Extracts from “The Admirable Adventures and Strange Fortunes of MASTER ANTONIE KNIVET, which went with MASTER THOMAS CANDISH in his Second Voyage to the South Sea, 1591,” published in _Purchas His Pilgrimes_, Part IV, lib. vi, c. 7. London, 1625. INTRODUCTION. Master Anthony Knivet joined the second expedition of Thomas Cavendish, which left England in August, 1591. He seems to have served on board the _Roebuck_, of which vessel one Cocke was captain. Nothing in his narrative enables us to identify this Cocke with the Abraham Cocke of Limehouse, who was “never heard of more” after he parted from Battell on the coast of Brazil in 1590, nor with the Abram Cocke who, according to Knivet, put in at the Ilha Grande in 1598, in the hope of making prizes of some of the richly-laden Spanish vessels returning from the Rio de la Plata. Battell, surely, may be supposed to have been acquainted with the fate of his old shipmate, whilst Knivet gives no hint that the Abram Cocke of the Ilha Grande was the captain of the _Roebuck_, to whom he was indebted for his life when Cavendish was about to throw him overboard in Magellan’s Strait. It is, however, just possible that there was but one Abraham Cock, who had not been heard of for some time when Battell returned to England about 1610.[263] When Cavendish returned from Magellan’s Strait, he put Knivet and nineteen other sick men ashore near St. Sebastian, to shift for themselves. Knivet was ultimately taken by the Portuguese; but they spared his life, and he became the “bond-slave” of Salvador Corrêa de Sá, the Governor of Rio de Janeiro; and apart from the time he spent among the cannibal Indians, and on a voyage to Angola, he remained with his master to the end, and returned with him to Portugal in 1599. My friend, Colonel G. Earl Church, to whom I applied for an opinion on the trustworthiness of Knivet’s statements with regard to Brazil, writes as follows:— “Yesterday morning I spent at the R. Geo. Soc., refreshing my memory of Knivet’s extraordinary adventures. One must read them always bearing in mind the romantic spirit of the age in which they were written, and the novel surroundings in which every adventurer found himself in the New World. Giving due weight to all this, I find Knivet’s relation of his voyages singularly truthful, so far as my knowledge of Brazil goes. What he states, excepting in two or three minor particulars, clashes with no geographical, descriptive, or historical point with which I am familiar, and he often throws in a sentence which relates to facts which no man could invent, and which makes his narrative impressive with truthfulness. I utterly discard Cavendish’s opinion of his men and companions for Cavendish appears to have been one of the most cold-blooded freebooters who ever cut a throat or raided a settlement or scuttled a prize.”