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This article takes a fresh approach to Walter Ralegh's published account of his voyage to Guiana, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana (1596), using it as a case study through which to explore the fragility of sixteenth-century processes of knowledge production about new lands. The article revisits this famous account in order to scrutinise in more detail the types of evidence Ralegh used to support his claims that a rich and powerful empire lay ready to be conquered by the English in the Amazon. This new analysis of Ralegh's narrative highlights the continued centrality of reputational models of authority in early modern travel literature and examines the types of evidence that could be employed by writers to support their suppositions when witness testimony was lacking. Ralegh's narrative illustrates that systems of knowledge production centred on the New World were, at the end of the sixteenth century, still in a state of flux. New ideas about what constituted credible knowledge, from firsthand experience to the collection of material artefacts, competed with older frameworks of authentication and authority. By examining knowledge production in frustration, and by dissecting Ralegh's failure to present a believable vision of El Dorado, this article throws into starker relief the many pitfalls and difficulties that beset those who attempted to present new and credible knowledge about the New World.

John Smith’s Generall Historie of Virginia (1624) was produced at a time when the English settlements in Virginia were in a perilous position. The English colonists were still reeling from an Indigenous attack in 1622 which had left hundreds of colonists dead and a number of settlements destroyed. Smith, while ostensibly producing a history of the early English settlements, also sought to provide a remedy to the dire circumstances his fellow Englishmen and women found themselves in. This article examines Smith’s argumentative strategy, arguing that it is reliant on recasting the colonial past both textually and visually. Moving beyond the current scholarship that has largely focused on narrow sections of the text, this article demonstrates the productive power of print in the early modern period, illustrating how the Generall Historie provoked new ideas about Indigenous people, their character, and how they should be approached by English colonists.

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