Antonio de Alcedo

Soldier, born at Quito (Ecuador), 1755, where his father was President of the Royal Audiencia from 1728 to 1737. He selected the military career, and rose to the rank of Brigadier General in 1792, in the Spanish army. He wrote a dictionary, historical and geographical, of the West Indies, in five volumes, for which the work of Father Giovanni Coletti, S.J., “Dizionario del l’America meridionale” (Venice, 1771) was a substantial basis. The work of Alcedo was translated into English by G.A. Thompson in 1812, and that translation is looked upon by many as an improvement, whereas it in fact teems with errors from which the original is relatively free.