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 The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. The Canary Islands have been known to European countries since the Roman era. In 1402, the kingdom of Castile sent an expeditionary force, led by French explorers Jean de Béthencourt (1362-1425) and Gadifer de la Salle (1340-1415), to conquer the islands. This volume, first published in English in 1872, contains a contemporary account of the conquest written by Pierre Bontier and Jean Le Verrier, both members of the expedition; it contains valuable details of the indigenous inhabitants of the islands.
Excerpt from The Canarian, or Book of the Conquest and Conversion of the Canarians in the Year It is a remarkable fact that in the proud list of the glories of noble France there is one class of achievements for which she has claimed more, and at the same time received less, honour than she really deserves. She has put forth a claim to having preceded even Prince Henry of Portugal in lifting the veil from the Sea of Darkness, the mysterious Atlantic, and in colonising the west coast of Africa; but although the most illustrious of her claimants to this distinction, the learned M. d'Avezac, still clings lovingly to his patriotic convictions on this head, the present writer has already demonstrated that that claim can by no means be maintained. At the same time France is very far from having received the amount of honour which is her due for the boldness of her maritime explorations at a somewhat later but still very early period. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Translated and Edited, with the fifteenth-century French text. Includes title used by Galien de Bethencourt in his manuscript of 1625: Le Canarien; ou, Livre de la conqueste et conversion faicte des Canariens à la foy et religion catholique apostolique et romaine en l'an 1402: par Messire Jehan de Bethencourt ... Composé par Pierre Bontier ... et Jean Le Verrier. Based upon the Bergeron edition collated, by M. d'Avezac, with an early manuscript in the possession of Madame de Mont Ruffet. French text at foot of page.The supplementary material consists of the 1870 and 1871 annual reports. This is a new print-on-demand hardback edition of the volume first published in 1872.
“Old maps lead you to strange and unexpected places, and none does so more ineluctably than the subject of this book: the giant, beguiling Waldseemüller world map of 1507.” So begins this remarkable story of the map that gave America its name. For millennia Europeans believed that the world consisted of three parts: Europe, Africa, and Asia. They drew the three continents in countless shapes and sizes on their maps, but occasionally they hinted at the existence of a "fourth part of the world," a mysterious, inaccessible place, separated from the rest by a vast expanse of ocean. It was a land of myth—until 1507, that is, when Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann, two obscure scholars working in the mountains of eastern France, made it real. Columbus had died the year before convinced that he had sailed to Asia, but Waldseemüller and Ringmann, after reading about the Atlantic discoveries of Columbus’s contemporary Amerigo Vespucci, came to a startling conclusion: Vespucci had reached the fourth part of the world. To celebrate his achievement, Waldseemüller and Ringmann printed a huge map, for the first time showing the New World surrounded by water and distinct from Asia, and in Vespucci’s honor they gave this New World a name: America. The Fourth Part of the World is the story behind that map, a thrilling saga of geographical and intellectual exploration, full of outsize thinkers and voyages. Taking a kaleidoscopic approach, Toby Lester traces the origins of our modern worldview. His narrative sweeps across continents and centuries, zeroing in on different portions of the map to reveal strands of ancient legend, Biblical prophecy, classical learning, medieval exploration, imperial ambitions, and more. In Lester’s telling the map comes alive: Marco Polo and the early Christian missionaries trek across Central Asia and China; Europe’s early humanists travel to monastic libraries to recover ancient texts; Portuguese merchants round up the first West African slaves; Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci make their epic voyages of discovery; and finally, vitally, Nicholas Copernicus makes an appearance, deducing from the new geography shown on the Waldseemüller map that the earth could not lie at the center of the cosmos. The map literally altered humanity’s worldview. One thousand copies of the map were printed, yet only one remains. Discovered accidentally in 1901 in the library of a German castle it was bought in 2003 for the unprecedented sum of $10 million by the Library of Congress, where it is now on permanent public display. Lavishly illustrated with rare maps and diagrams, The Fourth Part of the World is the story of that map: the dazzling story of the geographical and intellectual journeys that have helped us decipher our world.
