Biography
Christian Burckhardt was born in Halle, in Saxony, around 1652: he writes himself that he left his town on 29 April 1669, at the age of seventeen, to try his luck abroad. Nothing is known of his parents, except that he had an elder brother who was a jurist. His first years of service were spent at princely courts: in Prussia he was a kitchen clerk to the Count Palatine Charles of Birkenfeld, then, after a stay in France, a chancery clerk to Landgrave Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt.
Recommended by the latter to the administrator of the Archbishopric of Magdeburg, who resided in Halle, he obtained only the promise of a post. Rather than wait, he set off to visit Holland and arrived in Amsterdam on 31 July 1674. On 2 August he enlisted as a soldier with the Dutch East India Company, for the Delft chamber. He sailed on the Maurice Eyland, put in at the Cape in February 1675 and reached Batavia in June. Sent to Ceylon, he survived the capsizing of his boat at Matura, then served in Colombo as a muster clerk in the company of Rijcklof van Goens, from 1676 to 1678. In 1679 he became storekeeper and writer of the provisions depot at the fort of Sitawaka, before spending six months in Cochin with his brother-in-law, the surgeon-major Simon Kadensky.
He left Ceylon on 15 January 1681, rounded Scotland by way of the Shetlands, reached Middelburg in August and returned to Halle on 24 September 1681. From these seven years he drew the Ost-Indianische Reise-Beschreibung, oder Kurtzgefaster Abriß von Ost-Indien, published in Halle and Leipzig by Johann Friedrich Zeitler in 1693. The volume brings together the journal of the voyage, a memorial on the lands of the Indian Ocean and the Far East, sections on the life of Europeans, the fauna and the flora, and an appendix on the French expedition against San Thomé and on the entry of seven kings into Batavia in 1670.
His circle can be glimpsed in the book. In Leiden, in 1681, he called on the physician and botanist Paul Hermann, a native of Halle like himself, who had treated him in Ceylon. His brother, a councillor at the Kammergericht in Berlin, urged him shortly before the death of the Great Elector (1688) to present his account to the prince; the prince's death delayed the plan, and the work was finally dedicated to his son, Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg, with a dedication dated Halle, 13 April 1693. Burckhardt appears there as a pious and moralizing Lutheran, quick to preach and to strike satirically. No other writing by him is known.
According to his dedication, Frederick III entrusted him with the excise office of Aken, on the Elbe, which he held for about two and a quarter years. Ill and without care on the spot, he left this post and returned to Halle, from where he applied for new employment to the regency of Magdeburg. The date and place of his death are not known. Nor are any personal papers or modern edition known; the first edition is held notably by the British Library, whose copy has been digitized by Google Books.
