Today we return to our sixteenth century banker, alchemist and translator Richard Eden. In his translation Decades of the New World, a chronicle of Spain’s great voyages of discovery, he makes the first reference in English to alligators as “lagartos” which translates as great lizards in Spanish. But the word wasn’t used in English by a person who had actually seen the alligator until 1568. In The Travels of an Englishman, Job Hortop wrote about the adventures of his life, many of them which were negative. this is made quite clear in the subtitle where he states his description will include the story of his “sundry calamities”. The book also includes the first written account of the slave trade. Hortrop actually served on one of the first English slave transportation ships and had the life of a seaman adventurer, spending much of his life in various prisons. But he also records that “in a river we killed a monstrous lagarto or crocodile.”
Hortop and his shipmates might have found it difficult to imagine that the vicious-looking alligator would become a prized commercial asset, being exploited for meat and also for the skin which is used to make sought-after shoes and accessories. The Lana Marks Cleopatra handbag, made from alligator skin, retails at USD 250,000. Turning hide into gold; an interesting variation on the alchemy that Richard Eden attempted five centuries ago.
