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Illustrating A Tail of Intrigue in Brazil and Africa

Detailed map of the Atlantic Ocean and contiguous coasts, used by Vander Aa to illustrate a Dutch Translation of Antony Knivet's Voyage.

In all, Vander Aa issued 130 translations of important 15th, 16th and 17th Century Travel Narratives to America, Africa, and Asia, which were issued in 28 volumes in the early part of the 18th Century. Many of the narratives are either unobtainable or extremely rare in their original formats.  

Anthony Knivet

Anthony Knivet, also Anthony Knyvett or Antonie Knivet, was an English sailor who fell into Portuguese hands in Brazil, lived for a while with a native Brazilian tribe, and wrote about his adventures after his eventual return to Britain.

In 1591, Knivet joined English privateer Thomas Cavendish on a voyage to raid Portuguese holdings in Brazil. Cavendish was at the height of his fame, having completed a successful voyage around the world from 1586 to 1588.

After Cavendish's men had raided the town of Santos and destroyed several Portuguese sugar plantations, they traveled on and eventually left Knivet, who had developed frostbite in the Strait of Magellan, along with nineteen other sick or mutinous men, on the island of Ilhabela. He was captured by the Portuguese and was put to work as a slave on a sugar plantation. Later he was tasked with traveling inland and contacting natives in order to obtain more slaves. After a failed escape attempt, he was sent back to a plantation, where he attacked his owner and fled again. He met a native who had also fled from slavery, and together they made it to an indigenous Brazilian tribe of Tupí people, where they stayed for nine months.

Sold for metal tools back to the Portuguese, he was forced to work for the governor of Rio de Janeiro, Salvador Correia de Sá, o Velho. He managed to escape to West Africa (Congo and Angola). The Rio governor obtained his extradition to Brazil, and he then returned with the governor to Portugal, from where he finally made his way back to England in 1601. 

Upon return, Knivet wrote his memoir and sold it to Richard Hakluyt, who sold it on to Samuel Purchas. Purchas published an abbreviated version in his Purchas his Pilgrimes (1613) and a more complete version under the title "The Admirable Adventures and Strange Fortunes of Master Antonie Knivet, which went with Master Thomas Candish in his Second Voyage to the South Sea, 1591" in Purchas his Pilgrimes, part IV, book 6, chapter 7 (London 1625).