariot’s 1588 book A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. The tomb is a tall building in which nine corpses lie side by side on an elevated platform. In front of the platform, in the foreground, a person kneels, tending a fire.

The text accompanying the image reads:

They build a Scaffold 9 or 10 feet high as is expressed in this figure under the tombs of their Weroans, or chief lords which they cover with mats, and lay the dead corpses of their Weroans thereupon in manner following. First the bowels are taken forth. Then laying down the skin, they cut all the flesh clean from the bones, which they dry in the sun, and well dried they enclose in mats, and place at their feet. Then their bones (remaining still fastened together with the ligaments whole and uncorrupted) are covered again with leather, and their carcass fashioned as if their flesh were not taken away. They lap each corpse in his own skin after the same is thus handled, and lay it in his order by the corpses of the other chief lords. By the dead bodies they set their Idol Kiwasa, whereof we spake in the former chapter: For they are persuaded that the same does keep the dead bodies of their chief lords that nothing may hurt them. Moreover under the foresaid scaffold some one of their priests has his lodging, which mumbles his prayers night and day, and has charge of the corpses. For his bed he has two deer skins spread on the ground, if the weather be cold he makes a fire to warm by withal. These poor souls are thus instructed by nature to reverence their princes even after their death.

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 Charnel House.”