The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles by Captain John Smith

In this document John Smith gathers and edits a collection of accounts of English experiences in North America. I'm interested in this book's generic mixture: it's part economic treatise (how expensive would it be to fit out an expedition/colony and fish in North America), part history (of Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Bermuda, no less), and part natural history/ethnography. I think this mixture is related to the fact that the colonial experience is pretty new to the British at this point, and they're still making sense of how to understand it. There's also a great vocabulary list giving an account of native words. Many are related to warfare and to the presence of the English. I'm also interested in how much of this treatise Smith hasn't authored himself (there's a lot of first-hand accounts from other people to fill out areas where Smith wasn't) and in the presence of the Pocahontas legend (notably absent from Smith's earlier work about Virginia). All in all, a fascinating read.