Bidspirit auction | PEREIRA (Duarte Pacheco). ESMERALDO DE

PEREIRA (Duarte Pacheco). ESMERALDO DE SITU ORBIS. Lisboa. 1892. - PEREIRA (Duarte Pacheco) ESMERALDO DE SITU ORBIS . Edição Comemorativa da Descoberta da America por Christovão Colombo no seu Quarto Centenário sob a Direcção de Raphael Eduardo de Azevedo Basto. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1892. [12], XXXVI, 126, [6] pp., 6 est.: il.; 350 mm. First edition of the text, which was only printed in 1892, almost four centuries after it was composed. It was published in Lisbon by the National Press as a commemorative edition for the fourth centenary of Christopher Columbus's discovery of America, under the direction of Raphael Eduardo de Azevedo Basto, curator of the Royal Archives of Torre do Tombo. The edition includes a preliminary notice and a series of documents relating to the author and the work. Duarte Pacheco Pereira (1460?-1533), whom Camões called ”the Lusitanian Achilles, ” was a captain in India in 1503, in the fleet of Afonso de Albuquerque. The Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis was written between 1505 and 1508 as a navigation guide along the African coast. Planned in five books, it remained incomplete, as only the first three and part of the fourth were ever written. It reproduces one of the first Portuguese solar regiments and one of the oldest itineraries with latitudes, in addition to descriptions of the coasts and port entrances. The text is known from two manuscripts, one in the Public Library of Évora and the other in the National Library of Lisbon, the latter being a copy of the former. Azevedo Basto published it from the Lisbon manuscript, also making use of the Évora manuscript. This was followed by the critical edition by Augusto Epifânio da Silva Dias (1905) and the third edition, annotated by Damião Peres, published by the Portuguese Academy of History (1954). ⚑ Auto-translated via Google Translate