16th-Century Travel Narratives

Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme

Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.

• Cosimo de' Medici and the Florentine Humanists, Chroniques de la Renaissance, first half of the sixteenth century (1500-1550)

  At the moment when Pierre Gilles is surveying Constantinople, Florence has just buried the Republic and passed definitively into the hands of the Medici. The same passion for antiquity runs through Europe, but in Florence it takes the form of aristocratic patronage, whereas in Constantinople, for Gilles, it is a mission of rescue. The Florentine humanists of the mid-century, assembling their collections of coins, gems, and Greek manuscripts, are the exact contemporaries of the scholar from Albi. Worth reading in parallel to measure what separates them: the comfort of the study against the fever of the field.

• Amerigo Vespucci, Mundus Novus (1501-1502)

  In the spring of 1503, as Varthema prepares to join the Damascus caravan, a Florentine just back from Brazil writes from Lisbon to his former patron Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici. His letter, printed in Latin and endlessly reissued, advances an idea that overturns the maps: the lands reached in the west are not the edge of Asia, as Columbus believed, but a new continent. Vespucci describes the southern coasts, the naked peoples, the unknown stars of the other hemisphere. Just as Varthema proves that the spice route runs through Calicut, Europe discovers that an entire world lies across the road to the West. His Mundus Novus belongs to the same moment.

• Binot Paulmier de Gonneville, Relation authentique du voyage du capitaine de Gonneville ès nouvelles terres des Indes (1503-1505)

  In 1503, merchants of Honfleur fit out the Espoir to fetch the spices of the Indies by the route the Portuguese had just opened. Near the Cape of Good Hope, a storm throws the ship toward an unknown land, probably the southern coast of Brazil, where the crew spends several months among the inhabitants. Gonneville brings back a young man, Essomericq, who will later marry his daughter. The account of this voyage, deposited with the Admiralty on his return in 1505, was published only in the nineteenth century. While Varthema reaches India through Arabia, Normans seek the same route by sea and find a very different shore. The French title is Relation authentique du voyage du capitaine de Gonneville ès nouvelles terres des Indes.

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• Ludovico di Varthema, Itinéraire (1510)

  A few years before the Parmentier brothers, this adventurous Bolognese had reached, by land and sea, Arabia, Persia, India and the islands of the Sunda, as far as Sumatra. His itinerary, quickly translated throughout Europe, is one of the first to describe to the Western reader the spice ports that Crignon would reach by way of the Cape. Varthema traveled as a solitary, disguised wanderer, slipping into caravans; the men of Dieppe arrived with an armed crew. But they trod the same shores, and the fascination with pepper and gold was the same.

• Tomé Pires, Suma Oriental (1512-1515)

  A Lisbon apothecary who went out to the Indies, Tomé Pires wrote the Suma Oriental at Malacca and in India between 1512 and 1515, an inventory of the coasts, ports, rulers and goods from the Red Sea to Japan. Chosen afterwards as the King of Portugal's ambassador to the Emperor of China, he landed at Canton in 1517 and waited for an imperial audience until 1521; the death of the Zhengde Emperor turned the embassy into a disaster, and Pires never saw Europe again. His manuscript, long forgotten, was published only in the twentieth century. At the moment when Tschudi marvels at the galleasses of Venice, Pires describes the Asian trade that Lisbon is in the process of wresting from them.

• Sigismund von Herberstein, Commentaires sur la Moscovie (Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii) (1517-1526)

  In 1517, two years before the departure from Glarus, the Carniolan diplomat Sigismund von Herberstein arrives in Moscow on behalf of Emperor Maximilian to reconcile Grand Prince Vasily III with Poland; he returns in 1526. From these two embassies come the Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii, published in Vienna in 1549, which long remained the reference for Western readers on Muscovy: its rivers, its winter roads, its court, its Church. Tschudi lists the Muscovites and Russians among the Eastern communities loyal to the Patriarch of Constantinople, on the strength of his reading; Herberstein went to observe this Orthodox world on the spot.

