Note 219 — GOMES EANNES DE AZURARA; (continued 5)

(p. 286). Lost men ... Returned to the Kingdom.—[This detail, which is not to be found in ch. xv of the First Decade of Barros, where he treats of this expedition, is of the greatest importance, because it explains the event related in the letter of Antoniotto Usus di Mare, i.e., Antonio da Nole, dated December 12th, 1455, and found in the archives of Genoa in 1802 by Gräberg (Annali di geografia e di statistica, vol. ii, p. 285), in which that traveller tells how he met in those parts with a man of his own country, whom he took to be a member of the expedition of Vivaldi, which had set out one hundred and seventy years before, and of which nothing had been heard since its departure, according to Italian writers. Now it cannot be admitted that a descendant of the Genoese expeditioners of Thedisio Doria and Vivaldi would have kept his white colour if his ancestor had remained among the negroes, nor could he know the language. Therefore, Antoniotto can have seen no other white man in those parts except one of the mariners of the Portuguese caravel of Affonso and Vallarte of which Azurara treats in the text: especially as neither the different Portuguese captains, nor Cadamosto, found in any part of the African coast beyond Bojador a single vestige or tradition of other Europeans having gone there before their discovery by the Portuguese. Of the expedition of Vivaldi no news arrived after its departure in the thirteenth century. In the time of Antoniotto there remained a tradition only that it had set out intending to pass through the Straits of Gibraltar and make an unaccustomed voyage to the West. Antoniotto was a man of good education, and we see that he knew the authors who treated of this event; but having imbibed these traditions, and knowing of the existence of a Christian who had remained in these parts, he came to the conclusion—of course in ignorance of the fact mentioned by Azurara—that this man might be a descendant of the members of Vivaldi's expedition, "ex illis galeis credo Vivaldœ qui se amiserit sunt anni 170." If this important passage of Azurara's chronicle be confronted with the letter of Antoniotto, and both with the account of Cadamosto's second voyage, there remains not the least doubt that the man mentioned by Antoniotto was one of the three belonging to the caravel of Fernando Affonso and Vallarte, who had remained there in 1447, that is, eight years before Antoniotto visited the same parts, and that he was not a descendant of the men of Vivaldi's caravel, whose destiny had then for nearly two centuries been unknown. The passage also seems to refute the conjecture of the publisher of the said letter, and the induction of Baldelli in his Millone, vol. i, p. 153, etc., about the Medicean Portulano and the two maps of Africa therein, which we have analysed in our "Memoir on the priority of the Portuguese in the Discovery of the West Coast of Africa beyond Cape Bojador," where we show that these maps, far from disproving our priority, rather confirm it.]—S.