author

active 1570 Francisco de Sousa

A little-known Portuguese writer from Madeira, he left behind a vivid 1570 account of newly discovered islands and maritime exploration. His surviving work offers a rare glimpse of how the Atlantic world was being imagined during the age of discovery.

1 Audiobook

Tratado das Ilhas Novas

Tratado das Ilhas Novas

by active 1570 Francisco de Sousa

About the author

Francisco de Sousa is known as a sixteenth-century Portuguese author active around 1570. The surviving sources found here identify him as being from Madeira, and one edition describes him as a royal factor in the captaincy of Funchal.

He is remembered for Tratado das Ilhas Novas e descobrimento dellas e outras couzas, a work associated with 1570. Modern editions and library records present it as an account tied to newly discovered islands and Atlantic exploration, making it valuable both as travel writing and as an early historical document.

Very little firmly confirmed biographical detail appears to survive beyond those basic facts. Because of that, his reputation today rests mainly on this unusual work and the window it opens onto Portuguese expansion and geographical imagination in the late Renaissance.