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.