Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis is an early modern work on cosmography and Atlantic exploration written by the Portuguese geographer and navigator Duarte Pacheco Pereira.
Inception
1505, 1508
Overview
Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis is an early modern work on cosmography and Atlantic exploration written by the Portuguese geographer and navigator Duarte Pacheco Pereira.
It was dedicated to King Manuel I of Portugal (1495–1521). The work was divided into five parts with a total of fifty nine chapters and around two hundred pages. Composed in 1506, it dealt, in the author’s own words, with “cosmography and seafaring”. The enigmatic title name appears to be a mixture of Portuguese and Latin. It was written in Portuguese and it featured geographical coordinates for all known ports at the time. The manuscript was most likely written between 1505 and 1508 and was finished by 1508.
Synopsis
Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis describes itself as "a book of cosmography and navigation". It states that, in addition to the continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia, the world had a "fourth part": i.e., America. Eviatar Zerubavel explains that, according to Pacheco Pereira, America encompassed both North and South America.
According to Joaquim Barradas de Carvalho, when Pacheco Pereira composed the Esmeraldo, he was familiar with texts including Sacrobosco’s De sphaera mundi and Pliny’s Natural History.
