Kort Berättelse om Wäst Indien eller America, Som elliest kallas Nya Werlden.
[Wisingsborg/Visingsborg (Visingsö)]: [s.n. (Johan Kankel, for Per Brahe)], 1675. First edition. Later leather binding with gilt title on spine, preserved in a modern red cloth case. [2] 42 pp. Some contemporary marginal annotations. Small restoration to C2–3 at the lower margin, not affecting the text. Paper lightly tanned with minor foxing. Otherwise a very good copy.
Scarce early Swedish Americana, the first printed Swedish account of North America’s indigenous peoples.
An exceptionally rare Swedish Americana, printed at the private press of Count Per Brahe the Younger at Wisingsborg (Visingsö) and issued by Johan Kankel, printer to the Brahe estate. The work is an anonymous geographical and ethnographic account of the Americas and has been identified as the first printed description of the North American Indians in the Swedish language (Jansson, n.d.).
The text opens with a brief historical and geographical overview of the discovery of America, followed by short sections on Bermuda and Virginia, before turning to its principal focus: South America.
The chapter on Virginia (pp. 7–12) is partly based, among other sources, on John Smith’s A Map of Virginia (1612). Shaped by Smith’s colonizing aims, the Swedish adaptation preserves elements of English promotional writing, presenting Virginia as an English-held territory with a favorable portrayal of climate, fertility, habitability, and general agricultural potential.
The Indigenous people described in this chapter are the Susquehannocks (pp. 9; 10–11), regarded as allies of New Sweden (Jansson, n.d.). The section contains ethnographic material, including brief descriptions of settlement patterns, subsistence practices, material culture, religious rites, bodily ornamentation, and the Susquehannock terms for the five seasons of the year: Pananow, Catapeuck, Cohattayough, Nephinough, and Taqvitock (p. 9).
The largest part of the work is devoted to South America, with regional sections on Terra Firma (New Granada), Venezuela (New Andalucia), Guiana, the Amazon region, Brazil, Paraguay and the Río de la Plata, Tucumán, Chile, Peru, and the southern extremities of the continent, including the Strait of Magellan. The treatment throughout is descriptive and regional, emphasizing location, climate, natural resources, fertility, and political possession.
Bibliographically, the work has long been associated with Michael Hemmersam, a German craftsman in the service of the Dutch East India Company, whose voyages of 1639–1645 were first published at Nuremberg in the 1640s. Although this Swedish printing has traditionally been regarded as a fragmentary extraction from that voyage literature, closer analysis shows it to be composite in origin, incorporating material from multiple sources. Sabin described the work as “one of the scarcest of the Swedish typographical productions of the seventeenth century on America.”
The printing is generally attributed to Johan Kankel, whom Count Peter Brahe brought from Pomerania to establish and operate his private press at Wisingsborg. Bibliographical sources record only twenty-eight works produced at this press, all issued in very small editions and now rare. This title is among the earliest American-related productions of the Wisingsborg press and ranks among the earliest printed Swedish Americana.
Almqvist, 28; Larson Swedish Commentators on America no. 51; Sabin, 38244
Reference: Jansson, S. (n.d.). Susquehannockerna. In Etnografi i Nordamerika: Ursprungsbefolkningen – Nordamerikas indianer och eskimåerna.
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Price: €8,000.00