Manuscript Borg.tonch.20, “Truyện nhật trình ông Fernão Mendes” (The travels of Fernão Mendes), is a translation of the celebrated “Peregrinação” of the voyager Fernão Mendes Pinto (1510–1583), made by Father Philiphê do Rosario Nguyễn Văn Bỉnh, CO. The original was published in Portugal in 1614 and recounts Pinto's voyages and explorations in the East. The manuscript is entirely in Vietnamese, was completed in 1817 in Lisbon, and runs to 202 pages in two parts. In the first Father Bỉnh gathers a miscellany of mission history into a single sequence: the creation of humankind, the martyrs of 1723, St Francis Xavier's voyages, lists of the Superiors General, the founders and the saints of the Society of Jesus, the reasons for his own embassy and the course of the Garasa schism in both Vietnam and Portugal, the wars between Đàng Trong and Đàng Ngoài, several martyrs of Đàng Ngoài, and the Qing invasion of Annam. The second part translates twenty-three chapters of the “Peregrinação”, from Pinto's shipwreck and removal to Beijing, through his travels across China and the Portuguese trading network in East Asia, to an account of China's origins. This manuscript was probably the groundwork for the “Nhật trình kim thư khất chính Chúa giáo” that Father Bỉnh compiled later. This manuscript offers scholars of Vietnamese studies further material on the history of trade between Portugal and the countries of East Asia, Vietnam above all.
The original is held by the Vatican Library (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana). The images are copyright the Library and are loaded directly from the Vatican Digital Library (DigiVatLib); Digitizing Việt Nam presents this manuscript by permission of the Vatican Digital Library.