The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. This 1861 volume contains a translation, preceded by an introductory essay, of a narrative by Pedro Simón (b. 1565) describing perhaps the most notorious of the many sixteenth-century expeditions of European soldiers of fortune into the unexplored areas of South America. A band of quarrelling and murderous booty-hunters, motivated by reports of the fabulous wealth of the Inca empire and legends of the golden land of El Dorado, was led by Lope de Aguirre, whose cruelty and treachery themselves became legendary.
