Critical Essay on the Sources of Information

By Edward E. Hale and the Editor.

PIGAFETTA, who was born in Vicenza not long after 1490, was accordingly from twenty-five to thirty years old when he accompanied Magellan. He kept a diary of the voyage, a copy of which he gave to the Emperor; and later, in Italy, he wrote out a more extended account, copies of which he gave to distinguished persons. Of this ampler narrative four separate texts, in as many manuscripts, are preserved to us.

No. 1 is in French, Navigation et descouvrement de la Indie superieure faicte par moi Antoine Pigafete, Vincentin; on paper, in the National Library at Paris. It gives the full vocabulary of the Giants’ language, which is also reprinted in Amoretti. Students engaged in the study of the geography of the East Indies should not be satisfied with the few copies given by Amoretti of the maps and representations of the islands there. In this copy, which is divided throughout into short chapters, there are many more of these maps than have been engraved. It is impossible to look at them without believing that they give some idea of the size and even the shape of the islands visited. Charton calls this paper manuscript the oldest of those in France. No one can decide such a question. The illustrations in the vellum manuscript certainly seem to be nearer the originals than those in this coarser paper one.

No. 2 is a richly illuminated vellum document, with a text somewhat softened in the coarse parts. This may have been the copy known to have been given to Louise of Savoy by Pigafetta. This manuscript is also in the Paris library. The writing is elegant, and the maps are very prettily done in body color. They are much more elegant than the maps in the paper manuscript, which are in rough water-color by some one of no great artistic skill. The representations given by Amoretti of a few of the designs are sufficiently good for all practical purposes. But the picture of the boat with outriggers, illustrating the customs of the Ladrone Islands, is much more artistic in the vellum manuscript than it is in Amoretti’s engraving.

No. 3, the most complete, was owned by M. Beaupré, at Nancy, in 1841, when Thomassy described it; was sold in the Potier sale in 1851 (no. 506), and passed into the Solar Collection, and in 1861 (Solar sale, no. 3,238) it was bought by a London dealer, and reached finally the collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps, who bought it at the Libri sale (no. 1,139) in 1862. It is a question with critics whether Pigafetta composed his work in French or in Italian; for there is also a manuscript (no. 4) in the later language, poorly conceived, however, and mixed with Spanish, preserved in the Ambrosian Library at Milan. This was the manuscript published by the Abbé C. Amoretti; it is written in the character known as cancelleresco, on paper folios, of which the handwriting is of the time of Pigafetta; and it was once owned by the Cardinal Frederic Borroméo. Raymond Thomassy gives several reasons for believing that the French text is the original, but we have not been satisfied that it was so.

In the earliest edition of Pigafetta which we have,—one without date, and in French, edited by Antoine Fabre,—the text is represented as being a translation from the Italian. It is possible that, being an abridgment, it might have followed some abstract which had been made in that language, possibly an account which in 1524 Pigafetta asked permission to print, of the Doge and Council of Venice. This original French edition is called Le Voyage et Navigation faict par les Espaignolz es isles de Mollucques; and is usually thought to have been printed in 1525. It is in Gothic type, except the last four leaves, which are in Roman, as are all the notes. Harrisse cites an Italian edition of Pigafetta with the letter of Maximilian, as published at Venice in 1534; but there is little reason to believe such an edition to exist.

The earliest undoubted Italian edition was printed, however, in 1536, and it was professedly a translation from Fabre’s French text, and there is reason to believe that Ramusio may have been instrumental in its publication. It has the name neither of author nor of printer, but is supposed to have been issued at Venice. It is called Il Viaggio fatto da gli Spagnivoli a torno a’l mondo.

Amoretti published the Ambrosian manuscript (no. 4, above) in 1800, at Milan, under the title of Primo viaggio intorno al globo terracqueo ossia ragguaglio della navigazione alle Indie orientali d[i] Magaglianes, 1519-1522. Pubblicato per la prima volta da un codice manuscritto della Biblioteca Ambrosiana di Milano, e corredato di note da C. Amoretti con un transunto del Trattato di navigazione dello stesso autore. Milano, 1800.

About a month after the return of Del Cano in the “Victoria,” Maximilian Transylvanus (a son-in-law of Cristóbal de Haro, who had been a chief advocate of the voyage at the Spanish Court) wrote to the Cardinal Archbishop of Salzburg a brief account of the voyage, in a letter dated at Valladolid, Oct. 24, 1522; and when it was printed at Cologne in January, 1523, as De Moluccis insulis, and in the following November and again in February, 1524, at Rome, as De Hispanorum in orientem navigatione, its text constituted the earliest narrative of the voyage which was given in print. It was afterward printed in connection with the earliest Italian edition of Pigafetta; and the English reader will find it in the volume on Magellan published by the Hakluyt Society.

Ramusio also tells us that Peter Martyr wrote an account of Magellan’s voyage, gathered from the lips of the survivors, which he sent to Rome to be printed, but that in the sack of that city by the Constable de Bourbon it disappeared. We have but one point of this Martyr narrative preserved to us, and that is the loss of one day which the “Victory” had experienced in her westering voyage,—when arriving in Seville on the 6th of September, 1522, as her crew supposed, they found the Sevillians calling it the 7th.

