A collection and translation of seventeenth-century narratives about Europeans travelling across the great Ocean Sea and encountering a people who had maintained an independent existence in the lowlands of Guatemala and Belize.

"It is exciting to have a translation of these important early documents finally available. Feldman is widely regarded as one of the foremost scholars in Central American ethnohistoric studies. His grasp of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish and paleography is superior, his translations are accurate and faithful to the documents while being understandable to the nonspecialist, and the amount of cultural, geographic, and economic information contained in these documents is amazing."--Karen Olsen Bruhns, San Francisco State University