Francisco López de Gómara: A Father of Alternative Archaeology?

A few weeks back, I wrote about Francisco López de Gómara, the Spanish historian who was the first to propose that the Americas were the same as Plato's Atlantis. When I wrote my original blog post, I explained that I had been unable to find an English translation of Gómara's work, the Historia general da las Indias (1552). Fortunately, I discovered that there is an English translation of the relevant chapter, ch. 220! Unfortunately, it was done in 1555 and is difficult to read. I've now adapted that translation with modern spelling and have fully annotated it to explicate Gómara's astonishingly rich allusions to ancient literature.

Gómara was quite possibly the early modern father of alternative history. In addition to the passage on Atlantis, he also had this whopper from chapter 10, in which he states that the Indians who arrived in Germany in 60 BCE (whom I discussed recently) were in fact Inuit from Labrador who had "deceived" the Romans by having dark skin like people from India:

But to sail from India to Caliz by the other part of the north by a clime and regions of extreme cold, should be doubtless a difficult and dangerous thing, wherof is no memory among the old authors saving only of one ship as Pliny and Mela do write, rehearsing the testimony of Cornelius Nepos who affirmed that the king of Suevia presented to Quintus Metellus Celer, Lieutenant of France, certain Indians driven by tempest into the sea of Germany: if the same were not of the land of Labrador or Bacallaos [“cod-fish land”; i.e., Newfoundland], and they deceived in their color. (Richard Eden's 1555 translation, adapted)