Description of the Coasts of East Africa and Malabar: In the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century

The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. This 1866 volume contains an English translation of a Spanish manuscript version of a document originally written in Portuguese about 1514. The supposed author, Duarte Barbosa, who may have been a relative of Magellan, is said to have spent sixteen years exploring the Indian Ocean. The complex history of this manuscript narrative is given in detail in the translator’s preface, and the book has explanatory notes and an index.