ANGHIERA, Pietro Martire d' (Peter Martyr); Gonzalo Oviedo; Giovanni Ramusio.

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Summario de la generale historia de l'Indie Occidentali. 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 earliest attempts to assemble a group of accounts of travel and exploration. It was most likely assembled for publication by the Venetian Giovanni Ramusio, later famous for his much larger collection Navigationi, which began publication in 1554.The Summario is divided into three books. The first part comprises material from the Decades of Peter Martyr, drawn from the edition of 1530, the first complete publication 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: De la Natural Hystoria de las Indias (Toledo, 1526), which presented the first accurate reports of New World plants and animals. As that pioneering work of American natural history - 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 obtained. Oviedo 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 tr

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