In the second part of his work Great Voyages (1591) the engraver, printer and publisher Theodor de Bry (1528-1598) evokes the adventures of a French Calvinist group that commanded by captain Jean Ribault and the explorer Rene Laudonniere attempted, between the years of 1562 and 1565, to settle in the Florida peninsula. The encounters with the Timucua indians, the intervention of the Spanish troops led by the first Spanish governor of Florida, Pedro Menendez de Aviles, and the subsequent slaughter of almost all the French settlers, are the predominant elements of an episode of the European...

Usos y costumbres de los salvajes de Virginia (Uses and Customs of the Savages of Virginia) is the first edition in Spanish of a fundamental work, published more than 4 Centuries ago, in Latin, German, French and English. It is the oldest chronicle written by a pioneering traveller and illustrated by a painter also travelling with him, about the first territory of the future British Colonies in North America The mathematician Tomas Hariot, author of A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia: of the Commodities and of the Nature and Manners of the Natural Inhabitants was a...

Amerigo Vespucci's reputation today is intertwined by a long and passionate controversy: is indeed this Florentine navigator and astronomer known solely because he left his name to the New World? Is AMERICA the aptly named as some historians say, or can it be that Vespucci snatched a better deserved glory to Christopher Columbus? The purpose of this edition of his complete works (Family Letters, Lettera and Mundus Novus) is to demonstrate that this sterile discussion has clouded the essential fact, that is the historical and literary impact of travel narrations in the early sixteenth century....