Cambridge Library Collection - Maritime Exploration
1 total work
This compilation in Spanish of various accounts of the 1579-80 voyage of Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa (1532-92) in the Pacific, through the Straits of Magellan and across the Atlantic was published in 1768. Sarmiento had been tasked with preventing Sir Francis Drake's English fleet from entering the Pacific, or from re-emerging into the Atlantic. Although Sarmiento failed in this objective, he was nevertheless the first to survey the Straits in detail. This work, edited by Bernardo Yriate, offers an introduction on the sources, Sarmiento's own journal of the voyage, an extract from Bartolome de Argensola's work on Spanish voyages, and various other documents in which Sarmiento is mentioned. The Hakluyt Society published some of these works, and others, in an English translation edited by Sir Clements Markham, in 1895, which is also available in the Cambridge Library Collection.