Account of the Antiquities of the Indians

With Columbus on his second voyage to the New World in 1494 was a young friar named Ramon Pane. The friar's assignment was to live among the 'Indians' whom Columbus had 'discovered' on the island of Hispaniola in order to learn their language and write a record of their lives and beliefs. The culture of these Indians is now extinct - the native population had all but disappeared by 1530 - and the material remnants of their society have only in the last year been 'rediscovered' at locations in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. The written record produced by Pane, however, has survived and is now, for the first time, being published in English as a coherent and independent text in its own right, complete with the latest anthropological research on these early people. Edited by the noted Hispanist Jose Juan Arrom, this current edition is the only surviving direct source of information about the myths, ceremonies, and lives of the New World inhabitants whom Columbus first encountered. Pane's pioneering account contains many linguistic and cultural observations: descriptions of the Indians' healing rituals and their beliefs about their souls after death. He provides the first known account of the use of tobacco and recounts the use of idols in ritual ceremonies. The names, functions, and attributes of native gods, the mythological origin of the aboriginal people's attitudes toward sex and gender, and their rich stories of creation are described as well. With this new edition, Pane's remarkable and unapologetic examination of an indigenous people will enlighten English-speaking students of history, Latin America, and anthropology. Fray Ramon Pane, a self-described "poor friar of the Order of Saint Jerome," arrived in Hispanola with Christopher Columbus in 1494 where he spent the next two years living with and recording the lives of its indigenous inhabitants. Jose Juan Arrom is Professor Emeritus of Latin American Literature at Yale University and the author of numerous books, including Imaginacion del Nuevo Mundo. Susan Griswold is Professor of Foreign Languages at Wofford College in South Carolina and is the translator of The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature.