A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama 1497-1499
A Fifteenth-Century Shipboard Record of Portugal's Route from Lisbon to CalicutBy Anonymous
Length6h 38m
About this audiobook
A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama 1497–1499 offers a remarkably immediate account of the expedition that opened a direct maritime route from Portugal to India. Combining navigational record, travel narrative, ethnographic observation, and episodic adventure, it preserves the textures of shipboard life, oceanic uncertainty, diplomatic encounter, and commercial ambition. Its plain, sequential style—more documentary than ornamental—belongs to the early modern literature of discovery, while its silences, cultural assumptions, and occasional uncertainty reveal how exploration narratives transform experience into imperial knowledge. Read both as historical testimony and as a crafted record, the journal illuminates Portugal's expanding world-system and the human costs concealed beneath its rhetoric of achievement. The author is anonymous, a circumstance that appropriately reflects the collaborative and practical nature of maritime documentation. The text may derive from a participant or compiler close to the voyage, perhaps someone concerned primarily with distances, routes, ports, cargoes, negotiations, and dangers rather than personal self-fashioning. Its perspective emerges from the charged environment of late-fifteenth-century Portugal, where royal patronage, Christian expansion, mercantile competition, and navigational science converged. That background helps explain the journal's blend of observation and ideological purpose. This volume is recommended to readers of exploration literature, maritime history, and early global encounters. It rewards close attention not only for its vivid record of an epoch-making voyage, but also for the questions it raises about evidence, translation, cultural representation, and the formation of colonial narratives. Scholars and general readers alike will find in it a foundational document whose restrained voice makes its historical implications especially powerful.
Audiobook details
Rating★★★★ 3.8 (66)
Includes Goodreads, Amazon
GenreHistory
Length6 hrs 38 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateNov 30, 2023
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Beasts, Men and Gods (Annotated)
2INTRODUCTION.
3A JOURNAL OF THE FIRST VOYAGE OF VASCO DA GAMA IN 1497-99.
4[Calecut.]
5[The Voyage Home.]
Show all chaptersShow less
6[THE KINGDOMS TO THE SOUTH OF CALECUT.]
7About Elephants.
8Prices at Alexandria.262
9[A VOCABULARY OF MALAYALAM.]
10APPENDICES.
11TWO LETTERS OF KING MANUEL, 1499.
12I.—King Manuel’s Letter to the King and Queen of Castile, July 1499.
13II.—King Manuel to the Cardinal Protector, August 28th, 1499.
14GIROLAMO SERNIGI’S LETTERS ON VASCO DA GAMA’S FIRST VOYAGE.
15Girolamo Sernigi’s First Letter to a Gentleman at Florence.288
16Girolamo Sernigi’s Second Letter to a Gentleman of Florence.368
17THREE PORTUGUESE ACCOUNTS OF VASCO DA GAMA’S FIRST VOYAGE (1608-1646).
18I.—Jornal das Viagens dos Portuguezes as Indias, 1608.
19II.—Luiz de Figueiredo Falcão, 1612.
20III.—Pedro Barretto de Rezende, 1646.
21VASCO DA GAMA’S SHIPS AND THEIR EQUIPMENT.
22MUSTER-ROLL OF VASCO DA GAMA’S FLEET.
23THE VOYAGE.
24EARLY MAPS ILLUSTRATING VASCO DA GAMA’S FIRST VOYAGE.
25LIST OF PLACE-NAMES.
26HONOURS AND REWARDS BESTOWED UPON VASCO DA GAMA, 1499-1524.473
27INDEX AND GLOSSARY.
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