A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama 1497-1499. Anonymous

a trustworthy pilot at Melinde that the difficulties of the outward voyage can be said to have been overcome.

      In one other respect Vasco da Gama, or, perhaps, we ought to say his pilots, proved themselves the superiors of Columbus, namely, in the accuracy of the charts of their discoveries which they brought home to Portugal. Accepting the Cantino Chart7 as a fair embodiment of the work done by this expedition, we find that the greatest error in latitude amounts to 1° 40´. The errors of Columbus were far more considerable. In three places of his Journal the latitude of the north coast of Cuba is stated to be 42° by actual observation; and that this is no clerical error, thrice repeated in three different places, seems to be proved by the evidence of the charts. On that of Juan de la Cosa, for instance, Cuba is made to extend to lat. 35° N. (instead of 23° 10´), and even on the rough sketch drawn by Bartolomeo Columbus after the return from the Fourth Voyage, Jamaica and Puerto Rico (Spagnola) are placed 6° too far to the north.8

      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 searches12 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.

Signature of Fernam Lopes de Castanheda	Water Mark

      That is:—

      “Em Nome de Ds Amem// Na era de mill iiij lr vij

       mamdou Ellrey Dom manuell o primo desde nome em portugall/

       xxxxxxxxxxa descobrir/ quat

       navios/ os quaes hiam em busca da especiaria/ dos quaees na

       vios hia por capitam moor Vco da Gama e dos outros duũ

       delles Paullo da Gama seu jrmaoo e doutro njcollao Coelho”.

      The manuscript originally belonged to the famous Convent of Santa Cruz at Coimbra, whence it was transferred, together with other precious MSS., to the public library of Oporto.

      It is not an autograph, for on fol. 64 (p. 77 of this translation), where the author has left a blank, the copyist, to guard against his being supposed to have been careless in his task, has added these words: “The author has omitted to tell us how these weapons were made”. This copy, however, was taken in the beginning of the sixteenth century, as may be seen from the style of the writing as exhibited in the facsimile of the first paragraph of the work, shown on preceding page.

      The MS. is in folio, and is rudely bound up in a sheet of parchment, torn out of some book of ecclesiastical offices. The ink is a little faded, but the writing is still perfectly legible. The paper is of ordinary strength, and of rather a dark tint; the manufacturer’s water mark is shown in the above facsimile. Blank leaves of more modern make, and having a different water-mark, have been inserted at the front and back, and the first of these leaves contains the following inscription in a modern hand, which is still legible, although pains have been taken to erase it:—

      “Pertinet ad usum fratris Theotonii de Sancto

       G … Canonici Regularis in Cenobio

       Scte Crucis”.

      Immediately below this we read:—

      “Dô Theotonio”,

      and near the bottom of the page, in a modern hand, probably that of one of the librarians of the convent:—

      “Descobrimento da India por D. Vasco

       da Gamma”.

      Prof. Kopke suggests13 that the copyist of this valuable MS. was the famous historian Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, who was Apparitor and Keeper of the Archives in the University of Coimbra, and was engaged there during twenty years, much to the injury of his health and private fortune, in collecting the materials for his Historia do Descobrimento e Conquista da India. In support of this assumption he publishes a signature (see the facsimile on page xxii) taken from a copy of the first book of Castanheda’s history, published in 1551. But A. Herculano,14 whilst admitting this signature to be genuine, points out that the cursive characters of the MS. are of a type exceedingly common during the first half of the sixteenth century, and that it would consequently not be safe to attribute it to any writer in particular. Until, therefore, further evidence is forthcoming, we cannot accept the Professor’s theory that we are indebted for this copy to Castanheda; though, as we have already said, there can be no doubt that in writing his account of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama he depended almost exclusively for his facts upon the anonymous author of this Roteiro.

      

      The Author of the “Roteiro”.

      It is quite possible, as suggested by Prof. Kopke, that the title by which the Roteiro was known at the convent of Santa Cruz misled certain bibliographers into a belief that Vasco da Gama himself had written this account of his voyage.

      Thus Nicoláo Antonio, in his Bibliotheca Hispana Veta (1672), lib. 10, c. 15, § 543, says:—

      “Vascus da Gama … dedit reversus Emanueli suo Regi populari Portugaliæ idiomate navigationis suae ad Indiam anno MCDXCVII relationem, quae lucem vidit.”

      The