There are two modern gatherings of the most important documentary illustrations of this famous voyage,—the one made by Navarrete, and the other published by the Hakluyt Society. The former constitutes the fourth volume of Navarrete’s well-known Coleccion; and among the variety of its papers printed or cited largely from the public archives, illustrating the fitting out of the fleet, its voyage, and the reception of Del Cano on his return, a few of the more important may be mentioned. Such is a manuscript from the library of San Isadro el Real de Madrid, purporting to be by Magellan himself; but Navarrete does not admit this. He prints for the first time an original manuscript account in the Seville archives, usually cited as the Seville manuscript, which bears the title of Extracto de la habilitacion, etc. It gives an enumeration of the company which composed the force on the fleet. The Navarrete volume also contains the log-book of Francisco Albo, or Alvaro, printed, it is claimed by Stanley (who also includes it in the Hakluyt Society volume), from a copy in the British Museum, which was made from the original at Simancas. It follows the fortunes of the fleet after they sighted Cape St. Augustine. Muñoz had found in the Archives of Torre de Tombo a letter of Antonio Brito to the King of Portugal, and Navarrete gives this also. A letter of Jean Sebastian del Cano to Charles V., dated Sept. 5, 1527, describes the voyage, and is also to be found here.

The Hakluyt Society volume borrows largely from the lesser sources as given in Navarrete, and among other papers it contains the brief narrative which is found in Ramusio as that of an “anonymous Portuguese.” It also gives an English version of what is known as the account of the Genoese pilot, one Joan Bautista probably. This story exists in three Portuguese manuscripts: one belongs to the library of the monks of S. Bento da Sande; another is in the National Library at Paris; and from these two a text was formed which was printed in 1826 in the Noticias Ultramarinhas (vol. iv.) of the Lisbon Academy of History, as “Roteiro da viagem de Fernam de Magalhâes” (1519). A third manuscript is in the library of the Academy of History at Madrid. As edited by Luigi Hugues, it is printed in the fifteenth volume of the Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria.

The narrative in the preceding text has shown that the precise statements of latitude made by the Genoese pilot have wholly destroyed the value of all speculations as to the route of Magellan from the Straits to the Ladrones which were published before this “Roteiro” became known. The track laid down on the older globes is invariably wrong, and Magellan’s course was in reality that along which the currents would easily have propelled him, being that of the Antarctic stream of the Pacific, which Humboldt has explained. Stanley also points out that the narrative given in Gaspar Correa’s Lendas da India is the only authority we have for the warning given to Magellan at Teneriffe by Barbosa; and for the incident of a Portuguese ship speaking the “Victoria” as the latter was passing the Cape of Good Hope.

One Pedro Mexia had seen the fleet of Magellan sail, and had likewise witnessed the return of Del Cano. A collection of miscellanies, which he printed as early as 1526, under the title of Silva, and which passed through many editions, affords another contemporary reference. It is hardly worth while to enumerate the whole list of more general historical treatises of the sixteenth and even seventeenth centuries, which bring this famous voyage within their scope. It seems clear, however, that Oviedo had some sources which are not recognizable now, and some have contended that he had access to Magellan’s own papers. Herrera in the ninth book of his eleventh Decade in the same way apparently had information the sources of which are now lost to us. The story of Magellan necessarily made part of such books as Osorius’s De Rebus Emmanuelis gestis, published at Cologne in 1581, again in 1597, and in Dutch at Rotterdam in 1661-1663. Burton in his Hans Stade (p. lxxxvi) calls the Relacion y derrotero del Viaje y descubrimiento del estrecho de la Madre de Dios, antes llamado de Magallanes por Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, published in 1580, an unworthy attempt to rob Magellan of his fame.

The modern studies of Magellan and his career have been in good hands. Navarrete when he made his most important contribution of material, accompanied it with a very careful Noticia biográfica of Magellan, in which he makes exact references to his sources.

A critical life of Magellan was prefixed by Lord Stanley to his Hakluyt Society volume in 1874. R. H. Major in his Prince Henry the Navigator included an admirable critical account, which was repeated in its results in his later volume, Discoveries of Prince Henry.

A paper on the search of Magellan and of Gomez for a western passage was read by Buckingham Smith before the New York Historical Society, a brief report of which is in the Historical Magazine, x. (1866) 229; and one may compare with it the essay by Langeron in the Revue Géographique in 1877.

A number of more distinctive monographs have also been printed, beginning with the Magellan, oder die Erste Reise um die Erde nach dem vorhanderen Quellen dargestellt of August Bürck, which was published in Leipsic in 1844. Dr. Kohl, who had given the subject much study, particularly in relation to the history of the straits which Magellan passed, published the results of his researches in the Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde in Berlin in 1877,—a treatise which was immediately republished separately as Geschichte der Entdeckungsreisen und Schiffahrten zur Magellan’s Strasse. In 1881 Dr. Franz Wieser, a professor in the University at Innspruck, examined especially the question of any anterior exploration in this direction, in his Magalhâes-strasse und Austral Continent auf den globen des Johannes Schöner, which was published in that year at Innspruck. About the same time (1881) the Royal Academy at Lisbon printed a Vida e Viagens de Fernão de Magalhães, com um appendice original, which, as the work of Diego de Barros Arana, had already appeared in Spanish.

The bibliography of Magellan and his voyage is prepared with some care by Charton in his Voyageurs, p. 353; and scantily in St. Martin’s Histoire de la Géographie, p. 370.

EDITORIAL NOTE.—A section on the “Historical Chorography of South America,” tracing the cartographical history of that continent, together with a note on the “Bibliography of Brazil,” is reserved for Vol. VIII.