The voyages and adventures of Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, a Portugal, during his travels for the space of one and twenty years in the Kingdoms of Ethiopia, China, Tartaria, Cauchinchina, Calaminham, Siam, Pegu, Japan, and a great part of the East-Indies.

With a relation and description of most of the places thereof ; their religion, laws, riches, customs, and government in time of peace and war : where he five times suffered shipwrack, was sixteen times sold, and thirteen times made a slave : written originally by himself in the Portugal tongue and dedicated to the Majesty of Philip King of Spain ; done into English by H.C. Gent. London : Printed by J. Macock, and are to be sold by Henry Herringman, at the Sign of the Blew-Anchor, in the lower-walk of the New Exchange, 1663. Small folio, speckled calf ruled in blind, expertly rebacked with new spine of the very highest quality, spine with raised bands and gilt tooling and ornament, contrasting morocco title label lettered in gilt; preliminary blank; pp [xiv], 326; woodcut head-pieces and decorative initials; title page with wet stamp from the British Museum verso, the style of which indicates it was accessioned between 1753 – 1836, beneath which is the release stamp ‘Duplicate For Sale’ with a smudged date which appears to be 1884; same British Museum stamp to pp. 240 and 326, occasional foxing and spotting, marginal tear to pp. 67-68; marginal tear with small loss to pp. 323-324, not affecting the text, else clean and crisp throughout, a fine copy.

The second English edition of Henry Cogan’s translation of the Peregrinação, originally published in Lisbon in 1614.

Pinto’s work is a narrative of his two-decade voyage which commenced in Portugal in 1537 in a fleet under the command of the son of Vasco da Gama, and ended with his return in 1558. It contains some of the earliest eyewitness accounts by a Westerner of the Malay Peninsula, Siam, Cochin-China, China and Japan. Indeed, Pinto claimed to be the first European to set foot on Japanese soil.

Pinto was admitted to the Society of Jesus in 1554. A close acquaintance of Francis Xavier, he contributed to various missions in Japan, a country which he visited four times during his travels. The Peregrinação was enormously successful, and by 1700 had been published in nineteen editions in six languages. According to Catz, it rivalled Cervantes’ Don Quixote in popularity: “It is, in fact, an exotic and imaginative composite of fact and fiction, at once a picaresque prose epic and an authentic picture of sixteenth-century Asia.” (Rebecca D. Catz, The Travels of Mendes Pinto, 15).

Hill 1146; Cordier, Japonica, 40, Sinica, 2068-2069; Lust 346; Wing M1706