World geographies

In this category we find the earliest description of the coasts of the New World by an English writer, Roger Barlow, presented in the form of a manuscript geography to Henry VIII. Naturally, as a consequence of its early composition in 1540 the references to Peru are few in number, but already indicative of the trend others would follow. The work is essentially a translation of Martín Fernández de Enciso's Suma de geographia (Seville: 1519), to which Barlow has made additions with particular reference to the region of the rivers Plate and Paraná. This is an area he was one of the first Englishmen to visit in 1526, as supercargo in the expedition of Sebastian Cabot diverted from its aim of reaching the East Indies by rumours of precious metals in the interior of South America. Therefore, supported by personal observation of native women wearing ornaments of gold and silver, knowledge of the progress of Spanish exploration southwards from Panama along South Sea coasts, and the reports of survivors from the expedition of Juan Díaz de Solís to the River Plate a decade previously, Barlow sketches out the description of a ‘sierra or mount where they say is a king where is a great abundance of gold and silver’, ruled by a monarch whose ‘vessels and stoles that he sitteth on is of gold and sylver’. ‘This lond’ he continues, ‘and the lond of Pirro, wch is in the southside that the Spaniards have dyscovered of late, is all one lond, wheras thei had so grete riches of gold and sylver’ (162). Barely was Pizarro's conquest complete, when these were the tantalising ingredients that would shape the lure of Peru for Englishmen drawn to its remote coasts during the coming centuries. The artful interweaving of legend and fact would be confirmed by tales of a fabulously wealthy ‘white king’, the arrival of Atahualpa's ransom in Spain, the pillaging of Cuzco's Temple of the Sun and the discovery in 1545 of a mountain of silver at Potosí.

The earliest offering of the next century was the first English translation of Giovanni Botero's Le relationi universali (Rome: 1591). At once a popular text, it was soon followed by several enlarged, revised editions.