Based on Theodor de Bry's 1590 edition of Thomas Hariot's book, this facsimile edition presents de Bry's engravings, based on John White's sixteenth-century watercolors, in their original hand-colored form. Accompanying the Latin facsimile is an English text.

It became for many Europeans their first glimpse of the American continent. Accompanying the Latin facsimile is an English text. The first section is modernized from earlier versions of the English, and the second part, which accompanies the plates, is newly translated from the original Latin. In addition to a valuable introduction, the book includes two illuminating essays. The first, by Karen Ordahl Kupperman, examines the early American settlement and tells how a collaboration between the writer and mathematician Thomas Hariot and the artist John White (later governor of the Roanoke Colony) evolved into a rich study not only of English colonial life but of the Indian culture and the natural resources of the region. The second essay, by Peter Stallybrass, uncovers new information in the much studied plates and presents an intriguing theory about the creation and importance of the engravings. This facsimile edition will appeal to students and scholars in several fields of study, from American history and ethnography to fine arts and the history of the book, and will provide the reader with the best illustration of the New World as it was first presented to the Old.