Martyr, Peter, et al | The first collection to focus entirely on the New World

Martyr, Peter, Gonzalo Oviedo, and Giovanni Ramusio

[Summario de la General Historia de I'Indie Occidentali...(title given on verso of first leaf)]. Venice: 1534

15 leaves (151x203 mm), double-sheet map, woodcut illustrations in text; title leaf and first leaf of text remargined, not affecting text, slight dampstaining in upper corner of first 34 leaves, closed tear to leaf 56, two small burn holes in map, not affecting any printed area, occasional contemporary ink notations in margins. Contemporary full vellum, manuscript title to spine; neat bookplate to front pastedown, old bookseller's label on rear pastedown, contemporary ownership signature on front free endpaper, manuscript start of an index on rear fly leaf.

The earliest voyage collection focusing on the New World.

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 present volume is one of the first attempts anywhere to assemble a group of accounts of travel and exploration. It was probably amassed for publication by the Venetian, Giovanni Ramusio, later famous for his much larger collection, Navigationi..., which began publication in 1554. 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 part 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 (which is 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.

Oviedo's observations are the first accurate reports of New World plants and animals. 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 are both drawn from the work of Oviedo and made up by the Venetian printers. They 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.

REFERENCE:

European Americana 534/28; Harrisse 190; Church 69; Arents 3; JCB (3)I:114; Sabin 1565; Streeter Sale 13