Region and period
16th-Century Travel Narratives of the Americas
In the sixteenth century, America was written about as much in government offices as in the field. The Spanish crown wanted to know what it owned: in 1532 it named Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo chronicler of the Indies, and his General and Natural History, whose first part appeared in 1535, described the plants, animals and peoples of the Caribbean and the mainland. In 1577 Philip II sent a questionnaire of fifty items across the empire: climate, languages, tribute, distances, crops. The answers, known as the Relaciones geográficas, often came with maps painted by Indigenous artists. Travel became inquiry.
Others investigated on their own account. Pedro Cieza de León, who arrived in the Indies as a teenager, walked the Andes for years, notebook in hand, and published in Seville in 1553 a Chronicle of Peru describing Inca roads, suspension bridges and mountain cities. In Mexico, the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún worked for decades with Nahua scholars trained at the college of Tlatelolco; their great bilingual encyclopedia, completed around 1577, let the defeated speak about their gods, their crafts and the conquest itself. The discovery of silver at Potosí in 1545 drew a crowd to the high plateau whose letters and petitions form another literature of travel.
Brazil was written in Portuguese. As early as 1500, Pero Vaz de Caminha described to Manuel I of Portugal the land that Cabral's fleet had just reached, its people, their ornaments, the innocence he thought he saw in their faces. From 1549 the Jesuits led by Manuel da Nóbrega sent letters from Bahia that were copied and read all over Europe, and José de Anchieta wrote the first grammar of the Tupi language.
In the north, Spain's rivals looked for a passage and a foothold. Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed along the Atlantic coast from Florida to Newfoundland in 1524 for the king of France; Huguenots tried to settle in Florida in 1562-1565, and the painter Jacques Le Moyne brought back images of it. In 1576-1578 Martin Frobisher believed he had found gold and a passage to Asia in the Canadian Arctic, and brought Inuit back to England. The English attempted a colony at Roanoke from 1585, whose resources Thomas Harriot described and which Theodor de Bry's engravings made known throughout Europe. Walter Raleigh published his quest for El Dorado in Guiana in 1596.
Read together, these texts show a continent described by actors with opposing interests, at a time when the very names of places were still being settled. This collection brings together our editions and a directory of related texts.
Our titles on this subject
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.
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Décadas de Orbe Novo, Pietro Martire d'Anghiera, 1530 (1530)
The Italian cleric employed at the court of Castile spent thirty years gathering the first accounts of the navigators: Columbus, Cortés, the conquests of Cuba, Mexico, and Darién. His elegant Latin carried the New World into European humanist culture. Lizárraga writes a generation later: the astonishment of the early years has given way to methodical inventory, but the echo of the pioneering decades still runs through his account, in the pages on the origin of the Indians and on the earliest settlements.
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Jacques Cartier, Bref récit et succincte narration de la navigation faite en 1535 et 1536 (1535-1536)
While the four survivors walked from people to people towards Sinaloa, at the other end of the continent Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence to Hochelaga, then wintered at Stadaconé. Scurvy killed twenty-five of his men; the Iroquoians taught them the remedy of annedda, a decoction of conifer bark. In the same years, 1535 and 1536, two Europeans discovered North America through its inhabitants: one healed by them, the other become their healer. The Bref récit, published in 1545, also appears in the collection.
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Hidalgo d'Elvas, Relation véridique des travaux du gouverneur Hernando de Soto (1539-1543)
In the very year of Cabeza de Vaca's return, Hernando de Soto obtained Florida; he landed there in 1539, he too in the Tampa Bay area. His men wintered at Apalache, took in Juan Ortiz, a Spaniard who had come looking for Narváez and stayed more than ten years among the Indians, then wandered for four years through the Southeast. After Soto's death, the survivors built brigantines, went down the Mississippi and followed the coast to Pánuco, the port the boats of 1528 had never reached. An anonymous Portuguese knight published the account in Évora in 1557.
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Pedro de Castañeda de Nájera, Relation de l'expédition de Cíbola (1540-1542)
The stories of the four survivors set Mexico City dreaming of rich cities to the North. In 1539 Estevanico guided the Franciscan Marcos de Niza towards the seven cities of Cíbola and was killed there; the following year Coronado set out with an army. A common soldier, Castañeda told twenty years later of the stone villages of the Zuni, the Grand Canyon, the plains covered with bison, the humpbacked cows Cabeza de Vaca had described, and the elusive Quivira. The mirage of Apalache repeats itself further west, with the same disappointment.
