SECOND EDITION 1598 



and mooveable Townes, as likewise of their food, apparell 

 and armour, and in setting downe their unmercifull 

 lawes, their fond superstitions, their bestiall lives, their 

 vicious maners, their slavish subjection to their owne 

 superiours, and their disdainfull and brutish inhumanitie 

 unto strangers, they deserve most exceeding and high 

 commendation. Howbeit if any man shall object that 

 they have certaine incredible relations : I answere, first, 

 that many true things may to the ignorant seeme in- 

 credible. But suppose there be some particulars which 

 hardly will be credited ; yet thus much I will boldly 

 say for the Friers, that those particulars are but few, 

 and that they doe not avouch them under their owne 

 names, but from the report of others. Yet farther, 

 imagine that they did avouch them, were they not to 

 be pardoned as well as Herodotus, Strabo, Plutarch, 

 Plinie, Solinus, yea & a great many of our new principall 

 writers, whose names you may see about the end of 

 this Preface ; every one of which hath reported more 

 strange things then the Friers between them both ? 

 Nay, there is not any history in the world (the most 

 Holy writ excepted) whereof we are precisely bound to 

 beleeve ech word and syllable. Moreover sithens these 

 two journals are so rare, that Mercator and Ortelius (as 

 their letters unto me do testifie) were many yeeres 

 very inquisitive, and could not for all that attaine unto 

 them ; and sithens they have bene of so great accompt 

 with those two famous Cosmographers, that according 

 to some fragments of them they have described in their 

 Mappes a great part of those Northeastern Regions ; 

 sith also that these two relations containe in some respect 

 more exact history of those unknowen parts, then all 

 the ancient and newe writers that ever I could set mine 

 eyes on : I thought it good, if the translation should 

 chance to swerve in ought from the originals (both for 

 the preservation of the originals themselves, and the 

 satisfying of the Reader) to put them downe word for 

 word in that homely stile wherein they were first 



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