from a document in the archives of Venice, containing a petition of Pigafetta to the Doge and Council of Venice, dated August 5th, 1524, applying for leave to print his account of his circumnavigation of the globe, and to have a privilege for twenty years. This is followed by a statement that the prayer of the petition was granted by the Doge and 152 of the Council, six members of which voted against Pigafetta. The text of this document is given in the Appendix; it was communicated to me by the Geographical Society of Paris, which has published a translation of it in its bulletin of February 1869.
Until M. Amoretti published his edition of Pigafetta from the Ambrosian MS. in 1800, there never was a complete or an original Italian edition of Pigafetta; for the quarto edition of 1536 (Grenville, 6,977), without name of author or printer, is, as is mentioned in the address to the reader, a translation from the edition of Jacques Fabre. This edition of 1536 had a privilege for fourteen years; it must be by Ramusio, for the address to the reader is almost the same as his more abridged "discourse" in his collection of travels of Venice, 1550, and Venice, 1613, folio, 346 v. In Ramusio's collection, and in the edition of 1536, Pigafetta's voyage is preceded by the letter of Maximilian Transylvanus, Secretary of the Emperor Charles V, to the Cardinal of Salzburg. This letter of Maximilian's is not quite the same in the two books in the division of the paragraphs; in Pigafetta's voyage there is greater similarity, and the paragraphs are numbered
