This volume contains six contemporary accounts of Magellan’s voyage for the circumnavigation of the globe: one was written by a Genoese pilot of the fleet; the second by a Portuguese companion of Duarte Barbosa, which has been preserved by Ramusio; the third by Antonio Pigafetta of Vicenza; and the fourth is a letter of Maximilian Transylvanus, a Secretary of the Emperor Charles V; the fifth a log book of a pilot named Francisco Albo or Alvaro; the sixth is taken from Gaspar Correa’s Lendas da India.

Of Pigafetta’s account, four manuscripts are known, three of them are in French, and one in Italian. Two of the French manuscripts are in the Bibliothèque Impériale of Paris; one of these, numbered 5,650, is on paper; the other, numbered 68, of the Lavallière collection, is on vellum, and is richly illuminated; it does not contain the Brazilian and Patagonian vocabularies given in No. 5,650, and some rather indecent details are omitted or softened down, which leads to the conclusion that this copy was the one presented by Pigafetta to the Regent, Louise of Savoy. The third French manuscript, and the most complete, was in the possession of M. Beaupré of Nancy till 1855, it then passed into the Solar collection, and in 1861 was sold for 1,650 francs to a London book-seller, and, later, was bought by Sir Thomas Phillipps at Libri’s sale.

M. Rd. Thomassy published a memoir in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie of Paris, September 1843, in which he examines the question whether Pigafetta composed his account of his voyage in French. He has come to a conclusion (which M. Ferdinand Denis has also adopted) in favour of the French manuscript having been originally composed by Pigafetta, and not translated from the Italian, on the grounds of its being addressed to the grand master of Rhodes, Villiers de l’Ile-Adam, who was himself a Frenchman, and that Pigafetta had recently been made a Knight of Rhodes; and that Pigafetta used the French language for the device which he set up over his paternal house in the street of la Luna in Vicenza, “Il n’y a pas de roses sans épines”; that other Italians of the time had written in French; that the Italian MS. of the Ambrosian Library of Milan, published in 1800 by Amoretti, is in bad Italian, mixed with Venetian and Spanish, so that M. Amoretti saw in it rather a copy than the original of the relation presented to the Pope or to the Grand Master; these defects M. Amoretti removed by translating them into good Italian: also that the French edition of Fabre, though stated to be a translation from the Italian, was used in 1536 to publish an Italian edition; whereas if an Italian edition had existed before, that of Fabre would not have been required. Fabre’s edition, moreover, is very imperfect; and he puts what Pigafetta says in the third person. M. Thomassy concludes, therefore, that the version of Fabre was made from some Italian resumé.

In addition to the motives urged by M. Thomassy for believing that Pigafetta himself composed the French manuscripts, there is evidence of it in the phraseology of the MSS.; had these been translations from the Italian, every word would have been translated into French, whereas, instead of that, we find a great many Italian words used, especially in the vocabularies, also some Italian idioms. It was natural that Pigafetta, if he had not the French word at command, should write down an Italian one, such as “calcagno” for “talon”.

For the same reason, I should be inclined to believe that the Ambrosian MS., with its mixture of Spanish words, was composed by Pigafetta himself, in whom such a mixture of words would be more natural after so long a voyage in a Spanish ship, than in an Italian scribe.

That Pigafetta did compose a work in Italian appears from a document in the archives of Venice, containing a petition of Pigafetta to the Doge and Council of Venice, dated August 5th, 1524, applying for leave to print his account of his circumnavigation of the globe, and to have a privilege for twenty years. This is followed by a statement that the prayer of the petition was granted by the Doge and 152 of the Council, six members of which voted against Pigafetta. The text of this document is given in the Appendix; it was communicated to me by the Geographical Society of Paris, which has published a translation of it in its bulletin of February 1869.

