The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval

Saint-Malo, 18 May 1601. A young man from Laval sets sail aboard the Corbin for the East Indies. He will return ten years later, having nearly circled the globe and survived everything. The shipwreck first throws him onto the reefs of the Maldives, where he will spend five years as the captive of an island king, learning the language and observing the court, the justice and the customs of an archipelago of twelve thousand islands.

Then everything follows in turn: the invasion from Bengal that gives him back his freedom, the Nayar kings of Malabar and their warrior castes, his arrest at Cochin and imprisonment, the tower of irons, golden Goa and its dungeons, the Spice Islands of the Moluccas, and at last the long voyage home by the Cape of Good Hope, Brazil and Galicia. From these ten years of ordeals, tossed from jail to jail and from shipwreck to captivity, François Pyrard brings back far more than an adventure story.

It is the first French description of the Indian Ocean seen from within, a vivid encyclopedia of men, beasts and trees. Pyrard sets down the religion and justice of the Maldives, the rhythm of the monsoons that opens and closes the seas, the shell money and the silver larins, the coconut palm that feeds, clothes, shelters and quenches thirst, the ships stitched with fibre without a single iron nail. He lingers over the spices, the war elephants and the prodigious trees of the Indian continent. Pyrard is neither conqueror nor merchant: he is the castaway, the captive, the one who looks at this world from below, living among the peoples on whom he depends to survive. From this comes the patient curiosity, almost free of contempt, that makes him astonishingly close to us still.

The first Frenchman to tell of this world from the inside, Pyrard left one of the most striking testimonies of the age of the great crossings, halfway between a ship's log, an ethnographic inquiry and a tale of survival.

A complete rewrite in modern English for today's reader, which at last makes this tale of shipwreck and captivity readable without betraying anything of the voyage. Twenty original illustrations and eight maps of the voyage let readers see the route, while a set of aids to reading (a glossary of period terms, a chronology, an index of persons and an afterword) and selected passages of the original text shed light on the book.