Abstract
IF one has a complaint against the editor and the producers of this important work, it is that the title is seriously misleading. Mr. C. U. Clark has provided a most informative introduction, and there is a very full index. The main body of the text, running to nearly 800 pages, is a translation of a manuscript in the Vatican. The original, written by Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa, for the Council of the Indies, was called a description of the Indies and dealt with all the Spanish territory in the New World as well as that in the Far East. We have here, therefore, a detailed account of a large part of North, Central and South America, the Philippines and Moluccas as well as what are now known as the West Indies, as it was about the year 1620.
Compendium and Description of the West Indies
Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa. Translated by Charles Upson Clark. (Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Volume 102, Pub. 3646.) Pp. xii + 862. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1942.)
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BAKER, J. Compendium and Description of the West Indies. Nature 153, 299 (1944). https://doi.org/10.1038/153299a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/153299a0