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• Sigismund von Herberstein, Notes upon Russia (1517-1526)

  A diplomat in the emperor's service, Herberstein travelled twice to the court of Grand Prince Vasily III, in 1517 and again in 1526, at the very moment Narváez's armada was being prepared. In 1549 he drew from it a Latin book that revealed Muscovy to Europe: snowbound roads travelled by sledge, frozen rivers, a lavish and suspicious court, northern peoples on the edges of Siberia. Like Cabeza de Vaca among the nations of Texas, he notes customs, marriages and ways of making war, and looks at a neighbouring world that Western Europe knew almost nothing about.

• Sigismund von Herberstein, Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii (1517-1527)

  A Habsburg diplomat, Herberstein travelled to Moscow twice, in 1517 for Emperor Maximilian, then in 1526 for Ferdinand of Habsburg, to the court of Grand Prince Vasily III. From these stays he drew a Latin book printed in Vienna in 1549, which revealed to Europe a country almost as little known as the Indies: its sovereign, its Church, its snowbound roads, its furs and wild beasts. At the other end of the continent, Herberstein did for Muscovy what Varthema did for Arabia and India: describe a distant land as a witness, with a concern for verifiable detail rather than repetition of inherited fables. His book is the Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii.

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• Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Histoire véridique de la conquête de la Nouvelle-Espagne (1519-1521)

  An old soldier of Cortés, Bernal Díaz recounts the taking of Mexico City in which he took part, with a witness's memory and a subordinate's lingering resentment. Carletti arrives in that same city two generations later, when conquest has given way to administration and the cacao trade. The reader thus moves from the din of the fall of Tenochtitlan to the peaceful marketplace described by the Tuscan merchant: two states of a single place, blood first, then money.

• Antonio Pigafetta, Le Premier Tour du monde de Magellan (1519-1522)

  Eighty years before Carletti, this gentleman from Vicenza sailed with Magellan and kept the journal of history's first circumnavigation of the globe. Where Carletti travels alone, on his own account and for the sheer pleasure of knowing, Pigafetta accompanies a state expedition in search of the spice route, one that costs the lives of nearly all its men. The two accounts answer each other: the same endless Pacific, the same Philippines, but Pigafetta inaugurates what Carletti, a melancholy merchant, will come to close as an amateur. Worth reading to measure the distance between collective exploit and intimate adventure.

• Hernán Cortés, Lettres de relation (1519-1526)

  The objects that overwhelm Dürer in Brussels in August 1520, the golden sun, the silver moon, the weapons and ornaments, come from Cortés. The conquistador sent them to Charles V with his first messengers, and it is to the same sovereign that he addresses his Cartas de relación. The second, dated 30 October 1520, a week after the Aachen coronation that Dürer attended, describes Tenochtitlan, its markets, its temples and the court of Moctezuma, then the Spaniards' disastrous flight. To read the two texts together is to see the same conquest from both ends: the coveted and soon-to-be-destroyed city on one side, an artist's wonder before its treasures on the other.

• Hernán Cortés, Lettres de relation sur la conquête du Mexique (1519-1526)

  In 1519 too, while the Confederates are negotiating their passage with the patron Delphin, Hernán Cortés lands on the Gulf coast of Mexico, founds Veracruz, cuts off his own retreat by scuttling his ships and marches on Tenochtitlan, where Moctezuma receives him on 8 November, a few days before Tschudi's return to Glarus. His letters to Charles V, written between 1519 and 1526, describe the lake city, its markets and temples, then the war and the fall of the Aztec capital. In the same year, two Europes set out: one goes to pray at a tomb under Ottoman guard, the other seizes an empire.

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• Hernán Cortés, Lettres de la conquête du Mexique (1519-1526)

  At the very moment the Parmentier brothers were skirting Africa, Cortés had just subdued the Aztec empire and was sending Charles V his long report letters. In them one breathes the other side of oceanic adventure: no longer the merchant negotiating a sack of pepper, but the conqueror overthrowing an empire. To read Cortés after Crignon is to measure the gap between a France with nothing to conquer and a Spain devouring a continent, between the pilot taking latitudes and the captain burning cities.

