Verily, the Portuguese of those days were superior as navigators to their Spanish rivals and the Italians.
Posterity is fortunate in possessing a very full abstract of the Journal which Columbus kept during his first voyage to the West Indies.[9] No such trustworthy record is available in the case of Vasco da Gama, whose original reports have disappeared. They were consulted, no doubt, by João de Barros and Damião de Goes; but these writers, much to our loss, dealt very briefly with all that refers to navigation. The only available account written by a member of the expedition is the Roteiro or Journal, a translation of which fills the bulk of this volume, and of which, later on, we shall speak at greater length. The only other contemporary accounts, which we also reproduce, are at second-hand, and are contained in the letters written by King Manuel and Girolamo Sernigi immediately after the return of Vasco da Gama’s vessels from India.
Apart from these, our chief authorities regarding this voyage are still the Decades of João de Barros and the Chronicle of King Manuel, by Damião de Goes. Both these authors held official positions which gave them access to the records preserved in the India House. Castanheda relied almost wholly upon the Roteiro, but a few additional statements of interest may be found in his pages.
As to the Lendas of Gaspar Correa, we are unable to look upon his account of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage as anything but a jumble of truth and fiction,[10] notwithstanding that he claims to have made use of the diary of a priest, Figueiro, who is stated to have sailed in Vasco’s fleet. Correa’s long residence in India—from 1514 to the time of his death—must have proved an advantage when relating events which came under his personal observation, but it also precluded him from consulting the documents placed on record in the Archives of Lisbon. This much is certain: that whoever accepts Correa as his guide must reject the almost unanimous evidence of other writers of authority who have dealt with this important voyage.[11]
A few additional facts may be gleaned from Faria y Sousa’s Asia Portuguesa, from Duarte Pacheco Pereira and Antonio Galvão; but in the main we are dependent upon the Roteiro, for recent searches[12] in the Torre do Tombo have yielded absolutely nothing, so far as we are aware, which throws additional light upon Da Gama’s First Voyage, with which alone we are concerned.
And now we shall proceed to give an account of the Roteiro.
The Manuscript of the “Roteiro”.
In giving an account of the manuscript of this Journal, we entrust ourselves to the guidance of Professors Kopke and Antonio da Costa Paiva, the two gentlemen who first published it.
