Smallpox Victims
Hans Staden, a German soldier who was shipwrecked in Brazil in 1552, was captured by a Tupinambá Indian named Jeppipo Wasu. Shortly thereafter, Wasu and his family traveled to a neighboring village as smallpox ravaged the population; when they returned, they were very sick. Wasu recovered, but he lost his mother, two brothers, and two children. This engraving, which depicts Wasu’s return amid his townspeople’s grief, appeared in the third volume of Theodor de Bry’s monumental America, published in Frankfurt in 1593. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.