classes, cities, and practices of the peoples of the Powhatan Confederacy, with explanatory text translated from Latin into English by Richard Hakluyt.[6] The engravings, done by Theodore de Bry, are based on illustrations drawn by John White on Raleigh’s 1585 expedition. Appended to these engravings are five more, strangely, “of the Pictes, which in the olde tyme dyd habite one part of the great Bretainne” (67). De Bry explains that he received these images, too, from White, and that he includes them “for to showe how that the Inhabitants of the great Bretannie have bin in times past as sauvage as those of Virginia” (67). Yet the section on the Picts is concerned with little besides their elaborate body-paintings (a practice which, regardless of its historical reality, was and is alive in the cultural imagination). “In tymes past,” the caption of the first engraving reads, “the Pictes […] were sauvages, and did paint all over their bodye after the maner following” (68). The detailed description of the paintings––what was painted on the chest, what on the knees, legs, and shoulders––are redundant next to the engravings. The overriding emphasis on the paintings underscores the sense that this practice, more than anything else, is what marks out the Picts as “sauvages.” Although the text does not mention the source of the pigment, it was commonly understood to have been woad. Humphrey Llwyd, for instance, wrote in 1573 that “the Britaynes, of whom Caesar, and others do report, […] wer wont to paynt theyr bodies Blew with Woad, that they might appeare the more terrible to their enemies.”[7] For Llwyd, as for the engravings, woad confirms both the Britishness and the savagery of the Picts.

Woad is thus an uneasy marker of national identity. As a “marchantable” commodity, it represents England’s potential mercantile power and suggests English difference from New World things whose “goodnesse […] remayne yet to be proved” (9). At the same time, the woad-painted bodies of the ancient Britons mark their similarity to the Powhatan peoples depicted in the Report’s other engravings. Woad’s materiality might inform its instability of meaning. Shakespeare uses the metaphor of the “dyer’s hand” to describe “nature […] subdued / To what it works in.”[8] Dye cannot be handled without handling back. In a similar way, the fictive Viriginian woad in the Report, cultivated on land imagined as a mere extension of England, turns a fictive England into something like an extension of the Powhatan Confederacy.

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