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Updated: June 4, 2025
From Marco Polo to Scott's Journal the literature of geographical discovery abounds with classics, and standards of comparison suggest themselves in abundance to the critic of Champlain's Voyages. Most naturally, of course, one turns to the records of American exploration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to Ramusio, Oviedo, Peter Martyr, Hakluyt, and Purchas.
From an inspection of the codex in the library, where it then existed in Florence, M. Arcangeli supposes the manuscript was written in the middle of the sixteenth century. This identical copy was, therefore, probably in existence when Ramusio published his work.
The most ancient descriptions of these countries are to be found in the collections of M. Thevenot, and Ramusio, already noticed. Lobos's Voyage to Abyssinia, with fifteen Dissertations relating to Abyssinia. By Le Grand. 8vo. 1789.
Charlevoix, with a proper discrimination, refers directly to Ramusio as the sole source from whence the account of the discovery is derived, as do the French writers who have mentioned it since his time, except M. Margry, who, in his recent work on the subject of French voyages, quotes from the Carli version.
The foregoing account is given by Hakluyt on the authority of a map, engraved by Clement Adams after the design of Sebastian Cabot, which map was then to be seen in the private gallery of Queen Elizabeth at Westminster, and in the houses of many of the merchants of London. From Ramusio, however, Hakluyt gives rather a different account of this matter.
Ramusio in his preface, after mentioning to Fracastor that he placed the relation of Verrazzano and Jacques Cartier in that volume, adds, that inasmuch as Fracastor has exhorted him to make, in imitation of Ptolemy, four or five maps of as much as was known up to that time of the part of the world recently discovered, he could not disobey his commands, and had therefore arranged to have them made by the Piedmontese cosmographer Giacomo de Gastaldi.
This relation was printed in a small and scarce collection at the Aldus press in Venice, by Antonio Minutio in 1543, and was afterwards inserted in the collection of Giovanne Baptista Ramusio. The following is an abstract of that journey.
Florence, 1798.; Tiraboschi Storia dell Litt. vol. 1. p. 1. lib. 1. c. 6.; the Letters of Americo in Ramusio, 1. 138.; Bandini Vita del Amerigo, and an article in the North American Review, for 1822. Paris, 1797. 18mo. This little work, which embraces remarks on the arts and people of Asia, Africa, and America, deserves the title it bears better than most French works which claim it.
In the oriental Pilgrimage of the pious old Purchas, and in the fine old folio Voyages of Hakluyt, Thevenot, Ramusio, and De Bry, we read of many glorious old Asiatic temples, very long in erecting.
The remainder of this introduction is from the work of Mr J. R, Forster, extracted partly from Ramusio, and partly consisting of an ingenious attempt to explain and bolster up the more than dubious production of Marcolini: But these observations are here considerably abridged; as an extended, grave, and critical commentary on a narrative we believe fabulous, might appear incongruous, though it did not seem proper to omit them altogether.
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