Description
<p>A bird, identified as an “Indian Jay,” perches on the peeled husk of a large ear of corn, identified as “Indian Wheat,” in this frontispiece engraving from the 1651 book [<em>The Discovery of New Brittaine</em>] by Edward Bland, Abraham Woode, Sackford Brewster and Elias Peunant. Bland, the principal author of the book, was an English merchant colonist who owned over 3,000 acres of land in Virginia around the James River. As the title page states, on August 27, 1650, Bland and his party set out from Fort Henry to explore a region to the southwest of the James River, heavily populated by Indigenous people but not yet mapped or described to Great Britain. Bland and his party traveled about 120 miles to an area he named “New Brittaine,” and a river which he renamed the “Blandina,” after himself.</em>
