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First Europeans in Colombia: New Granada and Cartagena in the accounts of early witnesses

Before the Spaniards, the land that is now Colombia was shared among brilliant societies: the Tairona of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, goldsmiths and terrace builders, the Muisca of the highland plateaus, the Zenú and the Quimbaya, whose gold would dazzle the conquerors. The first Europeans came by sea: Alonso de Ojeda, with the cartographer Juan de la Cosa and Amerigo Vespucci, reached the Guajira peninsula in 1499, and Rodrigo de Bastidas followed the coast to the Gulf of Urabá in 1501.

The conquest began on the coast. Santa María la Antigua del Darién, founded in 1510, was the first Spanish town on the mainland; Santa Marta followed in 1525 and Cartagena de Indias in 1533. Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada pushed up the Magdalena in 1536, reached the Muisca country and founded Santa Fe de Bogotá in 1538; the next year he saw the German Nikolaus Federmann and Sebastián de Belalcázar, coming from Quito, arrive by other routes. The ritual at Lake Guatavita, where a chief covered in gold dust bathed among offerings, gave birth to the legend of El Dorado and to countless fruitless expeditions. Pedro Cieza de León, who travelled the Cauca valley around 1540, and the canon Juan de Castellanos were among the first chroniclers of this New Kingdom of Granada.

Cartagena became the great port for gold and silver and one of the first markets for enslaved Africans, among whom the Jesuit Peter Claver spent his life. Its wealth drew Spain's enemies: Francis Drake held it to ransom in 1586, the Baron de Pointis sacked it in 1697, and Admiral Vernon besieged it in vain in 1741 against Blas de Lezo. New Granada became a viceroyalty in 1739. The naval scientists Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa described it from 1735, and the physician José Celestino Mutis launched the Royal Botanical Expedition in 1783, whose painters drew thousands of plants.

Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland travelled up the Magdalena to Bogotá in 1801. After independence, declared in 1810 and won at Boyacá in 1819, travellers followed one another: Gaspard-Théodore Mollien in 1823, the American Isaac Holton in 1852, the landscape designer Édouard André in 1875. The country also looked at itself: Agustín Codazzi's Chorographic Commission toured the provinces from 1850 to 1859, painting their people, trades and landscapes.

This collection brings together our editions of eyewitness accounts and a directory of other early writings on Colombia.

Our titles on this subject

Sumatra, by the Cape Route

Jean and Raoul Parmentier, Pierre Crignon, 1529

In 1529, the Parmentier brothers left Dieppe for Sumatra by way of the Cape of Good Hope, the first French voyage to the East Indies, told day by day by the pilot Pierre Crignon.

In 1529 the Cape route was still a Portuguese monopoly, and Norman merchants were set on breaking it. Backed by the Dieppe shipowner Jean Ango, the Parmentier brothers pushed on to Sumatra, and their pilot Pierre Crignon left the only first-hand record of this first French attempt. His log shows seamanship day by day, bargaining with a Muslim ruler of the archipelago and the human cost of a private venture, seventy years before the great East India companies.

Drake's Expedition to the West Indies

Walter Bigges, 1585-1586

September 1585: Francis Drake sails from Plymouth with twenty-five sail to strike the Spanish empire in the West Indies. Captain Walter Bigges recounts this ten-month raid, from Santiago to Roanoke.

In 1585 England still had no lasting colony in America and was not officially at war with Spain. Drake's raid on the Caribbean marks the shift from private privateering to open war, three years before the Armada. Written by an officer of the expedition and rushed into print in 1589, Walter Bigges's account is the direct English witness to that turning point, and one of the few sources on the evacuation of the first Roanoke colony.

The World Tour of Francesco Carletti

Francesco Carletti, 1594-1606

A Florentine merchant circles the globe out of curiosity, from Cape Verde to Japan and China, before losing everything at Saint Helena. A firsthand account, 1591-1606.

At the end of the sixteenth century, sailing round the world was still the business of the Iberian crowns and their fleets. Francesco Carletti, a Florentine merchant, travelled as a private man along Spain's routes to America and across the Pacific, then Portugal's routes through Asia, just when both empires answered to a single king. Dictated on his return for the Grand Duke of Tuscany, his account gives the rare view of an Italian with no official mission on this first global trade.

A Cruising Voyage Round the World

Woodes Rogers, 1708-1711

The corsair who rescued from a desert island the sailor who became the model for Robinson Crusoe.

