Bernabe Cobo, Historia del Nuevo Mundo: a book finished in 1653 and first printed in 1892

A Jesuit who had spent most of his adult life between Peru and Mexico finished, in 1653, a survey of the Americas that runs from the cosmography down to how Andean farmers measured a short interval of time - the while it takes a pot of potatoes to cook. The manuscript went unprinted for nearly two and a half centuries. This entry reads the third tome of the first printing, Seville 1892.