Storia do Mogor 3.11

3.11

It is already abundantly clear that from the first Catrou's mode of editing his text has not met with approval. Anyone who consults the volumes now produced by me will agree, I think, that Catrou, for literary effect, acted wisely. He began by throwing overboard all, or almost all, personal narrative, looking on it as so much useless lumber, and then proceeded to dress out the rest according to his notions of what a history ought to be. While he thus produced a more artistic book, he much diminished, if he did not totally destroy, the authority of Manucci as an original source of history. It might even be doubted, confining oneself to Catrou's pages, whether Manucci ever was in India, or, granting that he did reach India, whether he had seen any more of it than a little of the country round Goa, and perhaps the town of Madras. If Manucci's narrative had already been in print, and thus available for reference, Catrou would have been justified in rearranging the material in his own way. But our ideas on the use of original and inedited documents have changed since his time, and unless a man's actual narrative can be consulted we discard him as an original authority. Moreover, it is the personal detail, in which Manucci so abounds, that at once secures our faith in the man, and leads to our believing that he did see and hear or undergo what he tells us.