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Crónica del Perú, Pedro de Cieza de León, 1553 (1553)
The soldier-chronicler traveled the same roads as Lizárraga, a generation earlier. He saw Cajamarca after Atahualpa, Cuzco after Pizarro, Potosí in its earliest days. His prose, simple and precise, is the great source for descriptions of Peru during the conquest. Lizárraga knows it and sometimes cites it without saying so. To read Cieza after Lizárraga is to go back a generation, to find the cities under their first coats of plaster, the Indians still close to the shock of conquest.
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Hans Staden, Veritable histoire et description d'un pays habite par des hommes sauvages, nus, feroces et anthropophages (1557)
Marburg, 1557. Account of a German arquebusier captured by the Tupinamba of Brazil between 1552 and 1555. Written almost contemporaneously with Cartier's third voyage, it is the other great European testimony of the American encounter in the sixteenth century.
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True History of His Captivity, Hans Staden, 1557 (1557)
The German arquebusier survived nine months among the Tupinambá, a prisoner marked to be devoured. His account, translated into several languages, caused a sensation across Europe. The description of cannibal customs, rituals, and Tupinambá chiefs is firsthand, raw, without scholarly filter. It reads well alongside the pages Lizárraga devotes to the Chiriguanos: the same report on cannibalism, but one speaks from bodily experience, the other relays what survivors of the Charcas expeditions told him at the convent.
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Andre Thevet, Les Singularites de la France antarctique and Cosmographie universelle (1557-1575)
Paris, 1557 and 1575. The royal cosmographer, who knew Cartier in Saint-Malo late in his life, gathered several anecdotes from him and gives an encyclopedic vision of Brazil and Canada typical of his century.
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Francis Fletcher, The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake (1577-1580)
Published in 1628 from the notes of the ship's chaplain Francis Fletcher, this account tells of the circumnavigation of 1577-1580, the voyage that made Drake a legend before the West Indian expedition. It follows Patagonia, the Strait of Magellan, the execution of Thomas Doughty, the run up the coast of Peru, and the capture of the galleon Cacafuego. Reading the two texts one after the other is watching a captain move from a distant raiding cruise to a large-scale military operation, with two thousand three hundred men and shareholders behind him.
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Jean de Léry, Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (1578)
A Genevan shoemaker turned pastor lands in 1557 in the bay of Rio, within a French colony that tears itself apart before vanishing. Léry spends nearly a year among the Tupinamba, learns their language, eats with them, listens to their songs, and returns home to write the finest book of the century on an encounter between two worlds. Where Bigges counts cannons and ducats, Léry looks at faces. The two accounts can be read at the two ends of the same Atlantic America, thirty years apart: one seeks to understand, the other seeks to take.
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Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588)
Harriot was at Roanoke with Ralph Lane in the very year Drake was sailing toward the Antilles. A mathematician, he measured, catalogued, learned a few words of Algonquian, and in 1588 published a report meant to convince English investors that Virginia was worth returning to. In it are the maize, the tobacco, the bark houses, and a careful silence about what had gone wrong. It is the exact reverse of Bigges's final page: what the hundred and three colonists taken back aboard in June 1586 had seen and believed.
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Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589)
Published in 1589, the same year as Bigges's account, this monumental work gathers everything England could claim upon the seas: Cabot, Frobisher, Gilbert, Hawkins, Drake, the merchants of Muscovy and those of the Levant. Hakluyt writes to prove that a nation left out of the great carve-up now has its place. The volume allows the West Indian expedition to be set within the series it belongs to, and shows just how much this kind of raid then served in place of foreign policy.
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Garcilaso de la Vega, known as El Inca, Comentarios reales de los Incas (1609)
Lisbon, 1609. The mestizo of Cuzco, son of a conquistador and an Inca princess, wrote in Cordoba the great inward account of the destroyed empire. To be read as a counterpoint to the European accounts.
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Comentarios reales de los Incas, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, 1609 (1609)
The mestizo from Cuzco wrote in Córdoba, Spain, the history of the Inca empire seen from within. His mother was an Inca princess, his father a Spanish captain. The book, published four years after the completion of Lizárraga's manuscript, brings Cuzco back to life, its rituals, its languages, its sovereigns, with a nostalgia the Dominican does not share. The two texts, nearly contemporary, are two faces of the same landscape: one by a mestizo who claims the Incas as his own, the other by a religious who judges them.
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Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Histoire veridique de la conquete de la Nouvelle-Espagne (c. 1568)
Written around 1568. Cortes's old soldier recounts, sixty years after the events, the march on Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the meeting with Montezuma, the siege and fall of the Aztec capital. The memoir of a direct witness, written in a rough hewn language, that resonates with the Malouin's notebook through its visual precision.