Biography
François Pyrard de Laval (c. 1578 - c. 1623) was a French traveller who spent ten years in the Indian Ocean, five of them held in the Maldives after a shipwreck. He brought back the first French account describing from the inside the societies and trade of maritime Asia. His book, published in Paris in 1611, remains the most detailed source available on the Maldives of the early seventeenth century.
He was a native of Laval, in Maine, and a cousin of the theologian Pierre Pyrard. Little is known of his youth. On 18 May 1601 he left Saint-Malo aboard the Corbin, one of two ships fitted out by a company of merchants from Saint-Malo, Laval and Vitré to attempt the route to the East Indies, a pioneering and poorly prepared undertaking at a time when France had no presence in Asia yet. The expedition went wrong during the crossing of the Indian Ocean.
On 2 July 1602 the Corbin broke up on a reef of Baa Atoll in the Maldives. The few survivors were held by the inhabitants and lived five years in the archipelago, most of the time in Malé, the capital, in conditions that Pyrard describes as changeable, between indifference and ill treatment; several died of fever. He learned Dhivehi, the local language, which opened to him the court, the customs and the history of the sultanate, until then unknown to Europeans. In February 1607, amid the disorder caused by a Bengali raid on Malé, he escaped by boat. Four years of wandering followed, in Bengal, on the Malabar coast, at Calicut, Cochin and Goa, capital of Portuguese India, where he was employed at the hospital and then enlisted, before a return by way of Brazil. He landed at La Rochelle on 5 February 1611.
The account appeared the same year under the title Discours du voyage des François aux Indes Orientales. Pyrard was no man of letters and was helped with the writing, notably by the jurist Pierre Bergeron. Two enlarged editions followed, in 1615 and 1619, the latter serving as the basis for later translations; a new edition appeared again in 1679. The text describes Maldivian coinage and weights, fishing and navigation, the cowrie trade and the making of cloth, but also the workings of the Portuguese empire in Asia observed at close range, its hospitals, its garrisons and its corruption.
The work was translated into Portuguese in the nineteenth century, then into English for the Hakluyt Society by Albert Gray, assisted by Harry Charles Purvis Bell, in three volumes published between 1887 and 1890 from the 1619 edition. In French, the annotated edition by Xavier de Castro and Geneviève Bouchon, published by Chandeigne, has renewed the reading of the text. Historians of the Maldives, who lack early native documents, rely on Pyrard for the organisation of the sultanate and the material life of the islands; historians of Portuguese expansion read him for his outsider's view of Goa. What became of him after 1611 is unknown, down to the exact date of his death.
