Usos y Costumbres de los Salvajes de Virginia

Usos y Costumbres de los Salvajes de Virginia brings together Thomas Hariot’s classic A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588) and the celebrated visual record created by John White and engraved by Theodor de Bry. Carefully edited and introduced by Jean-Paul Duviols, this large-format, premium color edition offers an exceptional window into the first English attempts to colonize North America and into the Algonquian world of late sixteenth-century Virginia.

Hariot’s text — written after a year in the Roanoke colony as Raleigh’s mathematician, cartographer, and observer — is both a scientific report and a colonial prospectus. He catalogues in detail the region’s resources (maize, roots, fish, timber, minerals, dyes, tobacco), describes indigenous agriculture, fishing, and social customs, and argues vigorously for the commercial and strategic value of Virginia. At the same time, his account reveals a distinctly colonial gaze: a paternalistic conviction of English intellectual, material, and religious superiority, alongside genuine curiosity and respect for Algonquian ingenuity.

Complementing the text, the De Bry engravings after John White’s watercolors form a foundational visual ethnography of North America: striking portraits of men and women, villages such as Pomeiooc and Secotan, rituals, feasts, fishing and canoe building, and even comparative “Pict” reconstructions that link Native “savagery” to Europe’s own past. Together, these documents shaped European perceptions of American Indians for centuries and remain indispensable for courses on colonialism, visual culture, travel writing, and the contested construction of the “Other.”