— 88 — 



The date would agree very well w|tli tlio presence of the 

 ship " Cirne " in these waters ; it left Lisbon on the 6th of 

 March 1506 with the fleet of 14 sail under Tristan da Cunha, 

 in which Alfonso d' Albuquerque commanded a division of 

 five ships, his flag captain on the " Cirne " being Diogo Fer- 

 nandez Pereira, who is expressly mentioned in this very year 

 1507 (Barros. 2 Decade, fol. 7 D.) : The Viceroy of India at 

 this time was certainly Francisco d' Almeida, who had left 

 Lisbon, March 25 1505, with a fleet of 22 sail (one of his 

 captains being Jean de Nova), and who did not resign the 

 viceroyalty to Albuquerque till the 18th of October 1509. 



There seems however to be no authority for associating the 

 name of Mascarenhas with the ship Cirne or with the date of 

 1507. The first authentic notice about Mascarenhas records 

 that he left Lisbon in one of six vessels commanded by Q-arcia 

 de Noronha in 1511 ; but Albuquerque before commanding 

 the Cirne in 1506, had already enjoyed a command in the fleet 

 of nine vessels which sailed from Lisbon April 6, 1503, under 

 the orders of Vincent Sodre (father in law of Vasco da Gama) ; 

 and in the same way Mascarenhas may have made on or 

 more voyages to India before 1511. Still it would seem to 

 have been during this expedition of 1511, of which I shall 

 occasion to speak again, that the islands which were to asso- 

 ciate the name of Mascarenhas with the Indian Ocean, were 

 fallen in with ; though it appears also that the islands of 

 Eodrigues had been sighted and nam&d in 1509 by Diogo 

 Lopes (transformed later into Don G-alopes) ; and it seems 

 improbable that the three islands should only have been 

 found at such very long intervals, Mauritius in 1507, Rodri- 

 gues in 1509 and Bourbon in 1511 or 1512. 



II 



Pedro Mascarenhas. 



Although it is impossible to connect, from the authentic 

 records of navigation, the name of Mascarenhas immediately 

 with the discovery of Bourbon or Mauritius, yet as the coa- 

 mographers of more than a century associated him more or 



