The earliest voyage collection to focus on the New World

Martyr d'Anghiera, Peter / Oviedo, Gonzalo / Ramusio, Giovanni et al. Libro primo della historia de l'Indie Occidentali. (Summario de la General Historia de I'Indie Occidentali ...).

€ 75,000.00

One of the earliest published attempts to assemble a group of travel and exploration accounts. This important collection of voyages and narratives is the work of several authors, although most bibliographers attribute it to Peter Martyr, a translation of whose work makes up the first section. The book was probably compiled for publication by Giovanni Ramusio of Venice (later famous for his much larger collection, "Delle navigationi et viaggi", which began publication in 1554). While only the Montalboddo collection precedes it as a group of voyage narratives outside Europe, this is the first collection to focus entirely on the New World.

The "Historia" is divided into three books: the first is made up of material from the "Decades" of Peter Martyr, drawn from the edition of 1530, the first complete edition to present all eight Decades. The second and most important part is drawn from the first published work of the great historian and chronicler of the early West Indies, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo's "De la Natural Hystoria de las Indias" (Toledo, 1526). Since that pioneering work of American natural history (a completely different book from Oviedo's later "Historia general") is virtually unobtainable today, the present 1534 publication is the only form in which the first work of Oviedo can be had. His observations are the first accurate reports of New World plants and animals, and he also provides one of the first accounts of Bermuda, where he tried to land while en route to Spain in 1515, only to be driven off by adverse winds. The distinction of being the first obtainable edition is also true of the third part, a translation of an anonymously written tract entitled La Conquista de Peru, first published in Seville, also in 1534, of which only three copies survive. It gives the text of the tract in full. Both are among the first published accounts of the conquest of Peru.

The woodcuts in the text, drawn from the work of Oviedo and made up by the Venetian printers, are some of the earliest published images of the New World based on actual experience, as opposed to the fantasies of European woodcut artists. There is also a handsome double-page woodcut map of Hispaniola, an extremely early piece of detailed New World cartography.