The first Portuguese to write on Brazil was Pero Vaz de Caminha in his famous letter to King Manoel, 1 May 1500 (translated in The Voyages of Pedro Alvares Cabral to Brazil and India, Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser., vol. 81, London, 1937, 3–33). Later in the sixteenth century we have the valuable chronicles of Gabriel Soares de Sousa, Tratado descriptivo do Brasil em 1587 (São Paulo, 1938), and Pero de Magalhães de Gandavo’s Tratado da terra do Brasil and Historia da provincia de Santa Cruz (1576), translated by John B. Stetson, Jr., The Histories of Brazil, 2 vols. (New York, 1922). Essential material is in letters from Nóbrega, Anchieta and other Jesuits, best consulted in Serafim Leite’s excellent collection Cartas dos primeiros Jesuitas do Brasil, 3 vols. (São Paulo, 1954–8), or, with a fourth volume, Monumenta Brasiliae (Monumenta Historica Societatis Jesu, 79–81, 87; Rome, 1956–60); for the entire period, the same author’s monumental tenvolume Historia da Companhia de Jesus no Brasil (Lisbon–Rio de Janeiro, 1938–50) is of fundamental importance, and he published a good summary of this in Suma histórica da Companhia de Jesus no Brasil (Lisbon, 1965); there are also anthologies of José de Anchieta’s writings, of which the best is edited by António de Alcântara Machado (Rio de Janeiro, 1933). A good Jesuit chronicler is Fernão Cardim, whose Do clima e terra do Brasil and Do principio e origem dos Indios do Brasil (c. 1584) survived only in Richard Hakluyt’s English translation of the captured originals, in Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes (London, 1625).