[223] MS. 5,650 reads: “The king hearing that came with seven or eight men.”
[224] For dorade, i.e., the dorado. MS. 5,650 adds: “which are very large fish of the kind abovesaid.”
[225] The ceremony of blood brotherhood. Casicasi means “intimate friends.” See Trumbull’s Blood Covenant (Philadelphia, 1898), which shows how widespread was the covenant or friendship typified by blood.
[226] MS. 5,650 reads: “After that the said captain had one of his men-at-arms armed in offensive armor.” Stanley has translated harnois blanc literally as “white armor.”
[227] This passage may be translated: “Thereby was the king rendered almost speechless, and told the captain, through the slave, that one of those armed men was worth a hundred of his own men. The captain answered that that was a fact, and that he had brought two hundred men in each ship, who were armed in that manner.” Eden so understood it, and reads: “whereat the Kynge marualed greatly, and ſayde to th[e] interpretoure (who was a ſlaue borne in Malacha) that one of thoſe armed men was able to encounter with a hundreth of his men.” MS. 5,650 agrees with the translation of the text.
[228] Instead of this last phrase MS. 5,650 has: “and he made two of his men engage in sword-play before the king.”
[229] MS. 5,650 says only: “Then he showed the king the sea-chart, and the navigation compass.” Eden says (p. 348) that the first to use the compass was one “Flauius of Malpha, a citie in the kingdom of Naples.... Next vnto Flauius, the chiefe commendation is dew to the Spanyardes and Portugales by whoſe daylye experience, the ſame is brought to further perfection, and the vſe thereof better knowen; althowghe hytherto no man knoweth the cauſe why the iren touched with the lode ſtone, turneth euer towarde the north ſtarre, as playnely appeareth in euery common dyall.” He also says: “As touchynge the needle of the compaſſe, I haue redde in the Portugales nauigations that ſaylynge as farre ſouth as Cap. de Bona Speranza, the poynt of the needle ſtyll reſpected the northe as it dyd on this ſyde the Equinoctiall, ſauynge that it ſumwhat trembeled and declyned a lyttle, whereby the force ſeemed ſumwhat to be diminiſſhed, ſo that they were fayne to helpe it with the lode ſtone.” (See ante, p. 93). The compass was known in a rough form to the Chinese at early as 2634 B.C., and first applied to navigation in the third or fourth century A.D., or perhaps earlier. It was probably introduced into Europe through the Arabs who learned of it from the Chinese. It is first referred to in European literature by Alexander Neckam in the twelfth century in De Utensilibus. The variations from the true north were observed as early as 1269.
[230] Stanley says that the Amoretti edition represents the king as making this request and Magalhães as assenting thereto; but the Italian MS. reads as distinctly as MS. 5,650, that Magalhães made the request.
[231] MS. 5,650 omits the remainder of this sentence.
[232] MS. 5,650 adds: “that is, a boat.”