Published in 1712, the journal of Woodes Rogers is one of the great English privateering narratives of the South Sea, written in the time of the War of the Spanish Succession. It tells of the rescue of Alexander Selkirk at Juan Fernández, the source of Defoe's *Robinson Crusoe*, the capture of Guayaquil and of a Manila galleon, then the return by Guam, Batavia and the Cape. Its descriptions of the Spanish coasts of the Pacific fed the English expeditions of the eighteenth century.

Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme

Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.

Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les Six Voyages (1676)

The merchant traveler of the seventeenth century crossed the Asia of spices and precious stones, from Persia to the Indies and on to the East Indies. His Six Voyages lay out in detail the trade that the men of Dieppe had barely glimpsed: the weights, the currencies, the tricks of the markets, the art of haggling that Crignon learned at Ticou the hard way. Two generations later, one finds there the same harsh pepper trade, but now conducted by a European versed in all its subtleties.
Alexandre-Olivier Exquemelin, Histoire des aventuriers flibustiers (1678)

Taken on as a surgeon among the buccaneers of Tortuga and Jamaica, Exquemelin publishes in 1678 the book that fixed the image of Caribbean piracy for three centuries. In it are the same anchorages, the same ransomed Spanish towns, the same reckoning of shares, but a century later and without the veneer of service to the queen. What Drake did under an implicit mandate, Morgan does under a Jamaican commission that barely disguises private plunder. The shift from state raid to private buccaneering can be read from one book to the other.
Engelbert Kaempfer, Histoire naturelle, civile et ecclésiastique du Japon (1690-1692)

A physician for the Dutch East India Company, Kaempfer lived in Japan at the close of the seventeenth century, in a country now closed to foreigners and purged of Christians. His book shows what became of the Japan that Carletti had reached while it was still open, before the crosses of Nagasaki announced the great closing. The same archipelago, a century later, locked shut.
Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles de l'Amérique (1694-1706)

Father Labat, a Dominican friar, lives in the French Antilles from 1694 to 1706 and tells everything: the sugar, the rum he perfects, the enslaved people, the governors, the fighting against the English, the recipes and the lawsuits. His prose is cheerful, curious, and utterly without scruple. In it we see what became, a century after Drake, of the islands he only sailed past: a plantation system that replaced the abandoned mines of Hispaniola and upended the population of the whole region.
William Dampier, Nouveau voyage autour du monde (1697)

A hundred and fifty years after the Parmentier brothers, this English buccaneer turned writer in turn crossed the coasts of Sumatra and the seas of the East Indies. Dampier observed the winds, the currents, the peoples with a precision that foreshadows science. His narrative, immensely read, shows what had become of the archipelago that Crignon had approached as a lone pioneer: a crossroads now traversed by the Dutch, the English and the Portuguese, where the pepper trade had changed in scale.
William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (1697)

Dampier roams the Antilles and the Pacific through the 1680s before publishing in 1697 an account that will make him the favorite author of naturalists and novelists alike. He describes the winds, the currents, the plants, and the men with a scholar's curiosity, all while taking part in expeditions little better than those of his predecessors. It is the same ground as Bigges's, Panama, Cartagena, the isthmus, seen by someone who takes the time to look at what he passes through.
Gemelli Careri, Le Tour du monde (1699-1700)

At the close of the seventeenth century, this Neapolitan magistrate retraces, as a well-off tourist, the circuit of the globe that Carletti had accomplished as a ruined merchant. Manila, Acapulco, Mexico City: he follows almost the same route and publishes an account that will meet with immense success. Reading Gemelli after Carletti is to measure the distance travelled between perilous adventure and pleasure travel.
Amédée-François Frézier, Relation du voyage de la mer du Sud aux côtes du Chili et du Pérou (1716)

Three years after Rogers, the military engineer Frézier sets out for the South Sea disguised as a merchant captain. From 1712 to 1714, from Concepción to Valparaíso, from Callao to Arica, he secretly draws up plans of the ports, counts the Spanish guns and garrisons, and observes the mines and the crops. He brings back to France the Chilean strawberry plant, which will give us our garden strawberries. His account appears in Paris in 1716 and an English translation follows as early as 1717. It covers the coast that Rogers sails up, seen this time by an officer's eye, attentive to defences more than to booty. The book is Relation du voyage de la mer du Sud aux côtes du Chili et du Pérou.
Le Père Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles de l'Amérique (1722)

For the book's other shore, the Antilles, this Dominican friar of the early eighteenth century offers the great fresco of islands that the second volume of the voyage still described as nearly untouched. Labat traveled through Hispaniola, recounting the sugar works, the livestock, the slaves, the trade in hides. What the Dieppe sailor noted in a few dry lines, the friar unfolds into entire tableaux, and one sees what the coast of wild herds had become in two centuries.
Richard Walter, A Voyage Round the World by George Anson (1748)

