True Detective: How an Explorer's Travel Book Was Found 400 Years Later

20th-century historian Armando Cortesao traced a lost 16th-century manuscript, the Suma Oriental by explorer Tomé Pires, through European archives across decades, finally discovering it in the Paris library of the Chamber of Deputies after it had been captured by English forces in 1600 and passed through the hands of an 18th-century hydrographer.

Cortesao's transcription was interrupted by World War II and completed after the war.