• Francisco Álvares, Vraie information des terres du Prêtre Jean (1520-1526)

  In April 1520, three months before Dürer left Nuremberg, a Portuguese embassy landed at Massawa on the Red Sea to reach the Christian king of Ethiopia whom Europe called Prester John. Its chaplain, Francisco Álvares, stayed there six years and brought back an account published in Lisbon in 1540: rock-hewn churches, the travelling court of the negus, the rites of a Christianity that had remained apart from Rome. The contrast with Dürer's diary is striking. The painter watches Latin Christendom tear itself apart over Luther, while the Portuguese priest discovers, in the depths of Africa, a Church that no one in Europe really knew.

• Francisco Álvares, Vraie information des terres du Prêtre Jean des Indes (1520-1526)

  In the spring of 1520, a few months after Tschudi's return, the Portuguese chaplain Francisco Álvares lands at Massawa with the embassy sent to the negus Lebna Dengel, the Christian ruler whom Europe confused with the legendary Prester John. He stays six years in Ethiopia, describes the rock-hewn churches, the monasteries, the feasts and the king's travelling court, then publishes his account in Lisbon in 1540. Tschudi devotes a whole chapter to the Eastern Christians, Abyssinians and Nubians included, whom he knows only from books and from what he glimpsed in Jerusalem; Álvares went to see them in their own country.

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• Francisco Álvares, The Prester John of the Indies (1520-1526)

  Chaplain to a Portuguese embassy, Álvares spent six years, from 1520 to 1526, at the court of the emperor of Ethiopia, whom Europe then identified with the legendary Prester John. He followed the imperial camp from province to province, attended feasts and baptisms, and described the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela. Published in Lisbon in 1540, his book is, like Cabeza de Vaca's account, that of a man who stayed for years among a distant people and came back to tell the king what the fables had hidden.

• Peter Füssli, Voyage à Jérusalem en 1523 et lettre sur la chute de Rhodes (1523)

  Four years after Tschudi, another Confederate takes the road to the Holy Sepulchre: the Zurich bell and cannon founder Peter Füssli, a former captain of the Italian wars and a member of his city's Great Council. His account of 1523, drier than the Glarus man's, follows the same pilgrim route through Venice, but it comes with a letter on the fall of Rhodes, taken by Suleiman the Magnificent at the end of 1522: the island where Tschudi had Peter Falck and Melchior zur Gilgen buried is now Ottoman, and its knights have gone. Füssli's two texts were edited together in 1982, and reading them directly extends Tschudi's retrospective aside on Rhodes.

• Décadas de Orbe Novo, Pietro Martire d'Anghiera, 1530 (1530)

  The Italian cleric employed at the court of Castile spent thirty years gathering the first accounts of the navigators: Columbus, Cortés, the conquests of Cuba, Mexico, and Darién. His elegant Latin carried the New World into European humanist culture. Lizárraga writes a generation later: the astonishment of the early years has given way to methodical inventory, but the echo of the pioneering decades still runs through his account, in the pages on the origin of the Indians and on the earliest settlements.

• Jacques Cartier, Bref récit et succincte narration de la navigation faite en 1535 et 1536 (1535-1536)

  While the four survivors walked from people to people towards Sinaloa, at the other end of the continent Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence to Hochelaga, then wintered at Stadaconé. Scurvy killed twenty-five of his men; the Iroquoians taught them the remedy of annedda, a decoction of conifer bark. In the same years, 1535 and 1536, two Europeans discovered North America through its inhabitants: one healed by them, the other become their healer. The Bref récit, published in 1545, also appears in the collection.

• Fernão Mendes Pinto, The Travels of Mendes Pinto (1537-1558)

  In 1537, the year Cabeza de Vaca landed in Lisbon, Mendes Pinto left it for Asia, which he roamed for more than twenty years: Ethiopia, Malaysia, China, Japan. He claims to have been captured thirteen times and sold seventeen times, shipwrecked, a beggar, a merchant, almost a monk. Published posthumously in 1614, his Peregrination blends lived experience with romance, and his readers long doubted him. Yet it contains what Cabeza de Vaca tells: the European stripped of everything, who survives only by adapting to the peoples he depends on.

• Hidalgo d'Elvas, Relation véridique des travaux du gouverneur Hernando de Soto (1539-1543)

  In the very year of Cabeza de Vaca's return, Hernando de Soto obtained Florida; he landed there in 1539, he too in the Tampa Bay area. His men wintered at Apalache, took in Juan Ortiz, a Spaniard who had come looking for Narváez and stayed more than ten years among the Indians, then wandered for four years through the Southeast. After Soto's death, the survivors built brigantines, went down the Mississippi and followed the coast to Pánuco, the port the boats of 1528 had never reached. An anonymous Portuguese knight published the account in Évora in 1557.

