The first voyage round the world, by Magellan : $b translated from the accounts of Pigafetta, and other contemporary writersPigafetta, Antonio
History
The first voyage round the world, by Magellan : $b translated from the accounts of Pigafetta, and other contemporary writers
Pigafetta, Antonio
Magalhães, Fernão de, -1521; Voyages around the world -- Early works to 1800
In 1801, a French translation of Amoretti’s edition of Pigafetta was
published by H. J. Jansen, who added a translation from the German of
M. de Murr’s Notice on the Chevalier M. Behaim. In this translation,
some liberties have been taken with the text; and it is to be regretted
that this translation was published instead of the French text
contained in the two MSS. of the Bibliothèque Impériale; these, even
were they not Pigafetta’s own composition, possess a philological
interest of their own.
An English translation of Pigafetta by Richard Wren, London, 1625, is
mentioned in _l’Art de Vérifier les Dates, depuis 1770_, folio, vol.
iii, p. 333. There is no copy of this in the British Museum Library.
The other contemporaneous account of Magellan’s voyage, a translation
of which precedes that of Pigafetta’s account, is by a Genoese pilot.
This pilot probably was named Mestre Bautista, since Barros mentions
him as a Genoese who, on the death of the pilot Joan Carvalho, was
charged with piloting the _Trinidad_, which got as far as Ternate.
Correa (tom. ii, p. 632) also mentions that Mestre Joan Bautista was
made captain instead of Carvalho, after he had allowed the son of the
King of Luzon to escape at Borneo. Of this account, three manuscripts
exist; all three are in Portuguese. From two of these MSS. a printed
edition was published in the _Noticias Ultramarinas_, No. II, by
the Academy of History of Lisbon. The text which served for this
publication was a MS. which belonged to the library of the monks of S.
Bento da Saude; and it has been supplemented and annotated from another
manuscript, which is in the Bibliothèque Impériale at Paris, numbered
⁷¹⁵⁸⁄₃₃, a copy of which was made by Dr. Antonio Nunes de Carvalho
in 1831. A third manuscript of this pilot’s narrative exists in the
library of the Academy of History of Madrid, No. 30, Est. 11a, grada 2a.
After the Genoese pilot’s narrative follows that of an anonymous
Portuguese taken from Ramusio.
The letter of Maximilian, the Transylvanian, follows Pigafetta’s
account; this has been translated from the Latin by Mr. James Baynes,
of the Printed Book Department of the British Museum. After that comes
the log-book of Francisco Albo or Alvaro, translated from a MS. in
the British Museum, which is a copy from a document in Simancas. This
log-book has been printed, in Navarrete’s collection, apparently from
the British Museum MS., and it appears to have escaped the notice of
Captain Burney. It is especially valuable because it helps to fix the
position of the “Unfortunate Islands”, and because it establishes that
the Island of Amsterdam in the Southern Indian Ocean to the North of
St. Paul’s Island, the discovery of which is usually attributed to the
Dutch navigator Vlaming, in 1696, was discovered March 18th, 1522, by
the _Victoria_, the first ship which went round the world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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