Little needs to be said about Ralegh's text beyond the obvious--it is a fascinating example of Renaissance self-fashioning through travel writing. It is reproduced carefully and faithfully here, with a minimum of editorial intrusion, for which readers should be grateful.
Whitehead's long introduction poses more of a problem. It is shockingly badly written--one imagines that the editors threw up their hands in despair at the atrocious quality of the prose. Only professional anthropologists and historians are likely to struggle through it. This is a great shame, because Whitehead's argument is fascinating and important. In essence, he argues that many of the most seemingly fantastical aspects of Ralegh's account (tales of Indians with faces in their chests, etc.) weren't simply European projections, but products of an interaction between European assumptions and native myths.