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• Francisco Álvares, The Prester John of the Indies (1540)

  Chaplain to the Portuguese embassy sent to the Ethiopian emperor, Francisco Álvares spent six years, from 1520 to 1526, in the Christian kingdom that Europe believed to be the realm of Prester John. His account, printed in Lisbon in 1540, just as Gwon Beol's mission was drawing to a close, describes royal camps, churches carved from rock, endlessly postponed audiences and disputed gifts. The two texts echo each other: an embassy held far from home, a court that makes its visitors wait, interpreters on whom everything depends, and an envoy who notes day after day the uncertain progress of his mission.

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• Pedro de Castañeda de Nájera, Relation de l'expédition de Cíbola (1540-1542)

  The stories of the four survivors set Mexico City dreaming of rich cities to the North. In 1539 Estevanico guided the Franciscan Marcos de Niza towards the seven cities of Cíbola and was killed there; the following year Coronado set out with an army. A common soldier, Castañeda told twenty years later of the stone villages of the Zuni, the Grand Canyon, the plains covered with bison, the humpbacked cows Cabeza de Vaca had described, and the elusive Quivira. The mirage of Apalache repeats itself further west, with the same disappointment.

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• Pierre Belon, Les Observations de plusieurs singularités et choses mémorables (1546-1549)

  The naturalist Pierre Belon of Le Mans set out in 1546 in the retinue of the French embassy to Suleiman and returned only in 1549. His Observations, published in 1553, lead the reader through Greece, Crete, Constantinople, Egypt and the Holy Land, but with a different eye from Tschudi's: Belon notes plants, fish, snakes, remedies and trades, and describes people more than relics. A generation after the Glarus pilgrim, the eastern Mediterranean becomes a field of learned inquiry, and the road to Jerusalem a path for the curious as much as for the devout. The stopovers at Candia and Rhodes take on quite a different aspect there.

• Jean Léon l'Africain, Description de l'Afrique (1550)

  Born in Granada and raised in Fez, Hassan al-Wazzan travels in the early sixteenth century from Morocco to Timbuktu, from Egypt to the Levant, before being captured by Christian corsairs and presented to Pope Leo X. In Rome he writes in Italian a description of Africa that Ramusio printed in Venice in 1550. Like Orta, this man of two worlds moves between languages, religions and learning, and gives Europe what it did not know of a neighbouring continent. His Africa of markets, caravans and kingdoms answers the India of merchants and sultans described by the physician of Goa.

• Crónica del Perú, Pedro de Cieza de León, 1553 (1553)

  The soldier-chronicler traveled the same roads as Lizárraga, a generation earlier. He saw Cajamarca after Atahualpa, Cuzco after Pizarro, Potosí in its earliest days. His prose, simple and precise, is the great source for descriptions of Peru during the conquest. Lizárraga knows it and sometimes cites it without saying so. To read Cieza after Lizárraga is to go back a generation, to find the cities under their first coats of plaster, the Indians still close to the shock of conquest.

• Pierre Belon, Les Observations de plusieurs singularités et choses mémorables trouvées en Grèce, Asie, Judée, Égypte, Arabie et autres pays étranges (1553)

  Between 1546 and 1549, the naturalist Pierre Belon of Le Mans travels through Greece, Constantinople, Egypt, Sinai and Palestine, notebook in hand. Like Orta, he wants to see with his own eyes the simples that Europe's apothecaries know only from books: the sealed earth of Lemnos, balsam, gums, the opium the Turks swallow before battle. He corrects Dioscorides and Pliny in the field, questions merchants and druggists, and distrusts counterfeits. To read Belon beside Orta is to watch the same revolution of the gaze unfold at two ends of the spice route, in the Levant and in Goa, in the middle of the same century.

