3 Review(s)

The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. This sixteenth-century autobiographical narrative, translated in 1862 from a manuscript in the National Library of Madrid and interspersed with contemporary letters, is a self-justificatory account of the adventures of an impecunious Spanish nobleman whose efforts to make a fortune took him all round Europe and eventually to Peru, where he witnessed the feud between Pizarro and Almagro which had lasting consequences for the future of South America. An introductory essay places this account in the context of other histories of the Spanish conquest.