The Discovery of America

Volume I follows the explorer Christopher Columbus (Kristoff Kolumbus in the German edition) from his hometown Genoa and his first voyages to his encounter with Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. After a description of the voyage towards the West and the discovery of the New World, the narrative relates Columbus’ first encounter with Native Americans as well as the first military conflicts.

In the second volume the reader is introduced to the conquistador Hernán Cortés (Ferdinand Kortes) and his exploration and conquest of Mexico. The explorations of the Central American mainland are followed by encounters with Native tribes, some of which become Cortés’ allies in his later conquest of the Aztec empire. After the death of the Aztec emperor Montezuma and the takeover of the empire's capital Tenochtitlan, the narrative gives a summary of the following subjugation of the rest of Mexico and of Cortés’ troubles with people envious of him.

Finally, the last volume deals with Francisco Pizarro (Franz Pizarro) and the conquest of Peru and Chile. It describes the journey along the west coast of South America and the society of the Incas. Next to the founding of Lima, the murder of the Inca Atahualpa, and the siege and takeover of Cuzco the narrative also relates the quarrels between Pizarro and some of the other Spanish generals. The volume ends with Pizarro's death.

Page 107 of a 1782-88 (unauthorised) German edition of the book, showing the typical dialogue form.

The trilogy is divided into fifty-two narratives that run continuously from the first to the last volume. Each narrative is supposed to reflect the narrations in which Campe originally told the story to his foster children.[4] The dialogue form, which is characterised by interruptions from the children but also comments by the narrating Father, is sometimes described as "Socratic," aiming at extracting the children's knowledge through skilfully asked questions.[5]

Map of the Gulf of Mexico, included in the 2nd volume of a 1782-88 (unauthorised) German edition of The Discovery of America

Discovery is an example of early specific children's and youth literature which developed with the German educational movement of philanthropinism. The focus of philanthropinist children's writers lay in creating age-appropriate books which would serve their pedagogical purposes of teaching moral and factual knowledge.[6] The philanthropinist background of the trilogy is apparent in its transmission of morals and of facts, especially related to the natural sciences. The first volume, for instance, contains an explanation of the system of longitude and latitude,[7] and each volume is accompanied by a map of the dealt-with area of Central or South America. The narrative occasionally refers to these maps.[8]

The trilogy is part of a larger work of Campe. It follows his earlier books Kleine Kinderbibliothek (1779–84) and Robinson der Jüngere (1779/80), translated into English as Robinson the Younger, the New Robinson or Robinson Junior, which is Campe's free adaptation of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719). At the same time Discovery presents a preparation for the subsequently published first collection of travelogues, Erste Sammlung interessanter und durchgängig zweckmäßig abgefasster Reisebeschreibungen für die Jugend (1785–93, 12 volumes).

The first German edition was published in 1781 (Kolumbus) and 1782 (Kortes, Pizarro) in Hamburg; in 1790 it saw the third edition and in 1834 the fifteenth authorised edition. The first French translation was published as early as 1782, followed by translations into English, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish,[9] Hebrew and Yiddish.[10] At the same time there were several unauthorised reprints available in German; Campe complained about these in a letter to Emperor Joseph II in 1784.[11]

Contemporaries of Discovery usually received the work very positively. Louis, Prince of Prussia, expressed his admiration for the first volume of Discovery in a letter to Campe. He excuses his late reply to a previous letter by saying that he first had to reread the book several times and that he wished he possessed all those virtues of Columbus.[12] An anonymous reviewer in the German Enlightenment journal Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek praises Campe's choice of topic and its utility but wishes for a more structured approach instead of the narratives.[13] Of the general criticism that the German new humanists and others presented against philanthropinist children's literature, Campe was usually exempt.[14] Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, the dialogue form had lost its appeal and in 1890 a revised German edition was published that eliminated the dialogue and solely related the narrative.[15]

Works dealing with The Discovery of America mainly point to its pedagogical functions but also see socially critical elements in the text.