• André Thevet, Cosmographie de Levant, Lyon, 1554 (1554)

  The Franciscan friar from Angoulême travels the eastern Mediterranean in the same years as Pierre Gilles. He visits Chios, Rhodes, Cyprus, Egypt, and the Holy Land, and in 1554 publishes this large volume mixing field observations, ancient quotations, and woodcuts. Thevet lacks Gilles's topographical rigor, but he shares his enthusiasm and curiosity. The contrast between the two works, published seven years apart in Lyon by neighboring publishers, gives the measure of what scholarly travel meant for the generation of Francis I.

• Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, Lettres turques, written in Constantinople from 1554 to 1562 (1554-1562)

  The ambassador of Ferdinand of Habsburg arrives in Constantinople seven years after Gilles's departure. He stays eight years and brings back manuscripts, plants (the lilac, the tulip), coins, and above all four detailed letters describing the Ottoman court, its customs, and the aging sultan. The same city, the same years, but seen from the diplomatic side. An indispensable complement to Gilles's archaeological gaze.

• Hans Staden, Veritable histoire et description d'un pays habite par des hommes sauvages, nus, feroces et anthropophages (1557)

  Marburg, 1557. Account of a German arquebusier captured by the Tupinamba of Brazil between 1552 and 1555. Written almost contemporaneously with Cartier's third voyage, it is the other great European testimony of the American encounter in the sixteenth century.

• True History of His Captivity, Hans Staden, 1557 (1557)

  The German arquebusier survived nine months among the Tupinambá, a prisoner marked to be devoured. His account, translated into several languages, caused a sensation across Europe. The description of cannibal customs, rituals, and Tupinambá chiefs is firsthand, raw, without scholarly filter. It reads well alongside the pages Lizárraga devotes to the Chiriguanos: the same report on cannibalism, but one speaks from bodily experience, the other relays what survivors of the Charcas expeditions told him at the convent.

• Gentleman of Elvas, True Relation of the Hardships Suffered by Governor Hernando de Soto (1557)

  In May 1539, a few months before Gwon Beol left Seoul, Hernando de Soto landed in Florida with more than six hundred men. For four years the expedition crossed the American Southeast as far as the Mississippi, on whose banks de Soto died in 1542. A Portuguese gentleman from Elvas, whose name is unknown, published the account in Évora in 1557. In the same year, two ways of entering a foreign land: the Korean ambassador arrives as a petitioner, laden with gifts, and waits for the gates to open; the conquistador arrives in arms and demands food and porters. Read together, the two show what diplomacy spares and what conquest destroys.

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• Andre Thevet, Les Singularites de la France antarctique and Cosmographie universelle (1557-1575)

  Paris, 1557 and 1575. The royal cosmographer, who knew Cartier in Saint-Malo late in his life, gathered several anecdotes from him and gives an encyclopedic vision of Brazil and Canada typical of his century.

• Nicolás Monardes, Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales (1565-1574)

  A physician of Seville, Monardes never crosses the Atlantic: the port brings the New World to him. In the crates unloaded from the fleets he studies tobacco, guaiacum, sarsaparilla and Peruvian balsam, and questions the sailors and settlers returned from the West Indies. His book is the American twin of Orta's, so much so that Charles de l'Écluse would translate both into Latin and European readers would read them together. Where Orta compares China root to guaiacum, Monardes describes guaiacum itself: the two Indies answer each other from one end of the Iberian empire to the other.

• Nicolas de Nicolay, Quatre premiers livres des navigations et pérégrinations orientales, Lyon, 1568 (1568)

  The geographer from the Dauphiné accompanies the French embassy to Constantinople in 1551. He brings back an illustrated book with sixty engravings showing Ottoman costumes and types with unmatched documentary precision. Here again, Lyon publishes the book some dozen years after the journey. The generation of scholarly travelers who cross paths with Suleiman the Magnificent has left a scattered and fascinating literature, of which Gilles is one of the high points.

• Luís de Camões, Les Lusiades (1572)

  The Portuguese epic of the great voyages, published in 1572, sings of the route that Carletti travels in reverse, from Goa to the Cape of Good Hope. Camões himself lived in the Indies and nearly perished at sea there; his poem transfigures into national glory what Carletti recounts as personal loss. The contrast is striking: the poet's imperial dream on one side, the merchant's swallowed fortune on the other, upon the same waters.

