First Voyage Around the World (1519-1522)

260 Pages·2016·3.41 MB·English

by  Antonio Pigafetta

THE FIRST VOYAGE AROUND THE WORLD
THE LORENZO DA PONTE ITALIAN LIBRARY
General Editors
Luigi Ballerini and Massimo Ciavolella,
University of California at Los Angeles
Honorary Chairs
†Professor Vittore Branca
Honorable Dino De Poli
Ambassador Gianfranco Facco Bonetti
Honorable Anthony J. Scirica
Advisory Board
Remo Bodei, Università di Pisa
Lina Bolzoni, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
Francesco Bruni, Università di Venezia
Giorgio Ficara, Università di Torino
Michael Heim, University of California at Los Angeles
†Amilcare A. Iannucci, University of Toronto
Rachel Jacoff, Wellesley College
Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University
Gilberto Pizzamiglio, Università di Venezia
Margaret Rosenthal, University of Southern California
John Scott, University of Western Australia
Elissa Weaver, University of Chicago
The First Voyage around the World
(1519–1522)
An Account of Magellan’s Expedition
ANTONIO PIGAFETTA

Edited and Introduced by
Theodore J. Cachey Jr
© University of Toronto Press 2007
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-0-8020-9370-7
The Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library

Printed on acid-free paper
Libraries and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Pigafetta, Antonio, ca. 1480/91–ca. 1534
The first voyage around the world, 1519–1522: an account of Magellan’s
expedition / Antonio Pigafetta; edited and introduced by Theodore J.
Cachey Jr.
(Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian library series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8020-9370-7
1. Magalhães, Fernão de, d. 1521 – Travel. 2. Pigafetta, Antonio, ca.
1480/91–ca. 1534 – Travel. 3. Voyages around the world – Early works to
1800. I. Cachey, T.J. (Theodore J.) Jr. II. Title. III. Series.
G420.M2P63 2007 910.4’109031 C2007-906270-9
This volume is published under the aegis and with financial assistance
of: Fondazione Cassamarca, Treviso; Ministero degli Affari Esteri,
Direzione Generale per la Promozione e la Cooperazione Culturale;
Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Direzione Generale per i Beni
Librari e gli Istituti Culturali, Servizio per la promozione del libro e della
lettura.
Publication of this volume is assisted by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura,
Toronto.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its
publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts
Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its
publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book
Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
For Eleanor
Contents

Introduction
Bio-bibliographical Note
Note on the Text and Translation
Chronology of the Voyage
THE FIRST VOYAGE AROUND THE WORLD
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Introduction

1. ‘ … to gain some renown with posterity’

The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez provided a memorable
introduction to Antonio Pigafetta’s First Voyage around the World (Viaggio
attorno al mondo) when he evoked, at the beginning of his 1982 Nobel Lecture,
the Renaissance traveller ‘who went with Magellan on the first voyage around
the world’ and wrote ‘a strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a
venture into fantasy.’ In the words of the Colombian novelist, the Italian
witnessed ‘hogs with navels on their haunches, clawless birds whose hens laid
eggs on the backs of their mates, and others still, resembling tongueless pelicans,
with beaks like spoons. He wrote of having seen a misbegotten creature with the
head and ears of a mule, a camel’s body, the legs of a deer and the whinny of a
horse. He described how the first native encountered in Patagonia was
confronted with a mirror, whereupon that impassioned giant lost his senses to the
terror of his own image.’1
In effect, for García Márquez, Pigafetta’s ‘short and fascinating book … even
then contained the seeds of our present-day novels.’ He acknowledged in
Pigafetta a genealogical source for the ‘marvellous’ realism (more familiar
perhaps as ‘magical realism’) that one has come to associate with the novelist’s
own fictions as well as those of other prominent Latin American authors. The
political implications of these Renaissance origins were not lost on the Latin
American Nobel Laureate. Indeed, the rhetorical category of the ‘marvellous’
that characterized Renaissance literature of discovery and exploration was often
employed to veil an act of power and to gloss over real conflict by evoking ‘a
sense of the marvelous that in effect fills up the emptiness at the center of the
maimed rite of possession.’2 Towards the end of his address, the Colombian
novelist pointedly isolated the literary category of the ‘marvellous,’ synonymous
with so much European ‘Americanist’ writing, and turned it back against the Old
World. For García Márquez the contemporary novelist’s report of Latin
America’s incredible political reality – the incessant upheavals, the military
coups and massacres, the continents surreal political melodrama – was ‘strictly
accurate’ but nonetheless resembled ‘a venture into fantasy.’ Exploiting another
trope of European Americanist writing, the commonplace of the New World’s
immense proportions when compared with those of the Old World, García
Márquez observed that the number of desaparecidos, at that time 120,000, was
equivalent to all the inhabitants of Uppsala, Sweden, being unaccounted for. He
noted that the death toll from civil strife in Central America of one hundred
thousand in four years was proportionally equivalent to 1.6 million violent
deaths in the United States. Europe’s ‘marvellous’ dream of possession had
become Latin America’s incredible nightmare of war and massacre, of exile and
forced emigration.
García Márquez’s citation of Antonio Pigafetta’s First Voyage around the
World is among the more recent and resonant of a long line of prestigious
literary responses to this Italian travel narrative. If Pigafetta undertook his
voyage, as he says, ‘so that I might be able to gain some renown with posterity’
(2), he can be said to have succeeded brilliantly. The author’s desire for fame,
for the extension of the self in space and time, was in fact a prominent motive
for both undertaking the journey and writing the narrative in the first place.
Pigafetta’s account of the circumnavigation originally expressed a desire for the
circumvention of death that is at the heart of travel literature itself, which has
always sought to ‘fix and perpetuate something as transient and impermanent as
human action and mobility.’3
William Shakespeare’s use of Pigafetta’s libretto (or ‘little book,’ as the
author terms it) in The Tempest is perhaps the best known manifestation of
Pigafetta’s literary fame during the Renaissance:
Caliban [Aside]: I must obey – his art is of such power,
It would control my Dam’s god, Setebos,
And make a vassal of him. (1.2. 372–4)

And later,
Caliban: Oh Setebos, these be brave spirits indeed!
How fine my master is! I am afraid
He will chastise me. (5.1. 261–3)