PINTO, Fernao Mendes (1509-1583). The Voyages and Adventures, of Fernand Mendez Pinto, a Portugal: During his Travels for the space of one and twenty years in the Kingdoms of Ethiopia, China, Tartaria, Cauchin-china, Calaminham, Siam, Pegu, Japan, and a great part of the East-Indiaes. London: J. Macock for Henry Cripps, and Lodowick Lloyd, 1653.
Folio (267 x 184 mm). Title-page printed in red and black, wood-engraved head-pieces and initials. (Small corner dampstain to a-a2, slightly touching letters.) Modern paneled calf antique (covers bowed). Provenance: contemporary initials on title-page.
FIRST ENGLISH EDITION OF "ONE OF THE FINEST TRAVEL BOOKS OF ALL TIME" (Howgego).
Fernão Mendes Pinto, a Portuguese adventurer, embarked on a remarkable 21-year journey through Asia beginning on 11 March 1537. Departing from Lisbon, Pinto first traveled to India via Portuguese Mozambique, arriving in Diu on September 5, 1537. His travels can be divided into three phases: from Portugal to India, through the Red Sea region and Persian Gulf, and finally across East Asia, including Sumatra, Siam, China, and Japan. During his odyssey, Pinto experienced numerous hardships, claiming to have been "13 times a prisoner and 17 a slave". He participated in various roles, including soldier, merchant, pirate, slave, ambassador, and even missionary. Pinto's adventures included being shipwrecked, sold into slavery, and sentenced to hard labor on the Great Wall of China. Upon returning to Portugal in 1558, he wrote "Peregrinação" (Peregrination), a vivid account of his travels that was first published in Lisbon in 1614, becoming a tremendous success with nineteen editions in six languages published by 1700, "rivalling the popularity of Cervantes' Don Quixote. 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 p.15). The narrative is considered to be the first book in European literature to tell of pirate battles on the seas of the Orient, to describe the wild beasts of the equatorial forests of Asia, and to portray the Dalai Lama. Cordier Japonica 40; Cordier Sinica 2068; Lust 346; Wing M-1706.
