Strange beast in an Asian river

Wednesday, 3/09/2011

Figure 1: SIL28-222-13.jpg

Early explorers and treasure seekers strayed pretty far from reality while portraying the people they were busy exploiting or exterminating in the tales and images they brought back to the inquiring public in Europe.
I ran across an odd early woodcut in the Smithsonian’s Illustrations Collection that really got me guessing. Most early ‘ethnographic’ or natural history illustration is filtered through the early European mind set. The artist need only satisfy church and king to be safely within legitimate reportage practice. This image though of a beast of some sort in a river has some threads of truth. It made me wonder if it weren’t the twisted interpretation of an actual observed scene somewhere. I started out thinking this was a portrayal of the “here there be dragons,” from the tale of places at the edge of the world. What do you think the artist was trying to portray?