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A Few Errors in Magellan Authorities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Extract
I have noted some errors or ambiguities in authoritative works on Magellan.
(1) J. A. Robertson's edition and translation of Pigafetta (Cleveland, 1906) has Captain Barbosa ‘threatening the slave that if he did go ashore, he would be flogged’ (1, 179). But Pigafetta wrote ‘se non andava in terra,’ ‘if he did not go ashore.’ The slave (Enrique de Malacca) was wanted ashore as interpreter. The error is repeated in the reprint of Robertson's text in Charles E. Nowell, Magellan's Voyage Around the World (Evanston, 1962).
(2) Nowell omits (p. 104) a sentence of Robertson's translation concerning the Patagonian giant: ‘He had a bow and arrows in his hand.’ He also obscures Pigafetta's text by turning Robertson's parentheses into brackets, and thus excluding three phrases. These should now read: ‘(but not of cedar),’ Nowell, page 119; ‘(with the pardon of cosmographers, for they have not seen it),’ Nowell, page 128; ‘(the king's men),’ Nowell, page 138.
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