An Account of a Voyage to the East Indies

In the spring of 1669, a seventeen-year-old leaves Halle to see the world. Five years later, in Amsterdam, Christian Burckhardt enlists as a soldier of the East India Company and sails on the Maurice Eyland, bound for Asia.

This voyage to the Indies will last seven years. Along the way: a girl discovered on board in a soldier's uniform, dysentery under the Equator, the stop at the Cape among the Hottentots, Batavia, then Ceylon, where he is hurled into the surf at Matura while trying to reach land. On the road to Colombo, a wild elephant charges his small escort in the dead of night. Made a muster clerk in the company of Rijcklof van Goens, he watches an embassy set out for the King of Kandy, sees his countrymen die and mourns his friend Johann Boy, swept away by the river.

To this lively narrative is added a vast picture of the East, from Hormuz to Japan: the cinnamon of Ceylon, the burning of widows in Malabar, the court of the Great Mogul, the Spice Islands, the massacred Christians of Japan. Two accounts close the book: San Thomé and its hundred sacks of sand disguised as rice stores, then seven defeated kings paraded through Batavia in 1670.

Pious, moralizing, curious about everything, this humble Company employee offers a rare testimony on Dutch Ceylon. It remains to be seen what seven years in the East made of him.