• Leonhard Rauwolf, Description véritable du voyage en Orient (Aigentliche Beschreibung der Raiß) (1573-1576)

  A physician and botanist from Augsburg, Leonhard Rauwolf sailed from Marseille in 1573 on behalf of a trading house, lived nine months in Aleppo, went down to Baghdad, then, recalled by the bankruptcy of his backers, made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1575 before returning by way of Venice in early 1576. His account, printed at Lauingen in 1582, is a herbarium as much as a diary; in it one reads one of the first European descriptions of coffee. Like Tschudi, Rauwolf writes in German for readers who stayed at home, but he discovers a Holy Land where the Ottoman administration, still brand new in 1519, has been in place for more than half a century.

• Francis Fletcher, The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake (1577-1580)

  Published in 1628 from the notes of the ship's chaplain Francis Fletcher, this account tells of the circumnavigation of 1577-1580, the voyage that made Drake a legend before the West Indian expedition. It follows Patagonia, the Strait of Magellan, the execution of Thomas Doughty, the run up the coast of Peru, and the capture of the galleon Cacafuego. Reading the two texts one after the other is watching a captain move from a distant raiding cruise to a large-scale military operation, with two thousand three hundred men and shareholders behind him.

• Cristóbal Acosta, Tractado de las drogas y medicinas de las Indias Orientales (1578)

  A physician and surgeon, Cristóbal Acosta arrives in Goa around 1568, the very year of Orta's death, in the retinue of Viceroy Luís de Ataíde. He travels the Malabar coast and the Konkan, sees growing the plants the Colloquies described, then publishes in Burgos a treatise that takes up Orta in Castilian, completes it and corrects it here and there. His most valuable contribution lies in the woodcuts: where Orta had included no image, Acosta draws the trees and the drugs. The book extends the Colloquies a generation later and helps make them known in the Hispanic world.

• Jean de Léry, Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (1578)

  A Genevan shoemaker turned pastor lands in 1557 in the bay of Rio, within a French colony that tears itself apart before vanishing. Léry spends nearly a year among the Tupinamba, learns their language, eats with them, listens to their songs, and returns home to write the finest book of the century on an encounter between two worlds. Where Bigges counts cannons and ducats, Léry looks at faces. The two accounts can be read at the two ends of the same Atlantic America, thirty years apart: one seeks to understand, the other seeks to take.

• Jean de Léry, Histoire d'un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil (1578)

  In 1556 the young Calvinist shoemaker Jean de Léry sails for the French colony in the bay of Rio, Villegagnon's Antarctic France. He spends nearly a year among the Tupinamba, shares their meals, listens to their songs, observes their fruits, their dyewoods, their way of smoking petun. Published twenty years later, his account keeps the vividness of a witness who sets what he has seen against second-hand reports. He shares with Orta a taste for the thing seen, a curiosity about plants and about the knowledge of the peoples met, and a distrust of compilers who stayed at home.

• Michel de Montaigne, Journal de voyage en Italie (1580-1581)

  Three quarters of a century after Dürer, Montaigne crosses Switzerland and Germany on his way to Italy and stops for a week in Venice in November 1580. He finds the city less marvellous than he had imagined, observes its institutions, its policing and its courtesans, and receives a book of letters from Veronica Franco. The journal, partly dictated to a secretary, was not rediscovered and published until 1774. In it we find what Dürer described from the inside: a city that welcomes the stranger with curiosity and a little mistrust, and a traveller from the North who measures, with irony, what he has gained and lost by leaving home.

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• Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588)

  Harriot was at Roanoke with Ralph Lane in the very year Drake was sailing toward the Antilles. A mathematician, he measured, catalogued, learned a few words of Algonquian, and in 1588 published a report meant to convince English investors that Virginia was worth returning to. In it are the maize, the tobacco, the bark houses, and a careful silence about what had gone wrong. It is the exact reverse of Bigges's final page: what the hundred and three colonists taken back aboard in June 1586 had seen and believed.

• Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589)

  Published in 1589, the same year as Bigges's account, this monumental work gathers everything England could claim upon the seas: Cabot, Frobisher, Gilbert, Hawkins, Drake, the merchants of Muscovy and those of the Levant. Hakluyt writes to prove that a nation left out of the great carve-up now has its place. The volume allows the West Indian expedition to be set within the series it belongs to, and shows just how much this kind of raid then served in place of foreign policy.

