Fray Ramon Pane's Relacion de las antiguedades de los indios (c. 1498)

The earliest surviving description of an American people written by a European, made on Hispaniola in the 1490s by a Hieronymite hermit ordered to learn the language. It preserves Taino cosmology by name, and survives only inside the biography of Columbus written by his son, as a single chapter. What makes it usable as evidence is that the friar keeps saying what he does not know — and, on the same pages, that the mission needs force and punishment and that the first man he baptised was killed.