Preface.

How these Letters of Mr Vander Neck fell into my hands, it imports the public but little to know. Some of my readers may perhaps view the following account of the Cessares in much the same light with Sir T. More's UTOPIA, rather as what a good man would wish a nation to be, than the true account of the state of one really existing. I shall leave, for an exercise of the Reader's ingenuity, the determination of this point, after only mentioning, that if he pleases to consult Ovalle's Account of Chili in the third volume of Churchill's Collection of Voyages; Feuillée's Observations on South America; and Martinière's Dictionaire Géographique, he will find, that there is really a people called the Cessares, in a country near the high mountains, Cordilleras de los Andes, between Chili and Patagonia in South America, in the forty-third or forty-fourth degree of south latitude. They are quite different from the Indians of those parts, and seem to be Europeans, according to the accounts which historians of the best credit give us. That their country is very pleasant and fruitful, bounded on the west by a great river, which runs very swift. That the sound of bells has been heard there, and linnen been seen spread out to whiten in their fields, as practised by the Dutch in Holland.