Abstract
THIS thick volume is a transcription of an unidentified manuscript found in the Vatican by Mr. C. U. Clark in 1930 and afterwards ascribed without any doubt to the Carmelite Fray Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa. Mr. Clark edited it and translated it into English, and this version appeared in 1942 as vol. 102 of the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections. It proved impossible to carry out the editor's original intention of publishing the Spanish text opposite the translation, and its appearance six years later cannot but be somewhat of an anti-climax to English readers. The work itself is a description, mainly geographical in the widest sense, of Central and South America and the Philippines, and it includes matter for the anthropologist, the botanist and the historian; however, the author does not claim special historical knowledge—in fact his remarks about the Inca Atahuallpa show less of knowledge than a desire to vindicate his countrymen. The editor considers that the greatest value of the work lies in the picture it gives of contemporary Spanish colonial and ecclesiastical administration at a period which is not adequately covered by other writers.
Compendio y descripción de las Indias occidentales
Por Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa. Transcrito del manuscrito original por Charles Upson Clark. (Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Vol. 108 : Publication 3898.) Pp. xii+801. (Washington, D.C. : Smithsonian Institution, 1948.) n.p.
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BUSHNELL, G. Compendio y descripción de las Indias occidentales. Nature 163, 467 (1949). https://doi.org/10.1038/163467b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/163467b0