Martín Fernández de Navarrete, Colección de los viages y descubrimientos, tomo V (Madrid, 1837)
The volume of Spain's official documentary edition that prints the papers of the Loaísa and Saavedra voyages to the Moluccas, each with the shelfmark it was copied from. It is the working end of a nineteenth-century decision that is rarely credited: a state printing the archive of its own empire at its own press, so that anyone could check the history against the documents rather than against the chronicles.
Why this wins its question: Navarrete's Colección is cited constantly and described almost never: in English it is a bracketed source note behind quotations from Columbus and Magellan. This object reads a volume of it and says what the apparatus actually does - a fleet table with burdens, captains and a crew total, footnoted to the chapter and folio of Oviedo it was drawn from; a warning that ten toneles make twelve toneladas, so that the tonnages are not misread; a document heading that prints "Arch. de Ind. en Sevilla, legajo 2.o de Autos del Consejo" and a marginal date, so the reader can go and check; and inside that document the crown's own way of establishing facts, a treasurer swearing in a returned passenger before named witnesses at La Coruña in June 1527. It also names the limit in the same breath: this was an edition published by royal order at the national press, and what it selects is the state's choice, whatever the transcription is worth.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The title page reads "COLECCION DE LOS VIAGES Y DESCUBRIMIENTOS, QUE HICIERON POR MAR LOS ESPAÑOLES DESDE FINES DEL SIGLO XV, CON VARIOS DOCUMENTOS INEDITOS CONCERNIENTES A LA HISTORIA DE LA MARINA CASTELLANA Y DE LOS ESTABLECIMIENTOS ESPAÑOLES EN INDIAS, COORDINADA É ILUSTRADA POR D. MARTIN FERNANDEZ DE NAVARRETE... TOMO V. EXPEDICIONES AL MALUCO. = VIAGES DE LOAISA Y DE SAAVEDRA. DE ORDEN DE S. M. MADRID EN LA IMPRENTA NACIONAL. AÑO DE 1837." The half-title inside repeats "VIAGES AL MALUCO. SEGUNDO EL DEL COMENDADOR Fr. GARCIA DE LOAISA: TERCERO EL DE ALVARO DE SAAVEDRA."
The edition was official in the plain sense: printed by royal order at the Imprenta Nacional. The editor's own offices are listed on the same page - knight of the Order of St John, of the king's council and his secretary, director of the Deposito Hidrografico and of the Academia de la Historia, member of the Spanish Academy, and corresponding member of the Geographical Society of Paris, the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, the Antiquaries of Normandy and of the North at Copenhagen, and the Royal Academy of Sciences of Berlin. The man publishing the Spanish archive held the hydrographic office and sat in the learned societies of the countries that would read it.
Every document carries the shelfmark it was copied from, printed in the heading rather than buried. Document number X is the "Relacion de Francisco Dávila, sobresaliente de la nao S. Gabriel, asi de la navegacion de Loaisa desde la Coruña hasta el estrecho de Magallanes, como de los acaecimientos particulares de aquella nao despues que se separó de la armada", followed by "(Arch. de Ind. en Sevilla, legajo 2.o de Autos del Consejo.)", with the date 1527, 4 de Junio set in the margin beside the opening line. That is a citation a reader can take back to the Archivo General de Indias and test.
The document printed under that heading is itself a piece of administrative practice worth reading. At La Coruña on 4 June 1527 Bernaldino Melendez, treasurer of His Majesty, recorded that the nao San Gabriel of Loaisa's fleet had come in to Bayona in Galicia, and that to give a more certain account to the king and his council he took sworn testimony from Francisco Dávila, a resident of Madrid who had sailed in her, before named witnesses - Santillana, notary, Martin de Landa, and Juan de Villanueva, almojarife of His Majesty. The crown's method for finding out what had happened at sea was to swear in a passenger and write it down.
The editor's own extract of the voyage opens with a table of the fleet that sailed from La Coruña in 1525 under Fr. Garcia Jofre de Loaysa, giving each ship, its burden in toneles and its captain: Sta. Maria de la Victoria, 300, Loaysa; Santi-Spiritus, 200, Juan Sebastian de Elcano, "piloto mayor y guia"; Anunciada, 170, Pedro de Vera; S. Gabriel, 130, D. Rodrigo de Acuña; Santa Maria del Parral, 80, D. Jorge Manrique de Nájera; S. Lesmes, 80, Francisco de Hoces; and the pataje or galleon Santiago, 50, Santiago de Guevara - 450 individuals in all. The figures are footnoted to Oviedo, second part, book 20, chapter 4, folio 20 verso and 21, so the reader is told which chronicle the table came out of.
The same page corrects a unit before anyone can be misled by it: as had already been said in the extract of Magellan's navigation, "los toneles estaban con las toneladas en razon de 5 á 6, ó que 10 toneles hacian 12 toneladas." An editor who tells the reader that the tonnage figures in his own table are not modern tons is doing the work that makes an edition usable.
The documents also catch the American end of a Pacific voyage. In the passage immediately before document number X, a ship of the fleet is reported provisioned on the coast of New Spain, having sailed 800 or so leagues off course over about forty-five days and lying at anchor building a boat, because she carried none - "para lo cual el dicho Hernando Cortés les ha hecho dar é proveer de todo lo que han menester." The relief of the Moluccas expeditions was mounted from Mexico.
What this object rests on and what it does not. It rests on one volume of a series of five or more, read as page images of a full-view digitisation of a 512-page copy: the title page and half-title, the opening of the editor's extract, and one document with its heading and first page. The famous preliminary discourse, which stands in the first volume of 1825 and carries the editor's account of his sources and his method, was not opened, so nothing here should be read as a description of the series as a whole. Neither was any of the surrounding literature on Navarrete, which was not reachable from this container. And the selection is a state's selection: a documentary edition published by royal order prints what its editor and his ministry chose to print, which is a limit on the collection that no amount of accurate transcription removes.