New Edition: 40 pages, title page with a decorated border, wood engraved vignette of the wreck on page 5, disbound with remnants of the forwarding on the spine and now held loosely in blue paper wrappers, wormholes throughout, text is clean. First published in 1554 and many times reprinted, this edition may be a seventeenth or early eighteenth century reissue, the bibliographic references are incomplete.
Translation of the title:
HISTORY OF THE VERY NOTABLE LOSS OF THE GREAT GALLEON S. JOÃO In which are recounted the great hardships and pitiful things that befell Captain Manoel de Sousa Sepulveda, and the lamentable end that he, his wife, his children, and all the other people met with, in the land of Natal where they were lost on the 24th of June 1552.
This is possibly the earliest substantial narrative account of the South African coastline in any European literature, predating the Dutch settlement at the Cape by a century. The 'terra do Natal' (Land of Natal) The name Natal itself was given by Vasco da Gama when he sighted the coast along what is now Durban on Christmas Day in 1497 and named the country Terra Natalis, after the Portuguese word Natal for Christmas.
Mendelssohn (Sydney) South African Biography, volume II, page 339.
See also: The Tragic Fate of the Great Ship Sao Joao
(https://www.theheritageportal.co.za/article/tragic-fate-great-ship-sao-joao)
Wikipedia: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hist%C3%B3ria_tr%C3%A1gico-mar%C3%ADtima)
- Size: Small 8vo (183 x 125 mm)
