De Bry’s Gran Voyages is the most significant collection of voyages to the Americas of the 16th century, both for the quantity of accounts and especially for the copious amount of maps and plates that illustrate it. The book was issued in parts, each one dealing with specific voyages of exploration and regions. This meant that sets could be found with a variety of parts, often grouped by the areas or proximity in years of publication. The present set contains eleven parts, making one of the largest possible, it includes hundreds of beautifully engraved maps and plates.

The Grand Voyages, though its considerable complement of illustrations, could be said to be responsible for largely shaping the European perception of the New World in the 16th and 17th centuries. The engravings that illustrate it, although sometimes somewhat free to an artistic and even poetic interpretation by the artists commissioned to illustrate the accounts, are often the first illustrations of the peoples, local inhabitants, cities, costumes, harbors, skirmishes, etc., that they represent, and are thus invaluable to us for our understanding of the cultural transmission and developing of the European mindset regarding the Americas.

Travel narratives were, understandably, incredibly popular at the time and were published at a staggering pace, however very few of them were illustrated, and those which were, are incomparably less illustrated than De Bry’s.

The first two parts of the work are devoted to Virginia, the Carolinas, and Florida, these include the accounts of the first attempts of the British and French to colonies the New World, including White and Le Moyne. The engravings are some of the best ethnographic documents of Native American life in the 16th century. The third part is made up of two accounts related to Brazil and includes one of the first detailed accounts of South American indigenous peoples, it is largely Hans Staden’s account. Parts 4, 5, and 6 include Girolamo Benzoni's Historia del Mondo Novo, a fundamental history of the Spanish conquest of the West Indies. Part 7 is Ulrich Schmidel’s account of the River Plate and the Parana region. Part 8 includes the travel accounts of the English Sir Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, and Thomas Cavendish. Part 9 consists of important accounts relating to Latin America and the Pacific, including the work of José de Acosta and the Pacific voyages of Olivier van Noort and Sebald de Weert. The final two parts include travel accounts by Amerigo Vespucci, and Willem Schouten, who discovered the Le Maire Strait and Cape Horn.

The maps show various parts of North and South America: the map of Virginia in the first part is “One of the most significant cartographical milestones in colonial North American history. It was the most accurate map drawn in the sixteenth century of any part of that continent… This is the first map to focus on Virginia (now largely North Carolina), and records the first English attempts at colonisation in the New World” (Burden 76). The map of Florida, in the second part, is remarkable because it was based on native sources rather than French ones. Although it is not very accurate, it became quite influential, because Hondius used it in his atlas in 1606. The map in the third part is a full rendering of South America, from the Caribbean to the southern tip of the Continent, shows South America in a somewhat potato shape, and is visually striking for the richness of detail and decoration. The fourth, fifth and sixth parts contain a map of the Caribbean and Southern United States boasting a large Cuba, a map of the Americas (both North and South America), again richly engraved with significant decoration and a map of Mexico. The eighth part is Raleigh’s map of Guiana, a fantastical image with fantastical beast and humanoid figures with mouths on their chest, largely embedded in popular culture. Part X has no maps as usual, although some copies do, and part XI and Addenda with several maps in text of the Strait of Magellan, and Tierra del Fuego.

Theodor de Bry:

Engraver and editor Theodor de Bry (1528-1598) was born in Liège, but was banished after he became a Protestant. He moved to Frankfurt am Main, where he established an engraving and publishing empire. A meeting with the great English geographer Richard Hakluyt in London inspired him to work on an illustrated collection of voyages, which he subsequently published in both Latin and German. He completed the first part in 1590 and went on to publish five further parts before his death in 1598, this is when his heirs Johann Theodor and Johann Israel took over the task of completing the work. They issued parts 7 and 8 in 1599, and part 9 in 1602: this is the reason why many sets contain only the first 6, or the first 9 parts, not the case here, incorporating two later parts, 10 and 11. The final parts were published between 1619 and 1634. The Latin edition has 13 parts in total and the German 14.

De Bry's Heirs also published another collection of voyages, however dedicated to Africa and the East Indies, today known as The Small voyages (1599-1628), which consisted of 12 parts.

Overall, the totality of the parts that compose the ‘Grand Voyages’ were published over the course of nearly half a century. Because of this, the first parts of the series ran out of print while the later parts were still being issued; these later editions were printed on lesser stock of paper, and are usually found more browned and spotted. New editions of the earlier parts were then republished, often assembled from remnants of earlier issues. As a result, no two sets of the work are the same. Almost every single set is a combination of editions and issues, and none of them can be said to be ‘complete’, as it was an idiosyncratic decision to compile them all or not.

The title pages and engravings of the present set mostly correspond to the second issue of the first edition. It is entirely in Latin, except for the map in part 8, which is in German. It contains all the engraved plates that are present in other copies. Part X and XI does not include the maps mentioned by Crawford, however most copies appear not to have the maps either, and perhaps an addition to some copies only, like the copy of the University of Genève.

Provenance: Gladys Robinson, her bookplate on front pastedown of the first volume; Dutch manuscript message to the binder on the back of the map in part 8.

Cat. of John Carter Brown Library, I, p.382-414; Church p.316-404; Huth p.404-418; Camus, A. G., Mémoire sur la collection des Grands et petits voyages, p.1-181; Sabin 8784; Stillwell, M., Incunabula and Americana p. 76-77; cf. Alexander, M., (ed.), Discovering the New World, based on the works of Theodore de Bry; Burden 76, 79, 80, 83, 91, 130, 131 (maps); Storm van Leeuwen I, pp. 228-284 (binding).