Relaçam da Viagem do Galeam Saõ Lourenço, e sua perdiçaõ nos bayxos de Moxincale em 3 de Septembro de 1649.

Escrita pelo Padre Antonio Francisco Cardim da Companhia de JESUS, Procurador ge[ne]ral da Provincia do Japaõ. A Manoel Severim de Faria. Em Lisboa : por Domingos Lopes Roza, 1651. Small quarto, modern panelled calf, both boards embellished with a gilt cross at centre; pp. 43, [1 blank]; title with woodcut device (the leaf repaired at gutter and re-inserted); decorated initial; signature at foot of text on final page; clean throughout.

A first-hand account of the shipwreck of the São Lourenço off the coast of East Africa in September, 1649, by the Portuguese Jesuit António Francisco Cardim (1596-1659), Procurator General of Japan. Cardim was subsequently forced to spend the winter of 1649-50 in Portuguese Mozambique, before finally arriving in Goa in May, 1650.

The present example appears identical in all respects to the National Library of Portugal’s 1651 copy, which has been digitised and can be viewed online: https://purl.pt/28106/1/index.html#/1/html

However, the possibility cannot be discounted that it is an eighteenth-century reprint of the 1651 original. In 1928, Maggs offered a set of Bernardo Gomes de Brito’s collection of seventeenth-century shipwreck accounts, Historia tragico-maritima (1735-1736), which included an additional six reprints of other seventeenth-century accounts – the Relaçam da Viagem do Galeam Saõ Lourenço among them. The Maggs entry states: ‘The six extra accounts were probably issued as separate reprints at different times by Gomes de Brito. As they all bear the imprints of the original editions, and the old dates of publication, they are apt to be mistaken for them’ (Rare Book Hub).

Note also, however, that in its physical description of the last copy of this title to be offered for sale that is recorded in the Rare Book Hub database (almost 60 years ago, in 1967), Sotheby’s described its copy as an eighteenth-century reprint with ’22 leaves’, rather than 43 numbered pages.