Carib Priests Instilling Courage: A Ritual Dance of the Caribbean, 1722

Carib priests blowing courage into a ring of dancers, an original hand-colored copperplate engraving after Bernard Picart from his illustrated work on the religious ceremonies and customs of the world's peoples, dated 1722 in the listing. The plate is numbered "95" at the top and titled below the image "Manière dont les Prêtres Caribes soufflent le Courage".

The scene is set inside a large, dim hall with a vaulted, ribbed ceiling and bare walls, with a bright arched doorway at the back opening onto palm trees and a hillside landscape. A ring of nearly naked men dances across the sunlit floor, each wearing a colored sash and a round red or pink ornament at the hip, bending forward in a stamping step. At the center, two men in green mantles and feather crests stand with long tubes in their hands, and white clouds of smoke puff from the tubes and around the dancers, who bend to receive it. Further dancers circle in the background with their faces turned away.

The Caribs of the Lesser Antilles were among the first American peoples met by Europeans, and Picart's plates, composed in Amsterdam from travelers' accounts, show such rites as eighteenth-century readers imagined them.