Folio, (354 x 248 mm; 385 x 265 mm). I: 2 ff., 128 ff.; II: 2 ff., 143 ff., with errors in foliation as issued. Red late 19th or early 20th century half chagrin by L. Martin, faux raised bands to spine, compartments finely tooled and lettered in gilt. First title mounted at gutter, small repairs primarily along margin, text block trimmed tight along top edge sometimes touching headlines, paper repairs to ff. 70, 107, 126 and 127 causing minor loss of text, old tape repair to f. 92 margin, large paper repair to f. 128 away from text, tiny worm holes to last few leaves, occasional dampstaining, scattered foxing; second title light dampstained and small restorations not affecting text, marginal repairs to following leaves not affecting text, light damp to last quires and scattered foxing, else excellent condition overall.

Barros’ ‘Asia’ was the basis for many of the future chronicles in the Portuguese language, and later on in other European languages, his access to first-hand information was instrumental in this. The work is divided into Decades, the first addresses the discoveries and explorations up to 1505, it contains the circumnavigation voyages of Vasco da Gama (1497–98 and 1502–04) and Pedro Alvares Cabral (1500–01); the second Decade covers the following 1505 to 1515, it includes Albuquerque’s deeds in Hormuz and Goa, as well as the defeat of the Egyptian-Gujarati fleet off Diu in 1509, episodes from Malacca and Singapore, and the defeat of the Sultan of Japara’s fleet by Fernão Peres de Andrade in 1513, which established Portuguese supremacy in the eastern end of the Indian Ocean.

Of all the colonies in Portugal’s vast empire, the author’s personal interest in Brazil was greatest, in a remarkable passage in the preface to Hakluyt (1582, pp. 5–6), Barros is credited as nothing less than the architect of Portugal’s colonial policy in the country, a view strongly endorsed by Charles Boxer. Barros was among the original lord-proprietors (donátarios) of one of the country’s twelve captaincies, which came with phenomenal rights and privileges. He sponsored two grand and ambitious expeditions to develop the region. The first, undertaken in 1535, is described in the present work as containing the largest number of mounted men ever sent such a distance from the Iberian peninsula. His second attempt was launched in 1555, and thus could be said to have been funded in part by the success of these initial volumes of his master-work. Ultimately, neither venture was successful (and the second nearly ruined him), but the connection aptly suggests why Barros was an extremely reliable chronicler: vital economic and political interests, whether personal or those of the Crown, were at stake.

Barros himself was deeply invested both politically and economically in Brazil, and personally sponsored two expeditions to his lands there. The first of these is detailed in the present work along with a treatment of its discovery, making it a book of note to the Western Hemisphere as well as the East. The collection was continued in two more volumes after a considerable lapse (published in 1563 and 1615 respectively), both in smaller format and the second posthumous.

Among sixteenth-century readers and travellers, the reception of Barros’ Asia was enormous: in his influential exhibit “Europe Informed,” Francis Rogers studied multiple booklists to identify in a historically controlled way the earliest travel accounts to disseminate information about Asia to Europeans: Barros is not only on every list but holds first place on all of them. From a more recent vantage point, in Laures’s chronologically arranged bibliography listing of the earliest printed European works devoted to Japan, Barros’s Asia is the second entry, and dates from the same year as the first.

Although he received an excellent humanistic education, Barros was very much a man of the world, holding the powerful posts of treasurer for the Casa da India and subsequently Factor, which made him the senior government official in connection with African and Asian colonies and the spice trade.

Donald F. Lach writes in Asia in the Making of Europe: “Because of his official position, Barros had at his disposal the full facilities, documents, and . . . reports of the Casa da India. All the Portuguese manuscript sources now extant—such as the account of Tome Pires, Domingo Paes and Fernao Nuniz—were used in the preparation of the Decadas. For geographical locations he depended implicitly on the written and oral accounts of the pilots and navigators who had sailed in Eastern waters and, on their testimony, did not hesitate to point out the mistakes of the Ptolemaic geographers. Nor was he satisfied to use the evidence of European observers exclusively. He was constantly trying to procure native accounts of the Eastern regions. For his remarks on India, he assembled Persian, Arabic, and Indian manuscripts and bought educated slaves to translate them for him.

He also had Chinese books and a Chinese slave as a translator. He likewise sought to assemble information from the oral tradition of places which had no written histories.

But, whether his sources were of European or Asian provenance, he tried, according to his own statement, to use them judiciously in order to produce a balanced narrative without ‘too much of any one thing’. The result of his labors was a history that stands as one of the classics of Portuguese literature and of European historiography” (Lach).

The work numbers among the rarest collected travel accounts, in part because of the relatively backward state of publishing in Portugal at the time, and in part because it was a thoroughly well-read and used source which was nonetheless supplanted by later accounts in more accessible languages. Already in 1597, Diogo Couto declared in the introduction to his continuation of this work that “the first edition is so consumed by time, that I do not know whether there are ten volumes in Portugal, and in India even one” (quoted in translation in Borba de Moraes). A worldwide census reported by Leite de Faria in 1990 located a mere five copies in the US, five in Brazil and 13 in Portugal. The first edition is a noted rarity with only this example appearing in the auction records for the last half century.

Borba de Moraes, p. 86; Brunet I, 669; Cordier, Japonica 31; European Americana 552/4 and 553/9; Laures 117; King Manuel 74; Portugal-Brazil, 147; Rogers, Europe Informed, pp. 51–2; Sabin 3646. C. R. Boxer, Joao de Barros; Portuguese Humanist and Historian of Asia, pp. 95–105; Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe 1.190–2; D. Schaffer, Portuguese Exploration to the West and the Formation of Brazil 1450–1800, 13.