South America – Conquista del Peru – Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Gonzalo. – Cronica de las Indias: La hystoria general de las Indias agora nueuamente impressa corregida y emendada:

Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (August 1478 – 1557), commonly known as Oviedo, was a Spanish soldier, historian, writer, botanist and colonist. Oviedo participated in the Spanish colonization of the West Indies, arriving in the first few years after Christopher Columbus became the first European to arrive at the islands in 1492. Oviedo’s chronicle Historia general de las Indias, forms one of the few primary sources about it, and introduced Europeans to the hammock, the pineapple, and tobacco as well as creating influential representations of the colonized peoples of the region. It is through the Historia that Europeans came to learn about the hammock, pineapple, tobacco, and barbecue, among other things used by the Native Americans that he encountered. The first illustration of a pineapple is credited to him. The Historia, though written in a diffuse style, furnishes a mass of information collected at first hand. With many interesting woodcuts like canoe o waka, differents forms of houses, different tools, plants, fuit-trees, different forms of cactus, pineapple etc. The second part is: CONQUISTA DEL PERU. Verdadera relacíon dela conquista el Peru y provincia del Cuzco llamada la nueva Castilla. Conquistada por Francisco picarro…Embiada a su magestad por Francisco de Xerez …Fue vista y examinada esta obra por mandado delos señores Inquisidores. With a beautiful title-woodcut, complet. – Missing Folios XLVII, LXVI, LXXI, CXXI and CLIII. The numbers for Folio LXXVI and CLXXX used twice. The copy was washed and some pages with small restaurations, folio LVII lower right corner supplemented with loose of some letters, also the last page. A couple of pages browned and a bit stained. Newly bound with new endpapers. – Even with this defects, still a desire-able copy of this extremely rare oeuvre.