A complete copy of this rarity with the two elaborately decorative maps and 8 beautifully engraved plates depicting a banana palm, and a zebra with the remaining plates showing costume, weaponry, and modes of transport etc.
Filippo Pigafetta (1533-1604) was an Italian mathematician and explorer. His work is a transcription of the Portuguese trader, Duarte Lopez’s, account of his time in the Congo. Lopez had been summoned to Rome by the Pope and his account is one of the earliest European descriptions of Central Africa.
Howgego provides a synopsis of the narrative: “After a stay of several years, and having accumulated some wealth through his enterprises, [Lopez] was appointed as ambassador of Alvaro II, king of the Congo, to the pope and Philip II of Spain, at that time unified with Portugal. The mission had originally been entrusted to Sebastian da Costa, who had been sent to the Congo in 1580 to announce the accession of Philip and to gain the consent of Alvaro to seek out certain supposed silver mines. Da Costa was returned to Portugal, carrying a letter from Alvaro, but died on the voyage, and Duarte Lopez was appointed in his stead. As ambassador to Philip, Lopez was to offer specimens of local minerals and to open the region for free trade with Portugal and Spain, while also informing the pope of the need for missionaries. However, during his return to Portugal, Lopez was shipwrecked on the coast of Venezuela and forced to spend a year there. Although his submissions to the pope and Philip were largely ignored, Lopez was able to relate everything he knew about the Congo to Filippo Pigafetta, who had been charged with the task of collecting information about the region.”
Beautifully engraved, the map, “Tavola Del’Regno Di Congo,” is of considerable value. It is the most importance map of West Africa published in the sixteenth century. Covering the area which Lopez visited from 1578-1584, it is replete with villages, toponyms, and geographical features. Pigafetta was the first to challenge the Ptolemaic conception that the source of the Nile was two large lakes side by side. He places them one beneath the other instead.
Betz, R.L., The Mapping of Africa: A Cartobibliography of Printed Maps of the Africa Continent to 1700 (Hes & de Graaf, 2007); Howgego I, L146; Mendelssohn (1979) III, 163; Relano, F., “Against Ptolemy: The Significance of the Lopes-Pigafetta Map of Africa,” Imago Mundi Vol. 47 (1995), pp.49-66.
