History of the New World

The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. This volume, published in 1857, contains Girolamo Benzoni's History of the New World, originally published in Venice in 1565. The book is not only a history of the New World since Columbus' discovery but an account of what Benzoni himself saw, when 'being like many others anxious to see the world, and hearing of those countries of the Indians, recently found, called by everybody the New World, I determined to go there'. It includes severe criticism of the Spanish colonists' treatment of the indigenous inhabitants.