The Roteiro or log book of the famous first voyage of Vasco da Gama, has been known and used for many years. The original manuscript is in the Municipal Library at Oporto, and although not published until the nineteenth century it was examined in the sixteenth by Fernão Lopes de Castanheda during the preparation of his História do descobrimento . . . da India pelos portuguezes. Diogo Kopke and António da Costa Paiva published a first Portuguese edition in 1838, and in 1861 Alexandre Herculano with Köpke’s former collaborator, now Baron Castello do Paiva, brought out a second which was no improvement on its predecessor. Fontoura da Costa supplied the present version, of which we here have an exact reprint, in 1940. Meanwhile, a very elaborate new edition in two volumes, prepared by scholars including Damião Peres and Gago Coutinho, appeared in 1945. Two French translations, by Ferdinand Denis and Arthur Morelet respectively, were published in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth Franz Hümmerich has devoted the most exhaustive criticism to the narrative. In many ways the best edition of all remains the translation and enlightening study made by Ernest G. Ravenstein for the Hakluyt Society in 1898.
These scholarly efforts have almost established the authorship of Álvaro Velho, though without proving it beyond any shadow of doubt. Velho certainly sailed with the Gama expedition to India in 1497 and evidently accompanied it homeward only as far as Sierra Leone. As the narrative stops there and as other evidence establishes the fact that Velho might have written it, they strongly favor his authorship. Fontoura da Costa here adds his vote to the majority by attributing the work to Álvaro in the title.
It is useful to have this reissue of the Fontoura da Costa edition of our best source for the Gama first voyage, as only a few years ago, to the best of this reviewer’s knowledge, only Harvard and the Library of Congress possessed both the Köpke and Herculano editions, and many large libraries possessed neither. As between this and the Peres-Gago Coutinho publication of 1945, a reasonable choice would be the selection of Peres as a work of scholarship and Fontoura da Costa as a handy reference.
