قصة الكتاب :
Duarte Barbosa left Portugal for India with Cabral’s fleet in 1500. Apart from a home visit\r\nsometime between 1506–11, he remained in India for the rest of his life working, at least\r\nuntil 1518, as a government official. Some confusion has arisen because of the presence in\r\nthe Indian Ocean of two contemporaries of the same name: Magellan’s brother-in-law who\r\ndied at Cebu in 1521 (cf. Appendix to Introduction to Volume I, 1918); and a pilot in\r\nPortuguese India. It appears that his book was finished by 1517–18, but it was not published\r\nuntil 1550 when an Italian version appeared in Ramusio’s Delle Navigationi et Viaggi. It has\r\nbeen widely assumed that the reason for the delay was the Portuguese policy of ‘control of\r\ninformation’, but J.-P. Rubiès has argued that the lack of a publishing infrastructure was\r\nequally significant. However, the manuscript had an active informal life, being translated into\r\nSpanish in 1524 and exercising an important influence on European map making. For those\r\nwho had access to it, it provided for many decades the best guide to what was to be the future\r\narena of western imperialism in the Indian Ocean from Hormuz in the Persian Gulf to the\r\nStrait of Malacca.\r\n