Shipwrecks and Bibliographic Ghosts (Blog post by José Montelongo)
During John Carter Brown’s legendary book-buying spree of 1846 and 1847—a foundational moment that brought around one thousand rare volumes into his collection—he acquired a thick, cube-like 12mo volume enticingly titled The Argonautica of the Americas, or a History of the Dangers of Pedro de Vitoria and his Companions. Written in Latin by the German Jesuit Johannes Bissell and printed in Munich in 1647, the work came with a curious origin story: Bissell claimed he had long wanted to write an account of the West Indies when, by happenstance, he stumbled upon a short text by a Spaniard named Pedro Gobeo de Vitoria and decided to expand it into a full-length narrative.
The narrative chronicles the harrowing misadventures of a Spanish teenager lured to South America by tales of vast Peruvian silver deposits. Shipwrecked and forced to traverse punishing, arid coastal terrain in a desperate bid for survival, Gobeo de Vitoria lived to record his ordeal in vivid, dramatic detail.
The volumes arriving on Benefit Street in Providence had been sourced by Henry Stevens, an entrepreneurial young Vermonter living in London who would become a central figure in the transatlantic rare book trade. Though his relationship with John Carter Brown had its share of ups and downs, Stevens never stopped sending catalogues to his Providence patron. Among them was his Bibliotheca Geographica & Historica, sent with a handwritten dedication to Brown. The catalogue described a vast collection of books assembled by Stevens, slated for a ten-day auction in London’s Leicester Square in November 1872.
Leafing through the catalogue, Brown would have come across Stevens’s colorful entry on Bissell’s Argonautica. The bookseller was deeply skeptical of its historic value, noting that “on examination, this is evidently not a translation of any authentic history, since it resembles a Simbad-the-Sailor and Robinson Crusoe concoction.” Stevens concluded that the volume was merely “a sort of experimental model of Bissell’s new method of making history attractive.”
Stevens went so far as to suggest that Pedro Gobeo de Vitoria’s original account might be a complete fiction—a bibliographic ghost, cited in bibliographies but never seen in print. Yet one formidable authority suggested otherwise. In his monumental Bibliotheca Hispana Nova, the 17th-century bibliographer Nicolás Antonio wrote that he had personally met Gobeo de Vitoria, author of Naufragio y Peregrinación, and had even read a manuscript version of the shipwreck narrative written in Latin by the survivor himself.
Was Johannes Bissell working from this unpublished Latin manuscript when he expanded the tale? Or was he translating from an early German edition titled The Wondrous and Strange Journey of the Young and Noble Pedro de Victoria from Spain to Peru? That detail remains unclear. What we do know is that John Carter Brown’s appetite for the saga did not wane: he eventually acquired that German edition, printed in Ingolstadt in 1622. He also bought a second Latin edition, printed in 1698 in Danzig.
Decades turned into centuries, seasons turned, and the John Carter Brown Library continued to grow in size and renown as generations of scholars and librarians cared for its holdings. Then, this year—proving that collection development in libraries is the ultimate long game—the ghost finally materialized.
The JCB acquired the original Spanish edition by Pedro Gobeo de Vitoria, printed in Seville in 1610. With it, the Library finally holds the complete family of texts. Even extraordinary discoveries have their caveats, but not this one: our volume is the only known complete copy in existence. The other surviving copy, discovered in Mannheim in the early 2000s, lacks its final gathering of pages, leaving the Gobeo’s survival story abruptly truncated.
Until now.