SOUSA DE SEPULVEDA, Manoel, de.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Historia da muy notavel perda do galeam grande S. Joam, Important shipwreck account - influential for Portuguese literature - on the sinking of the São João off the coast of Natal, in present-day South Africa, in 1552. We have only traced one other copy previously on the market. The São João had left Cochin, on the Malabar coast, heading to Lisbon. This tragic accident near the Cape of Good Hope caused the death of over seventy enslaved people and over forty Portuguese mariners. Three hundred more perished while trying to reach the shore. The subsequent four-month-long walk along the African coast, in the hope of meeting some ivory-traders, killed most of the remainder, including the captain Manoel de Sousa de Sepulveda, and his wife and children (Frank, p. 205). "It was said that the value of the cargo of the ill-fated vessel was worth a million in gold" (Mendelssohn). First printed ca. 1554, this anonymous account was published five more times in the 16th and 17th centuries; most of the generally undated recorded editions appear to be, like the present, examples of an 18th-century counterfeit citing the long since deceased Antonio Alvares, who had flourished in the 16th century, as the printer. These counterfeits testify to the lingering importance of this narrative, which by then had acquired the aura of a myth.In 1735-36, it was reprinted as part of Bernardo Gomes de Brito's Historia trágico-marítima, a famous collection of early Portuguese shipwreck narratives.

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