The men--and they were all men--who first crossed the Atlantic in the 17th century could not possibly have discovered Native Americans, because they had never heard of such things. What they found were the mythical creatures that had dwelt for millennia in the European imagination. Magasich-Airola (Latin American history, Institut des Hautes Etudes des Communications Sociales, Brussels) and de Beer (Institut de Radioélectricité et de Cinématographie, Brussels) survey some of them, limiting their account to creatures well known in Iberia, from where most of the first adventurers embarked. América mágica; quand l'Europe de la Renaissance croyait conquérir la Paradis was published in 1994 by Editions Autrement. The first English edition was published in 2005 and translated by Jean-Marc De Beer and Jorge Magasich-Airola; David Abulafia (Mediterranean history, U. of Cambridge) provides a foreword to this edition. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)