Books

11 parts in 3 volumes. Exquisitely bound set of the Latin edition of one of the finest works on the Americas. The work is very rare. It is especially exceptional to find a set that contains multiple parts. The present set, however, contains eleven parts, including hundreds of beautifully engraved maps and plates. The beautiful binding was made by the so-called Double Drawer Handle Bindery, active in Amsterdam between 1697 and 1742(?), which was known for binding many multi-volume and large-size works. This remarkable work is responsible for shaping the European image of the New World in the 16th and 17th centuries. Although travel narratives were incredibly popular at the time and were published at a staggering pace, very few of them were illustrated. The present work, which is a collection of multiple important travel accounts on the Americas, allowed readers to see for the first time what these travellers described. The plates depict the Native American people and their culture, shaping European iconography of them for more than a century after. The first two parts of the work are devoted to Virginia, the Carolinas, and Florida. They provide an account of the first attempts of the British and French to colonise the New World. The engravings are some of the best ethnographic documents of Native American life in the 16th century. The third part is made up of two accounts related to Brazil and includes one of the first detailed accounts of South American indigenous peoples. Parts 4, 5, and 6 are made up of Girolamo Benzoni's Historia de Mondo Nuevo (1565), an important history of the Spanish conquest of the West Indies. Part 8 includes travel accounts by Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, and Thomas Cavendish. Part 9 consists of important accounts relating to Latin America and the Pacific, including the work of José de Acosta and the Pacific voyages of Olivier van Noort and Sebald de Weert. The final two parts include travel accounts by Amerigo Vespucci, and Willem Schouten, who discovered the Le Maire Strait and Cape Horn. The maps in the work show various parts of North and South America. The map of Virginia in the first part is considered "One of the most significant cartographical milestones in colonial North American history. It was the most accurate map drawn in the sixteenth century of any part of that continent." This is the first map to focus on Virginia (now largely North Carolina), and records the first English attempts at colonisation in the New World" (Burden 76). The map of Florida, in the second part, is remarkable because it was based on native sources rather than French ones. Although it is not very accurate, it became quite influential, because Hondius used it in his atlas in 1606. The other maps in the work show South America, the West Indies, Mexico, the Americas, Guiana, the Strait of Magellan, and Tierra del Fuego. The different parts of The Voyages were published over the course of nearly half a century. Because of this, the first parts of the series ran out of print while the later parts were still being issued. New editions of the earlier parts were then quickly republished, often assembled from remnants of earlier issues. As a result, no two sets of the work are the same. Each set is a combination of languages, editions and issues, and none of them can be said to be "complete". The title pages and engravings of the present set mostly correspond to the second issue of the first edition. It is largely in Latin, but contains a German map in part 8. It contains all the engraved plates that are present in other copies. The digitised copy of the University of Genève includes three maps (in part 10 and 11) that are not present in our copy. However, they seem to be missing from other copies as well. With the bookplate of Gladys Robinson mounted on the front pastedown of the first volume, and a Dutch manuscript message to the binder on the back of the map in part 8. The work is slightly browned throughout, with some l.