Discoveries of the World: From their First Original Unto the Year of our Lord 1555

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 The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India.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 volume, published in 1862, contains a sixteenth-century Portuguese text first published in translation by Hakluyt himself in 1601; both the original Portuguese and a modified version of Hakluyt’s translation are given on each page. The author, Antonio Galvano (1503-1557), distinguished himself as Governor of the Moluccas, but fell out of favour on his return to Portugal and died in poverty. His book traces the history of exploration from ‘the time of the Flood’ to 1555.