John Smith's description of the early English settlement of Virginia is pretty interesting. I particularly like this important reminder for anyone thinking about starting a colony:
“A few Bevers, Otters, Beares, Martins and minkes we found, and in divers places that aboundance of fish, lying so thicke with their heads above the water, as for want of nets . . . we attempted to catch them with a frying pan: but we found it a bad instrument to catch fish with: neither better fish, more plenty, nor more variety for smal fish, had any of us ever seene in any place so swimming in the water, but they are not to be caught with frying pans.”
You can find his complete "Generall Historie of Virginia" (1624) at https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/smith/smith.html
The following is narrated by Xenophon [Anab. 1.2.14-18]. Not that unexpectedly entertaining but actually just a funny incident I've read lately, a military prank.
When Cyrus the younger had gathered his forces for a war against his brother, Artaxerxes II, for the throne of Persia in 401 BCE ca, the Cilician queen Epyaxa, the wife of king Syennesis, visited him. She was said to be a funder of Cyrus and asked him for an army exhibition. Cyrus' army was consisted by Greek mercenaries, and other forces from the area, which the historical work is calling barbarians. Cyrus accepted and after some preliminary marches...
"When [Cyrus] led them all in march, after setting up his chariot in front of the center of the [Greek] phalanx and sending Pigres the interpreter to the generals of the Greeks, he commanded the whole phalanx to put forward the arms and advance. The generals ordered the soldiers to do these: and when the trumpet sounded, they advanced putting the arms forward. And from there, after starting moving faster with a shout, the soldiers started to run of their own accord towards the tents [=camp]. And the barbarians were terrified. And the Cilician queen left on her carriage, and the people of the market left leaving their merchandise. And the Greeks reached the tents with laughter."
The greek original with a 1922 translation by Brownson can be seen in http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0032.tlg006.perseus-eng1:1.2
* Xenophon, an Athenian historian of the 5th-4th c. BCE, followed the Greek mercenaries in 401 BCE ca. After the death of Cyrus in battle and some of the Greek generals [401 BCE] the Greek forces elected Xenophon as their leader and had an adventurous journey back home.
This expedition is described in the historical work Anabasis, which Xenophon didn't sign. However, later Plutarch [1st c. CE] attributed this historical work to Xenophon, saying that he wanted to give some reliability to his history by distancing himself from the story and speaking in the 3rd person for himself. This approach is followed by the vast majority of the modern historians, and so Xenophon is considered a first hand source of the historical events of the work Anabasis.