Peter Martyr d'Anghiera

Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, formerly known in English as Peter Martyr of Angleria, was a Savoyard historian at the service of Spain during the Age of Exploration. He wrote the first accounts of explorations in Central and South America in a series of letters and reports, grouped in the original Latin publications of 1511 to 1530 into sets of ten chapters called "decades". His Decades of the New World is of great value in the history of geography and discovery. He describes the first contacts of Europeans and Native American civilisations in the Caribbean, North America and Mesoamerica, and includes the first European reference to India rubber. The work was first translated into English in 1555, and in a fuller version in 1912.