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 The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. The Canary Islands have been known to European countries since the Roman era. In 1402, the kingdom of Castile sent an expeditionary force, led by French explorers Jean de Béthencourt (1362-1425) and Gadifer de la Salle (1340-1415), to conquer the islands. This volume, first published in English in 1872, contains a contemporary account of the conquest written by Pierre Bontier and Jean Le Verrier, both members of the expedition; it contains valuable details of the indigenous inhabitants of the islands.

Translated and Edited, with the fifteenth-century French text. Includes title used by Galien de Bethencourt in his manuscript of 1625: Le Canarien; ou, Livre de la conqueste et conversion faicte des Canariens à la foy et religion catholique apostolique et romaine en l'an 1402: par Messire Jehan de Bethencourt ... Composé par Pierre Bontier ... et Jean Le Verrier. Based upon the Bergeron edition collated, by M. d'Avezac, with an early manuscript in the possession of Madame de Mont Ruffet. French text at foot of page.The supplementary material consists of the 1870 and 1871 annual reports. This is a new print-on-demand hardback edition of the volume first published in 1872.

Excerpt from The Canarian, or Book of the Conquest and Conversion of the Canarians in the Year It is a remarkable fact that in the proud list of the glories of noble France there is one class of achievements for which she has claimed more, and at the same time received less, honour than she really deserves. She has put forth a claim to having preceded even Prince Henry of Portugal in lifting the veil from the Sea of Darkness, the mysterious Atlantic, and in colonising the west coast of Africa; but although the most illustrious of her claimants to this distinction, the learned M. d'Avezac, still clings lovingly to his patriotic convictions on this head, the present writer has already demonstrated that that claim can by no means be maintained. At the same time France is very far from having received the amount of honour which is her due for the boldness of her maritime explorations at a somewhat later but still very early period. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.