The ‘Taboas geraes’ of João Teixeira Albernaz I as a Mediated Textual Object

Abstract

This article examines the ‘Taboas geraes da toda a navegacão’ (1630), a manuscript atlas by Portuguese cartographer João Teixeira Albernaz I (fl.1602-1649), as a textual artifact permanently altered and resignified by the additions and alterations that Spanish mariner and author Francisco de Seyxas y Lovera (c.1646-c.1705) carried out in the late seventeenth century. I examine the biographical circumstances in which Seyxas possessed the atlas and analyze his modifications of the ‘Taboas geraes’ as authorial acts with political, autobiographical and literary dimensions. I seek, as well, to identify problems that the ‘Taboas geraes’ presents for how we understand matters of authorship and textual nature surrounding this object – as well as other one-of-a-kind, mediated artefacts – examining whether existing scholarship provides an adequate framework through which to approach this situation.

Antonio de la Roche and the discovery of South Georgia

“…How reliable is his account? The foremost student of Seyxas is the Hispanist and book historian Clayton McCarl, who in a series of studies (McCarl 2014(McCarl , 2018(McCarl , 2020 has been drawn to the conclusion that Seyxas' publications offer a mixture of fact and fiction. In 2011 Dr McCarl published an edition of a work by Seyxas that had survived in manuscript in the collection of the Hispanic Society of America in New York City.…”

“…The island that La Roche had discovered soon began to appear on maps. The first was a map of the Région Austral Magallánica that in 1692 Seyxas added to "Atlas Taboas geraes da toda a navegacão" (1630), a manuscript atlas (now in the Library of Congress, G1015.T4 1630) by the Portuguese cartographer João Teixeira Albernaz I (McCarl, 2018(McCarl, , 2020. In 1703, the French cartographer Guillaume Delisle produced a Carte du Paraguay, du Chili, du Detroit de Magellan, which showed Ile de La Roche divided by a strait from a piece of land to the east labelled "terre inconnüe"; the strait is labelled "Detroit de la Roche découvert en 1675" (Delisle, 1703).…”