at
your conuenient leasure, your good testimony of my selfe and of my
trauailes therein, together with the infallible signes of your earnest
desire to doe mee good, which very lately, when I thought least thereof,
brake forth into most bountiful and acceptable effects: these
considerations haue throughly animated and encouraged me to present vnto
your prudent censure this my third and last volume also. The subiect and
matter herein contained is the fourth part of the world, which more
commonly then properly is called America: but by the chiefest Authors The
new world. New, in regard of the new and late discouery thereof made by
Christopher Colon, alias Columbus, a Genouois by nation, in the yere of
grace 1492. And world, in respect of the huge extension thereof, which to
this day is not throughly discouered, neither within the Inland nor in the
coast, especially toward the North and Northwest, although on the either
side it be knowen vnto vs for the space of fiue thousand leagues at the
least, compting and considering the trending of the land, and for 3000.
more on the backeside in the South Sea from the Streight of Magellan to
Cape Mendocino and Noua Albion. So that it seemeth very fitly to be called
A newe worlde. Howbeit it cannot be denied but that Antiquitie had some
kinde of dimme glimse, and vnperfect notice thereof. Which may appeare by
the relation of Plato in his two worthy dialogues of Timaeus and Critias
vnder the discourse of that mighty large yland called by him Atlantis,
lying in the Ocean sea without the Streight of Hercules, now called the
Straight of Gibraltar, being (as he there reporteth) bigger then Africa and
Asia: And by that of Aristotle in his booke De admirandis auditionibus of
the long nauigation of certaine Carthaginians, who sayling forth of the
aforesaid Streight of Gibraltar into the maine Ocean for the space of many
dayes, in the ende found a mighty and fruitfull yland, which they would
haue inhabited, but were forbidden by their Senate and chiefe gouernours.
Moreouer, aboue 300. yeeres after these wee haue the testimony of Diodorus
Siculus lib. 5 cap. 7. of the like mighty yland discouered in the Westerne
Ocean by the Tyrrheni, who were forbidden for certaine causes to inhabite
the same by the foresaid Carthaginians. And Senecca in his tragedie
intituled Medea foretold aboue 1500. yeeres past, that in the later ages
the Ocean would discouer new worlds, and that the yle of Thule would no
mo