• Jan Huygen van Linschoten, Itinerario (1596)

  While Drake is burning Santo Domingo, a young Dutchman is serving the new archbishop of Goa and noting everything down: the routes, the winds, the prices, Portuguese customs in the East Indies. Back home, he publishes in 1596 a work that hands the navies of the North the navigational secrets Lisbon had jealously guarded. Two ways of dismantling an empire at the same time, one by cannon in the Caribbean, the other by chart and notebook in the Indian Ocean. The second proved the more effective.

• Jan Huygen van Linschoten, Itinéraire vers les Indes orientales (1596)

  This Dutchman, in the service of the Archbishop of Goa, published in 1596 the book that would guide the first fleets of the United Provinces toward Asia. Carletti, for his part, crosses paths with these same Dutchmen as enemies at Saint Helena and later finds them presiding as masters over his lawsuit in Zeeland. To read Linschoten is to see from the inside the machine that will ruin the Florentine merchant: knowledge patiently stolen from the Portuguese, turned into charts, routes, and fleets. Two views of Goa, one preparing the conquest, the other suffering its first blows.

• Itinerario, Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, 1596 (1596)

  The Dutch clerk spent six years in Goa in the service of the Portuguese archbishop. When he returned to Enkhuizen, he published a book that changed the geography of world trade: sea routes, ports, goods, charts of the Asian seas. The East Indies, until then locked behind Lisbon, opened to navigators from the North. Lizárraga was writing at the very same moment on the far side of the Pacific: the same imperial era, the same descriptive curiosity, the same blend of commercial inventory and ethnographic observation, but on one side a settled religious, on the other a Protestant traveler reporting what he had seen to hand it to his rivals.

• Gerrit de Veer, Waerachtighe beschrijvinghe van drie seylagien (1598)

  The year Van Noort leaves Rotterdam to seek Asia by the south, Amsterdam reads the account of those who sought it by the north. Gerrit de Veer tells of Willem Barentsz's three voyages to Novaya Zemlya, and above all of the winter of 1596-1597: the ship caught in the ice, the wooden house built from the wreckage, the bears, the cold that freezes the bedsheets, the death of Barentsz in the boat on the way home. Two twin books, issued four years apart from the presses of the same Amsterdam bookseller, Cornelis Claesz, and the same stubbornness in forcing a passage that nature refuses.

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• Jacob van Neck et Wybrand van Warwijck, Journael ofte Dagh-register (1600)

  Two months before Van Noort's fleet, eight ships leave the Texel in May 1598 by the Cape of Good Hope route. The fleet touches at Mauritius, named after the stadtholder; Jacob van Neck reaches Bantam and returns as early as 1599 laden with pepper, cloves and nutmeg; Van Warwijck pushes on to the Moluccas, and Jacob van Heemskerck to Banda. This is the commercial success that Van Noort will never know. The two accounts answer each other: in Borneo, Chinese merchants tell him that Dutchmen have already traded in Java, and it is Heemskerck, gone out again with a new fleet, whom he meets in the Atlantic on the way home.

• Garcilaso de la Vega, known as El Inca, Comentarios reales de los Incas (1609)

  Lisbon, 1609. The mestizo of Cuzco, son of a conquistador and an Inca princess, wrote in Cordoba the great inward account of the destroyed empire. To be read as a counterpoint to the European accounts.

• Comentarios reales de los Incas, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, 1609 (1609)

  The mestizo from Cuzco wrote in Córdoba, Spain, the history of the Inca empire seen from within. His mother was an Inca princess, his father a Spanish captain. The book, published four years after the completion of Lizárraga's manuscript, brings Cuzco back to life, its rituals, its languages, its sovereigns, with a nostalgia the Dominican does not share. The two texts, nearly contemporary, are two faces of the same landscape: one by a mestizo who claims the Incas as his own, the other by a religious who judges them.

