«Ce Routier est la piece la plus exacte qui ait paru en ce genre»

In the giant puzzle of pre-modern nautical literature, the 16th century rutter by Manuel de Mesquita Perestrelo (to which our title refers) is a very special piece. Mesquita Perestrelo sailed south-east African waters—between the Cape of Good Hope and the Cape Correntes—around 1576, and his navigational survey, commissioned by Sebastian of Portugal, was used as a reference until the late 18th century.

Surprisingly, the first edition of this rutter was a French translation made by the diplomat and scientist Melchisédech Thévenot (c. 1620–1692). Thévenot published his four-volume travel compilation, the Relations de divers voyages curieux (Paris, 1663–1672), continuously updated until 1696, in a crucial moment of the French administration, and precisely when it looked at the colonial policy and trade as a priority.

The edition of Mesquita Perestrelo’s rutter was based Aleixo da Mota’s version. Aleixo da Mota was another Portuguese pilot of the Carreira da India who wrote his own rutter around 1615. Nowadays a copy of Mota’s text is kept at the National Library of Portugal, but it is not clear which was the copy followed in the French edition.

Thévenot was a tireless collector who was involved in the management of the royal library, but he also created his personal cabinet of curiosities with a rich library, scientific instruments, Greek sculptures and, above all, a renowned collection of Oriental manuscripts. He was in contact with Arabists as Antoine Galland and Abraham Ecchellensis (Ibrahim al-Haqilani) and kept up correspondence with notorious men of letters all around Europe. One of them was John Locke, whom Thévenot asked for help to locate the lost unprinted papers of Richard Hakluyt. Thévenot was obsessed with overseas knowledge and long-distance voyages and engaged in a real manuscript hunt.

The French writer stressed the importance of the Portuguese rutters on several occasions, but the very first lines of the dedication to the King Louis XIV is the most meaningful: “Sire, I present to your Majesty a collection of travel accounts about voyages to the East Indies and long-distance voyages, in a time when the glory of Your Name spreads through all Europe, and your subjects are on the verge of bringing it with your Empire beyond the Ocean: They will find in the rutters and in the maps of the Portuguese all the knowledge accumulated during two hundred years of navigation and several shipwrecks on the way to find the Sea route & all traces of such a long path.” [Luana Giurgevich]