A Staged Encounter: French Meeting Timucua in Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues

• Main Author: Frank Lestringant
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: eScholarship Publishing, University of California 2017-10-01
• Series: Journal of Transnational American Studies
• Online Access: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0989398t

<p>A quarter of a century after the destruction of the French settlements in Florida in 1565, there appeared in Frankfurt the second volume of Théodore de Bry’s <em>Great Voyages</em>, the <em>Brevis Narratio</em> of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues that included a series of copperplates depicting the Timucua Native Americans engaged in a variety of everyday activities. Lestringant focuses on plate VIII which depicts the Timucua, in the presence of Laudonnière, prostrating themselves before the column that had been erected three years earlier by Jean Ribault and analyzes the space represented in it as a “theater,” in the sense the word often held in the sixteenth century—that is, a kind of visualization device—linking the world of the Amerindian idolaters and that of the Huguenots.</p>