Lost New World

Before Jamestown or Plymouth was founded, two European artists roamed the forests of North America. They found the New World as lovely as a daydream and as weirdly frightening as a nightmare, painted it with wideawake precision and detail. Last week their historically priceless pictorial reporting, long scattered and out of print, was reissued in one of 1946's handsomest books (The New World, Duell, Sloan & Pearce; $20).

Frenchman Jacques le Moyne and Englishman John White returned with watercolors to inspire stay-at-homes. A Fleming named Theodore de Bry engraved their paintings in 1590-91. Now all but one of Le Moyne's originals have been lost, and only the engravings remain.

Le Moyne was sent with the Huguenots who settled on the South Carolina coast in 1564, and was told to map and paint what he saw. A Spanish expedition wiped out the colony within a year, but Le Moyne escaped to a French ship, with a portfolio full of fastidiously painted reports. Among them: a sunrise sacrifice of a stuffed and garlanded stag, a huddle of Indian widows mourning before their king Outina and begging permission to marry again, and an exaggerated painting of an alligator hunt which might have given Europeans the idea that dragons abounded in America.

John White explored the Virginia coast in 1585, and two years later Sir Walter Raleigh sent him back to found and govern a colony. He sailed back to England with watercolors of American butterflies, turtles, and of an Indian tomb-temple on stilts, decorated with the skins and bones of ten mummified chiefs. When he returned to Virginia three years later, the colony had vanished.

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