Pedro de Cieza de León, Parte primera de la chronica del Peru (Seville, 1553)

A soldier who left Spain before he was thirteen and spent seventeen years marching through the Indies wrote down what he saw, and the first part was printed at Seville in 1553 under royal privilege. It surveys Peru province by province, and carries the Inca road, the four-league relay of storehouses and the quipu as a working audit — set beside the wars, the burnings, and the reason the Andean peoples gave for rising.