Until M. Amoretti published his edition of Pigafetta from the Ambrosian MS. in 1800, there never was a complete or an original Italian edition of Pigafetta; for the quarto edition of 1536 (Grenville, 6,977), without name of author or printer, is, as is mentioned in the address to the reader, a translation from the edition of Jacques Fabre. This edition of 1536 had a privilege for fourteen years; it must be by Ramusio, for the address to the reader is almost the same as his more abridged “discourse” in his collection of travels of Venice, 1550, and Venice, 1613, folio, 346 v. In Ramusio’s collection, and in the edition of 1536, Pigafetta’s voyage is preceded by the letter of Maximilian Transylvanus, Secretary of the Emperor Charles V, to the Cardinal of Salzburg. This letter of Maximilian’s is not quite the same in the two books in the division of the paragraphs; in Pigafetta’s voyage there is greater similarity, and the paragraphs are numbered identically in the edition of 1536 and in Fabre’s French edition. Ramusio says:

“Magellan’s voyage was written, with details, by Don Pietro Martire, of the Council of the Indies of the Emperor, and that he had examined all those who had survived the voyage, and returned to Seville in the year 1522; but, having sent it to be printed at Rome, in the miserable sack of that town it was lost, and it is not yet known where it is. One who saw it and read it gives testimony of it, and amongst the other things worthy of recollection which the above-named Don Pietro noted in this voyage, was that the Spaniards having navigated about three years and a month, and the greater part of them (as is the custom of those who navigate on the ocean) having noted down each day of each month, when they rejoined Spain they found they had lost one day; that is, when they reached the port of Seville, which was on the 7th of September, by the account which they had kept it was the 6th. Don Pietro having related this particularity to an excellent and rare man, Sig. Gasparo Contarino,⁠[23] a Venetian senator, who was then in Spain as ambassador to his Majesty from his Republic, and having asked him how it could be, he, as a very great philosopher, shewed him that it could not be otherwise, as they had navigated three years, always accompanying the sun, which was going westwards; and he said that the ancients had observed that those who navigated to the west greatly lengthened their day.”

This book of Don Pietro’s having been lost, says Ramusio, he thought of translating the Latin letter of Maximilian, and of adding to it the summary of a book which was written by the valiant knight of Rhodes, Messer Antonio Pigafetta, a Vicentine; and this said book was abridged and translated into French by a very learned philosopher, named Messer Jacopo Fabri, of Paris, at the instance of the most serene mother of the most Christian King Francis, Madame Louisa the Regent, to whom the aforesaid knight had made a present of one [of his books].

This French epitome by Fabre is a small octavo of seventy-six leaves, in Gothic type (Grenville, 7,065); it is without date; the title is as follows:

“Le Voyage et Navigation, faict par les Espaignolz es Isles de Mollucques, des isles quilz out trouue audict voyage, des Roys dicelles, de leur gouuernment & maniere de viure, auec plusieurs aultres choses.”

“Cum Priuilegio, ¶ on les vend a Paris en la maison de Simon de Colines, libraire iure de luniuersite de Paris, demeurāt en la rue sainct Jehan de Beauluais, a lenseigne du Soleil Dor.”

Simon de Colines, the printer, issued his last work in 1546, and his heirs are mentioned on a work of 1550.⁠[24]

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.

There is a confusion as to the names of these two islands, which are rightly named in the Admiralty and other sea charts, but which are wrongly named in common English maps, which place St. Paul to the north of Amsterdam. The southern island is bare and arid, and the northern island has bushes and a high peak visible eighteen or twenty leagues off. Francisco Albo says this Island had no trees; but the Victoria may not have approached near enough to see the bushes, which, from the views of the island, appear to be near its base; it is clear that the Victoria approached the northern island, or Amsterdam, because not only does the latitude given by F. Albo differ from that of modern observation by only eight miles, but also because from the course steered by the Victoria on leaving this island, she must have sighted the northern island had the one discovered by her been the southern one. Plates are given of these two islands, taken from Valentyn’s Dutch work on the East Indies. A French Geographical Dictionary sets up a claim to these islands as belonging to the government of the Isle of France or Mauritius; it does not say on what grounds; but if ever they were dependencies of Mauritius, they will have passed with that island into the possession of Great Britain.

Correa’s narrative contains two details not given in any of the other accounts, viz., the warning given to Magellan at Tenerife by Diogo Barbosa of the intended mutiny; and the incident of the Portuguese ship speaking the Victoria off the Cape of Good Hope. Correa’s having been in India at the time, and relating what he heard from the Portuguese, would account for his misplacing the death of Magellan as having happened at the same time as that of Duarte Barbosa. His narrative also contains additional evidence of the violent animosity of the Portuguese against Magellan, though he himself is more favourable than other Portuguese historians to him who is one of the most renowned of their countrymen, as he undoubtedly is the greatest of ancient and modern navigators.

September 1874.