2019 | Bronze edition: 35 | Height: 31″
“…such great and well proportioned men are seldom seene, for they seemed like giants to the English…”
Within about a year of the founding of the English colony at Jamestown in Virginia, Captain John Smith sailed north exploring the Chesapeake. He had primarily two goals in mind: the foremost of these was to try to find the Northwest Passage to the Orient (which of course he failed to find); the other was to confirm rumors he had heard from the natives near Jamestown who had spoken of a giant-like race of men to the north-the Susquehannock.
“60 of those Susquehannocks came to us…such great and well proportioned men are seldom seene, for they seemed like giants to the English…these are the strangest people in all those countries both in language and attire; for their language it may well beseeme their proportions, surrounding from them as a voice in a vault. Their attire is the skinnes of beares and woolves, some have cassocks made of beares heades and skinnes…The halfe sleeves coming to the elbows were the heades of beares and the arms through the open mouth…one had a head of a woolf hanging from a chain for a jewel…with a club suitable to his greatness sufficient to beat out ones brains. Five of their cheife wereowances came aboard us…(of) the greatest of them his hayre the one side was long the other shorn close with a ridge over his crowne like a cocks combe…the calfe of whose leg was ¾ of a yard around and all the rest of his limbes so answerable to that proportion that he seemed the goodliest man we ever beheld!”
From the voyages of Captain John Smith
(of Jamestown, Va.) 1607-1609
The Chiefe Wereowance of the Susquehannock is a study of the larger sculpture Susquehannock.
