About Pigafetta’s Log

Pigafetta’s Log retells the first voyage around the world as Antonio Pigafetta saw it. Pigafetta, a young gentleman from Vicenza, sailed with Ferdinand Magellan’s fleet in 1519 and was one of the eighteen men who came home on the Victoria three years later. His journal is the fullest eyewitness account of the expedition.

The book follows him in 34 chapters. As you turn the pages, the fleet sails on across a globe of the world as it was in 1520, with the parts Europe had not yet charted drawn the way Magellan imagined them. Objects from Pigafetta’s story are collected into your codex as you read.

Sources

The book retells Antonio Pigafetta’s own account of the voyage, known in Italian as the Relazione del primo viaggio intorno al mondo and in English as the First Voyage Around the World. Quotations follow James Alexander Robertson’s English translation, made from the Italian manuscript in the Ambrosian Library in Milan and published in 1906 in Blair and Robertson’s The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898 (volumes 33 and 34).

Where other records of the voyage, such as the pilot Francisco Albo’s log, add to Pigafetta or differ from him, the margins say so.

The maps

The globe shows the world as it was in 1520, with borders adapted from historical-basemaps by A. Ourednik (GPL-3.0) and coastlines from Natural Earth. The parts Europe had not yet charted are drawn as Magellan imagined them, after Johannes Schöner’s globe of 1520, and the real world appears as the fleet reaches it.

How it was made

Pigafetta’s Log was made with the help of AI. The retelling was written with an AI model working from Pigafetta’s account, and the quotations are Pigafetta’s own words in Robertson’s translation. The 37 pictures in the codex were made with AI image generation, in the style of the copperplate vignettes on maps printed around 1570. See them all →

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Pigafetta’s Log is the first volume of Voyage Logs: history’s great voyages, retold from the journals of the people who sailed them.