ABSTRACT
VERY little is known about Hans Staden except the story of his voyages and captivity among the Tupi Indians of Brazil. He was born at Homberg in Hesse, where his parents had settled, and later when he returned from the New World he was living at Wolfhagen, not far from Cassel. Of his youth nothing is reported. He appears to have had some kind of education, after which he was trained as a gunner, and when still a young man, with the call of the New World upon him, he sailed early in 1547 from Holland for Lisbon in the hope of finding employment in one of the Portuguese ships sailing for America. Lisbon at that time had a German colony of its own, for the Welsers and Fuggers had their factors there, and Germans were freely recruited through the great commercial factory at Antwerp to serve as gunners in the Portuguese ships. Staden found a German inn at Lisbon where he lodged and where he must have encountered many of his country-men, but when he arrived the King’s ships had left. His host, however, procured him employment in a vessel which was about to depart, carrying a cargo of convicts to Brazil, and some time in June 1547 he set sail. The captain had been ordered to seize any ships which were poaching on the Portuguese preserves off the African coast, and to attack French interlopers in Brazil, and after taking a prize and encountering heavy weather they reached Pernambuco on January 28, 1548. Staden’s first five chapters describe his voyage out, his adventures in the
The rest of his book is taken up with the account of his second voyage, his captivity among the savages, and his final escape.
