The present volume, which has been selected for issue by the Hakluyt Society, contains the Second Part of the Chronicle of Peru, by Pedro de Cieza de Leon. The First Part formed one of the Society's volumes for 1864, having been translated from the Antwerp edition of 1554.

When I translated and edited the First Part, no other had been printed. I then had reason to believe that the author completed the second and third parts of his Chronicle, and that one of these parts had come into the possession of Mr. Lenox of New York, in manuscript. I lamented the disappearance of the Second Part, and referred to it as one of the greatest losses that had been sustained by South American literature.

It has now been discovered that the manuscript narrative which Mr. Prescott frequently refers to, in his History of the Conquest of Peru, as “Sarmiento”, and which he considered to be one of the most valuable of his authorities, is in reality the Second Part of the work of Cieza de Leon. Mr. Prescott quotes the title in his critical notice, “para el Illmo Señor Dn. Juan Sarmiento, Presidente del Consejo Rl. de Indias”, and assumes that this Don Juan Sarmiento was the author, who, after having travelled in all parts of Peru and diligently collected information from the Ynca nobles, subsequently became President of the Council of the Indies. In reality, the word para means “for”, and not “by”, and the manuscript is simply addressed to Dr. Sarmiento, who never crossed the Atlantic in his life, and who only held the post of President of the Council of the Indies for twenty months.