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Cartography
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The First Separate Appearance Of Drake's Circumvigation And Las Casas En Frans
LAS CASAS, Bartolome. Histoire des Indes Occidentales ov l'on reconnoit la bonte ces pa & de leurs peoples; & les cruautez Tyrannique des Espagnols. Lyon, Jean Caffin & F. Plaignard, 1642.
8vo, (4) ff., 230 pp. Bound in contemporary French calf, spine with raised bands and red morocco title label gilt. Titles somewhat soiled, with early annotations (one scored on the Drake), closely cropped at top of Las Casas, with light waterstaining in lower corner; fine wormtracks in a handful of quires of Drake not affecting legibility, trimmed rather closely at top; generally good.
$11,500 Scarce French-language editions of two important travel narratives, Las Casas's excoriating account of the Spanish in the New World and an early edition of the first separate appearance of Drake's epoch-making voyage.
1) Written in 1539 and first published in Seville in 1552, Las Casas's Breuissima relacion de la destruycion de las Indias accused his countrymen of systemic brutality against the natives of the New World, providing ample material for the creation of an indelible image of Spanish atrocities in the European mind. "A most formidable weapon for any nation on ill terms with the Spaniards" (Church I.87), it circulated in numerous translations, first appearing in French as Tyrannies et cruautez des Espagnols (Antwerp, 1579). This Lyon edition is a reprint of a new Parisian translation done in 1635.
2) Scarce third edition of the first separate appearance of Drake's 1577-80 circumnavigation, a narrative that had previously appeared only in collections, first in Hakluyt's The Principall Navigations (1589; rev. 1598) and subsequently in De Bry. The text is a French translation based on Hakluyt's "Famous voyage of Sir Francis Drake into the South Seas" once ascribed to Francis Pretty but convincingly ascribed by Wagner to Hakluyt. Kraus singles out Le voyage cvrieux as "the best version of the Hakluyt narrative" (Drake, p. 81).
Hakluyt compiled his account from eyewitness sources, among them a manuscript report of the voyage by a disgruntled chaplain on board the Golden Hind, Francis Fletcher. The French text here by F. de Louvencourt, Sieur de Vauchelles (1568-1638) was undertaken both as a personal favor-one of the dedicatee's "subjets" accompanied Drake on the voyage-and of course to stimulate French exploration. The fact that the first separate publication appeared in French rather than English possibly reflects the semi-secrecy in which the circumnavigation was held in England owing to its basically piratical nature: "It is certain that English policy was to suppress detailed information on the voyage, probably because of its questionable, semi-piratical nature" (Kraus, Sir Francis Drake, p. 208).
A portion (90 pages) of the present work first appeared in 1613. The substantially augmented second edition of 1627 (entitled Le voyage de l'illustre seigneur et chevalier François Drach...) was reprinted line for line in 1641. Both the first and second editions are exceedingly rare on the market. Seven or eight recorded copies of the 1627 and 1641 editions include a map of Drake's voyage by Nicola van Sype (c. 1581); however, Kraus argues persuasively that the map was separately published in the late 16th century and merely inserted in a handful of copies of the Voyage by the publisher to augment the text, and as such is supplementary to the collation. The JCB Catalogue mentions a portrait of Drake, which is evidently also a later insertion not required by other bibliographies.
* 1) Sabin 11,272; Graesse II.60; European Americana 642/35 Streit I.486; Palau 46,964; JCB II.295.
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