Look & Learn No 846 (1 April 1978) - Into The Unknown: America - Discovered By A Trick

Another - and sadly, probably the last surviving - Oli Frey Look & Learn DPS joins the crew.

This was the first of Frey's 'Into The Unknown' DPSs for Look & Learn. 'Into The Unknown' was a series describing the adventures and derring-do of the great explorers, and of course Christopher Columbus is the OG classic explorer. This being the late 1970s, the narrative was breathless excitement of strange new worlds and close calls with savage natives, but, and this struck me even at the time, the illustrator was to add a sense of pathos to these encounters, a sadness and humanity that was largely absent from the written text.

Here we see Columbus and his crew with the Arawak people of San Salvador (the island that these indigenous people called Guanahani). Of course, in less than a century all these people would have been driven into extinction, murdered, raped and worked to death in fruitless attempts to find gold, or through European smallpox or measles. Frey seems have captured a little of their doom in this image, along with the brutal arrogance of the explorers.

Swiss-born, but British resident, Oli Frey died in August of 2022, and his partner of 50+ years Roger Kean in 2023. I was lucky enough to be able to bid on items from Roger's estate auction, and this was one of the remaining pieces of original art in the estate. It must have meant a lot to both Oli and Roger.

Gouache on board
board 5s x 71 cms
image 45 x 68 cms