NODAL, Bartolome & Gonçalo Garcia de.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Relacion del viaje que por orden de Su Magestad y Acuerdo del Real Consejo de Indias, First edition, complete with the notably rare map, of this account of the expedition sent out by Philip III for the exploration of the extreme south of America: "one of the rarest books of its class" (Sabin).Alarmed to learn that the Scouten-Le Maire expedition of 1616 had rounded Cape Horn and entered the Pacific from the Atlantic, Philip sent the Nodal brothers in 1618 to examine the Le Maire strait and study the possibility of maintaining control over this new passage. With the cosmographer Diego Ramírez de Arellano Chamás serving as pilot, the Nodals passed around the Horn through Le Maire's strait, turned northward, and sailed back to Spain via the Strait of Magellan, thus circumnavigating Tierra del Fuego for the first time. En route, they discovered the Diego Ramírez Islands, for 150 years the southernmost land reached by European explorers. They returned to Spain with accurate observations of the tides in the Strait of Magellan and precise sailing instructions for the area. The map, created by Diego Ramirez de Arellano and Pedro Teixeira, Royal Cosmographer, shows for the first time the Le Maire Strait, here renamed the Strait of San Vicente, and shows Tierra del Fuego as an island. Borba de Moraes states that "copies containing the map are so rare that it is believed to have been withdrawn", in keeping with the official Spanish policy of secrecy regarding the Padrón Real. "This firs

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