Adventure & Exploration Library of Steve Fossett

8vo (215 x 138 mm). 8 engraved maps (4 folding, 4 hand-colored), 2 engraved plates. (Lacking half-title, tear repaired p.263 crossing text.) Original paper-covered boards uncut. FIRST EDITION IN FRENCH, edited and translated from the Italian by Carlo Amoretti. Pigafetta, a gentleman volunteer and navigator, kept a diary at sea which he presented to Charles V of Spain on his return from the voyage in 1522. When he returned to Italy, he composed a fuller account, of which a few manuscript copies were made. One was given by Pigafetta to Louise de Savoy, mother of Francis I of France, who had it translated into French and published in an abridged form in Paris in about 1525. The original Italian manuscript from which it was translated has since been lost. An Italian translation was made of the 1525 Paris edition and published in Venice in 1534 and 1536. No further separate editions were published until Father Amoretti's in Milan, 1800. His transcription was made from a 16th century Italian manuscript which he discovered in Milan's Ambrosian Library, one of only four contemporary manuscripts then extant, and the only one in Italian. This French edition includes Martin Behaim's curious 1492 treatise on the terrestrial globe, which was first published in Schedel's Chronicarum liber, Nuremberg, 1493. Borba de Moraes II, p.146; Brunet IV, 650; Graesse V, p.289; Sabin 62805.