By general agreement, the most handsome, complete, and extravagantly illustrated version resides today in the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. To read this memoir, and to turn its ancient vellum pages, is to be transported instantly five hundred years into the past. Although Pigafetta tells his story more or less in chronological order, he has not constructed a linear narrative; rather, it is a compilation of events, illustrations, translations of foreign tongues, prayers, descriptions, epiphanies, and bawdy asides, all of them heavily
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