At the turn of the seventeenth century, as England and Scotland began to colonize North America, historians undertook a parallel journey into their own ancestors’ past. They observed in the annals of Roman descriptions about Britannia a practice similar to what contemporary colonial explorers were reporting from the Eastern seaboard: figurative tattoo and body modification. The ancient Picts — a Roman name given to the people of Caledonia who lived above Hadrian’s Wall — seemed to evidence the “savagery” out of which Britain had emerged, and which Britons were now reporting on the shores of the New World.

Visual depictions of the Picts flourished in this period (and indeed “Pict” and “depiction” are thought to share a Latin root: pingere, to paint). Jacques Le Moyne’s “Young Daughter of the Picts” (1585) shows a woman dressed solely in patchwork floral tattoos, based on specimens that, rather anachronistically, had only been introduced to Western Europe in recent years. The frontispiece illustration to John Speed’s History of Great Britaine (1611) features a Pict looming over an architrave bearing the book’s title, his deltoid inscribed with a leonine face. But the most famous images of the Picts were found in a book whose main aim was to detail the peoples of a distant land: Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, deluxe editions of which were adorned with illustrations by the Flemish engraver Theodor de Bry after watercolors by John White.

In the summer of 1585, the mathematician and scientist Thomas Harriot docked with a few dozen men in an area they called Virginia (today known as North Carolina’s Roanoke Island and Outer Banks). Harriot was uniquely suited to the voyage: while still in London, he had dedicated himself to learning and phonetically transcribing the oral language of Manteo and Wanchese, two Algonquian-speaking men who returned to England with an earlier expedition. These reconnaissance missions to Virginia were financed by Walter Raleigh, who now employed Harriot and the artist John White to map this area and its inhabitants in preparation for establishing the first English colony in America. Harriot’s Briefe and True Report would be published in Latin as a pamphlet in 1588, with English, German, and French editions to follow, translated and edited by Richard Hakluyt, Theodor de Bry, and others.

Written in a rich, scholarly Latin, Harriot paid particular attention to the tattoos and ritual scarification he encountered, which he named punctiunculis, “little prickings”, and noted that “the inhabitants of all the cuntrie for the most parte have marks raised on their backs, whereby yt may be knowen what Princes subiects they bee”. The Report ends with a curious, jarring coda, featuring images and descriptions of Picts, “to showe how that the Inhabitants of the great Bretannie haue bin in times past as sauuage as those of Virginia”. This is what remains most striking about these illustrations. Attempting to depict a strange, foreign people who were quickly classed as savage “others”, Harriot and his artists arrive back on the shores of their own history.

Raleigh’s colony ultimately failed. In 1587, John White, now the governor of Roanoke, returned to England to gather more supplies and reinforcements, leaving behind his wife, daughter, and granddaughter, Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World. When White moored once again at the colony in 1590, having been waylaid by the Anglo-Spanish War, he found the settlement completely abandoned. 112 of the 121 colonists seemingly vanished without a trace. The only clues were engraved nearby, nested in the landscape like ancient hieroglyphs: the words “CROATOAN” and “CRO”, perhaps in reference to a nearby island. Impending winter storms and anchor troubles forced White back to England before he could find his family. He died three years later, having never returned to America.

Below you can browse Theodor de Bry’s engravings based on John White’s watercolors. They were made to accompany several 1590 editions of the Briefe and True Report in various languages, and would, in turn, become part of de Bry’s popular America series. As these illustrations were further augmented by other engravers, they came to represent a new kind of colonial fantasy — and the decline of English subjects seeing their own past in the New World. One of de Bry’s engravings, for example, shows an Indigenous child holding English objects (a doll, an armillary sphere); in Robert Beverley’s 1705 revision, her hands grip a rattle and ear of corn. It’s as if, writes Joyce E. Chaplin, “the possibility that Indians would gain understanding of English goods and technology was now at an end”.