500 Years of Brazil
Divisão de Bibliotecas e Documentação
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The Works

PACHECO PEREIRA, Duarte. Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis.     Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1892.

Dubbed the "Lusitanian Achilles" by Luís de Camões, Duarte Pacheco Pereira was a man of great learning. Setting out for the East in 1503 as captain of the ship Conceição in the squadron Led by Afonso de Albuquerque, he gained prestige and fame through the many victories he won in the two years he remained there.

Around 1505-1508, he wrote Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis, a work that was to total five volumes but remained an unfinished manuscript. 

Being what historian Luís Filipe Barreto sees as a sort of global treatise of sailing in the second phase of Atlantic navigation, one of the features of Duarte Pacheco Pereira's work is the reproduction of one of the first Portuguese solar regimes and one of the oldest itineraries with latitudes, as well as the descriptions of the coasts and entrances to the harbours along the coast of Africa.

Duarte Pacheco Pereira's book – from whose title the denomination situ orbis reproduces Pomponio Mela's geographic treaty, though the reason for the denomination Esmeraldo remains unknown – was published in Lisbon in 1892 by Rafael Eduardo de Azevedo Basto, Curator of the Royal Archive at the Torre do Tombo, in an edition to commemorate the fourth centenary of the Discovery of America . This publication was revised by Augusto Epifânio da Silva Dias in a critical edition brought out in 1905.