Bodmer_Publication

(Alaska); both prints are based on illustrations by John Webber from the atlas of
James Cook’s third voyage (1776 – 1780), published in 1784. Schinz’s book also includes
a picture of an Amazonian Indian from Spyx and Martius’ work, as well as
images of Botocudos and other Brazilian natives from the Prince of Wied’s first
travel journal of 1820 – 1821. The only representative from the eastern part of North
America was Tayadaneega (1742 – 1807) whom Schinz describes as “Captain Joseph
Brant, Mohawk war chief.” The lithograph was based on the portrait painted
by George Romney in 1776 during Brant’s visit to England. 9
In the second, revised edition of Natural History of Mammals, published in 1827,
the illustrations remained more or less unchanged but the classification had
been modified slightly. The two men from the North-West Coast had now been
re assigned to the American race and, as a further representative of the Native
North Americans, Schinz had included a portrait of Micco Chlucco, chief of the
“ Siminoles” (Seminole), which, by his own account, he had taken from Bertram’s
Travels to North America. In the text, Schinz names Prince Maximilian as his source
to the claim that “the Botocudos and other peoples in Brazil are cannibals.” 10
Schinz’s comments on the Native North Americans are not exactly flattering:
“The North Americans waste their entire wealth on strong water, that is spirits,
and it is an irrevocable fact that the misuse of liquor has led to the prodigious
diminishment of the North American natives and that, for this reason alone,
these peoples are doomed to extinction.” 11 Schinz also finds it difficult to discern
common features among the Native American peoples, adding that “…the great
divergency of languages makes speculation concerning their origins arduous.” 12
The first two editions of Schinz’s Natural History of Mammals evidence how
little was known about the North American Indians in Europe at the time. The two
American explorers Merriwether Lewis and James Clark had crossed the American
continent from east to west between 1804 and 1806, but they had no illustrator with
them to visually document what they had seen. Their travel diaries, which were incompletely
published in 1814, contained only fragmentary information on the
Indian tribes west of the Mississippi, which is why the European view of the American
Indians was restricted to peoples of the West Coast and Indians from the Eastern
Woodlands. In between there existed a kind of void about which little was known
and which even on American maps is designated as the “Great American Desert.”
Bodmer’s First Pictures of American Indians
Probably in 1835 Schinz published a completely new edition of his Natural
History, giving more space to the description of people, which is why the work was
given a new title: Natural History and Illustrations of Humans and Mammals.
There is no reference to the date of publication, but the correspondence between
Schinz and Prince Maximilian shows that the book was ready for publication by
the end of 1835. 13 This edition was published by J. Honegger’s lithographic printing
office in Zurich and contained sixty-three lithographs showing representatives of
the different “human races.”
By this time, the Prince of Wied had just returned from his travels in North
America and was able to provide Schinz with the first reliable information on
the “interior of North America.” As the letters between Schinz and Wied – analyzed
by Läng in his Bodmer biography – disclose, Schinz visited the Prince in Neuwied
in September 1834: “Now Schinz was able to convince himself of the quality of
72