Probably not. In “This Huge Leviathan” (Emblem 42), Pulter frequently uses the terminology of horseback riding to describe the Indigenous hunter’s conquest of the whale, likely inspired by the account of explorer José de Acosta, included in the Curation Whaling Legends. Acosta reports that Indigenous hunters in Florida “with great dexterity . . . leap to [the whale’s] neck, and there they ride as on horseback,” but this seems to be more fancy than fact.1 Historians of whaling in North America have expressed doubts about the veracity of his account. David W. Laist suggests, “If there is any credence to the tale at all, it must have been based on descriptions of either a Native drive fishery, in which porpoises or other small cetaceans2 were herded into the shallows of a cove or along a beach by a small fleet of canoes, efforts to salvage dead whales or porpoises found floating offshore, or a hunt for manatees.”3 Although evidence for their hunting techniques is scanty, several sources report that the Tequesta, a tribe inhabiting the southeast coast of Florida, did consume whale meat.4

Theodor de Bry, a Flemish-born German engraver, created the illustration below based on de Acosta’s description, included in volume nine of his series Americæ (published in Germany in 1602). In the midground a man can be seen hammering stakes into the blowholes of a whale, and in the background a whale is being dragged to shore by a rope tied to the stakes sticking out of its blowholes. It is one of many engravings by de Bry depicting Indigenous peoples in the New World, which were hugely influential in Europe. “These engravings were the medium through which most Europeans came to view the customs and habits of the American Indians, and they became the source of illustrations for many later travel accounts,” argues art historian Jane Campbell Hutchison.5 It should be noted that de Bry never traveled to America—there are several degrees of separation between the artist and his subjects and we should be skeptical of his portrayals of Indigenous peoples.

Pulter may also have taken inspiration from the Book of Job, which compares the leviathan to a horse too fierce to bridle (see Job 41:13 in the Curation The Leviathan and the Bible). The connection between horses and fish is an old one: Greek and Roman deities associated with the sea were often portrayed riding a creature with the head and upper body of a horse and the tail of a fish, known as a hippocampus.

Detail from Theodor de Bry, Americæ (London: 1602), Vol. 9, p. 435, plate AA2. Public domain, via HathiTrust.

Footnotes