A New World: England's First View of America

This beautifully illustrated book reproduces in full the famous and rarely seen British Museum collection of drawings and watercolors made by John White, who in 1585 accompanied a group of English settlers sent by Sir Walter Raleigh to found a colony on Roanoke Island, North Carolina. White's duties included making visual records of everything he encountered that was then unknown in England, including plants, animals, and birds, as well as the human inhabitants, especially their dress, weapons, tools, and ceremonies. The collection also includes White's watercolors of Florida and Brazilian Indians and of the Inuit encountered by Martin Frobisher. Here each work is reproduced in color and supplemented by engravings by Theodor de Bry and other comparable works.

Kim Sloan's introduction sets the scene, followed by chapters placing John White and his work in their historical, cultural, and artistic contexts. Joyce Chaplin explores how White's contemporaries viewed his work and Christian Feest assesses its accuracy as historical documentation. Ute Kuhlemann examines the role of de Bry, White's Frankfurt publisher and engraver. The book explores John White's role as a colonist, surveyor, and artist who not only recorded plants and animals but also provided Elizabethan England with its first glimpse of a now-lost American Indian culture and way of life.

• A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (Rosenwald Collection Reprint Series)
• America 1585 The Complete Drawings of John White
• The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke
• America, 1585: The Complete Drawings of John White
• The American Indian in North Carolina
• Native Carolinians: The Indians of North Carolina
• Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony, 2nd Edition
• Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584-1606