Thirty years later, Commodore Anson's squadron almost retraces the route of the Duke. Setting out in 1740 and decimated by scurvy off Cape Horn, it recovers at Juan Fernández, where the sailors find goats with slit ears that they link to Selkirk. It plunders Paita, watches in vain for the galleon off Mexico, then in 1743 seizes the Covadonga near the Philippines. The narrative, published in 1748 under the name of the chaplain Richard Walter, becomes a great publishing success. It shows what naval war made of Rogers's privateering model. See A Voyage Round the World by George Anson.
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Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde par la frégate du roi La Boudeuse et la flûte L'Étoile (1771)

Setting out in 1766 to hand the French settlement on the Falklands over to the Spanish, Bougainville passes through the Strait of Magellan, crosses the Pacific by way of Tahiti, Samoa, the New Hebrides and the Solomons, then reaches the Moluccas and Batavia before returning across the Indian Ocean. It is the first official French naval voyage round the world. His account, published in 1771, feeds the philosophers' debate on the noble savage. The comparison with Rogers is telling: the same seas, the same Dutch ports of call, but a voyage of state, of scholars and observation, where Rogers led an enterprise of prizes. The book is Voyage autour du monde par la frégate du roi La Boudeuse et la flûte L'Étoile.
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William Bartram, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida (1773-1777)

Between 1773 and 1777, the American naturalist William Bartram travels alone, on horseback and by canoe, through Florida and the Carolinas, that is, exactly the coast Drake's fleet sails past between St Augustine and Roanoke. He describes the alligators, the springs, the pine forests, the Creek and Seminole villages. His book, published in 1791, fed the English Romantic poets. It brings to life a shore that the 1586 account shows only as a log fort and a wooden town.
Alexander von Humboldt, Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent (1799-1804)

Humboldt lands at Cumaná in 1799 and spends five years measuring, botanizing, and coming to understand Spanish America. He stays in Cartagena in 1801 before making his way up the Magdalena River toward Bogotá. He describes a drowsy port town, its outsized fortifications, its heat, its fevers, and the dying empire around it. Two centuries after the English soldiers' night march along the shore, the walls built in response to that kind of attack are still standing, and serve no purpose anymore.
Alexandre de Humboldt, Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent (1807-1834)

On the threshold of the nineteenth century, the Prussian scholar explored as a naturalist the coasts of Tierra Firme, from the Rio Grande to Cartagena and beyond. Where Crignon drew up an inventory of ports and shoals for the pilot, Humboldt measures, classifies, understands. To read the two together is to follow the same coastline across three centuries, from the sailor's logbook to the great scientific inquiry.
Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches (1839)

Aboard the Beagle from 1831 to 1836, Darwin in his turn skirts Brazil, touches the Falklands, rounds Cape Horn, stays in Chile and Peru, then spends five weeks in the Galápagos in September 1835, before returning by the Cape. Where Rogers sought fresh water and tortoises to feed his crews, the young naturalist notes the differences from island to island among the finches and the giant tortoises. His journal, published in 1839, changes the way these archipelagos are seen, which the Bristol privateers took for dry and useless rocks. See Journal of Researches.
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Herman Melville, Les Encantadas ou îles enchantées (1854)

In 1841 the whaler Acushnet sails past Albemarle Island, in the Galápagos, with a young sailor named Herman Melville aboard. Thirteen years later, under the pseudonym Salvator R. Tarnmoor, he publishes in Putnam's Monthly ten sketches of these islands of ash and lava, peopled by tortoises, hermits and former buccaneer lairs. He cites the old buccaneer accounts, such as Cowley's, by sailors who, before and after Rogers, came there for tortoises. The text, reprinted in 1856 in The Piazza Tales, turns into a moral landscape the archipelago that Rogers's journal describes as a hurried seaman. The sketches are The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles.
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Anthony Trollope, The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1858)

In 1858, the English novelist, then a post office official, is sent to reorganize the Caribbean mail routes. From it he draws a brisk, funny, and often unfair travel account, in which he visits Jamaica, Cuba, Colombia, Panama, and Guiana. He sees the ports the galleons once sailed from, the isthmus Drake never crossed, and the Panama Railroad, along the corridor the canal will later follow. The book shows what three centuries had made of the treasure route that was the true stake of the 1585 voyage.

First Europeans in Colombia: New Granada and Cartagena in the accounts of early witnesses