4 America in English (1511)

This is an anonymous account of the strange new land Europeans found and the people who lived there. I have revised spelling to make the text legible, but I haven’t entirely rewritten the account, so it retains some of the wonder. The author implies that he saw all these wonders himself, but seems to have trouble distinguishing between information that seems likely to be true and claims we would now regard as mythical. This confusion might seem odd, since by 1511 when this account was first read by Englishmen, the Spanish and Portuguese had been operating in the New World for nearly two decades.

Here aforetimes in the year of our Lord god 1496 we with ships of Lisbon sailed out of Portugal through the commandment of the King Emanuel. So have we had our voyage. For by fortune islands over the great sea with great charge and danger so have we at the last found one lordship where we sailed well 900 miles by the coast of Selandes [Iceland?] there we at the last went aland but that land is not now known for there have no masters written thereof nor it knoweth. And it is named Armenica [America]. There we saw many wonders of beasts and fowls that we have never seen before. The people of this land have no king nor lord nor their god, but all things in common. The men and women have on their head, neck, arms, knees, and feet all with feathers bounden for their beauty and fairness. These folk live like beasts without any reasonableness. And they eat also one another. The man eats his wife [and] his children as we also have seen and they hang also the bodies or persons flesh in the smoke as men do with us, swine’s flesh. And that land is right full of folk for they live commonly 300 years and more as with sickness they die not. They take much fish for they can go under the water and so fetch the fishes out of the water. And they war also one upon another for the old men bring the young men thereto that they gather a great company thereto of two parties and come the one against the other to the field of battle and slay one the other with great heaps. And now holding the field, they take the other prisoners. And they bring them to death and eat them and as the dead is eaten then flay [skin] they the rest. And they are then eaten also. Otherwise live they longer times and many years more than other people for they have costly spices and roots where they themself recover with and heal them as they be sick.

Source: “First Printed Account of America in English” (1511). Edward Arber, The First Three English Books on America (London, 1885), xxvii., American History Told By Contemporaries, Alfred Bushnell Hart, 1897. 72. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.45493/page/n91/mode/2up