• William Adams, Lettres du Japon (dans Memorials of the Empire of Japon) (1611)

  A few days before Van Noort, in June 1598, five ships leave Rotterdam for the same Strait of Magellan under Jacques Mahu and then Simon de Cordes: this is the fleet of Verhagen, whose journal constantly crosses the wreckage, from Sebald de Weert starving in the strait to the prisoners' letters seized in Chile. Only one of these ships, the Liefde, reaches Japan, in April 1600; in Borneo, a Portuguese captain gives the general the news. Its English pilot, William Adams, becomes the adviser of Tokugawa Ieyasu, and his letters of 1611 tell of this fatal crossing and then of a whole life in the shogun's service.

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• Anthony Sherley, Sir Antony Sherley his Relation of his Travels into Persia (1613)

  In 1598, while the ships of Rotterdam sail down the Atlantic, the English adventurer Anthony Sherley crosses the Ottoman Empire with his brother Robert and some twenty companions to reach the court of Shah Abbas at Qazvin. He leaves it in 1599 as ambassador of the king of Persia to the Christian princes, charged with forging an alliance against the Turks. His account, published years later, mingles diplomacy, vanity and court intrigue. It sheds light on the other side of the same moment: northern Europe is looking everywhere for roads that bypass the established powers, through the South Sea for Van Noort, through Persia for Sherley.

• Fernão Mendes Pinto, The Travels of Mendes Pinto (1614)

  Fernão Mendes Pinto left Portugal in 1537 and spent more than twenty years in Asia, between Malacca, Siam, China and Japan. In his Peregrinação, published in 1614, he claims to have been seized on the Chinese coast, taken in chains to Beijing and sentenced to labour on the Great Wall in the early 1540s. The narrative mixes things seen, hearsay and invention, and its truthfulness has been debated for four centuries. Yet it sketches the same Ming China that Gwon Beol was crossing at the very same time, seen from below by an unprotected adventurer, while the Korean ambassador entered it as an official guest.

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• Matteo Ricci, Histoire de l'expédition chrétienne au royaume de la Chine (1615)

  At the very moment Carletti is buying silk and porcelain at Canton, the Jesuit Matteo Ricci is pressing into the interior of China, learning to speak with the mandarins. Where the merchant sees prices, goods, and a fabulously wealthy empire, the missionary seeks souls and the language of the learned. To read the two together is to set the eye of the hurried trader against the patience of a man who will stay thirty years: the same China, seen from the counting-house and seen from within.

• Andrew Battell, The Strange Adventures of Andrew Battell of Leigh, in Angola and the Adjoining Regions (1625)

  An English sailor captured by the Portuguese in Brazil in 1589, Andrew Battell is deported to Angola, where he spends nearly twenty years: a soldier against his will, an escapee, recaptured, he lives for several months among the Imbangala, the feared warriors of the interior, before returning to England around 1610. Samuel Purchas published his account in 1625. It shows from the inside the Portuguese empire of the South Atlantic that Van Noort's fleet only brushes against, with its trading posts on the Gulf of Guinea, its garrisons and its ambushes. What Prince's Island and Rio de Janeiro let one glimpse from the deck, Battell lived on land.

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• Antonio Pigafetta, Relation du premier voyage autour du monde (c. 1524)

  While the men of Dieppe descend toward the Cape, the memory of Magellan's circumnavigation is still fresh. Pigafetta, a gentleman of Vicenza who embarked out of curiosity, brought back the only complete account of it. He watched Magellan die in the Philippines, crossed the spice archipelago, and was one of the eighteen survivors of a fleet of five ships to return to Spain. His account, written at the same time as Crignon's journal, tells of the same seas of the East Indies, the same islands of pepper and clove, but by the other route, that of the west. Two logbooks thus answer each other from one end of the world to the other, written by two literate sailors whom the sea had made attentive.

• Akbar, Akbar Nama, written by Abu'l-Fazl, circa 1590 (c. 1590)

  While Gilles is surveying Constantinople, the Mughal emperor Akbar (1542-1605) builds the new capital of Fatehpur Sikri and reorganizes the empire of India. The chronicle of his reign, written later by his secretary, portrays another contemporary imperial summit. Three great Muslim emperors reign simultaneously in the mid-sixteenth century: Suleiman in Istanbul, Tahmasp in Persia, Akbar in India. The scholar from Albi rubs shoulders with one of them; the other two reach him only as distant rumors.

• Léon l'Africain, Description de l'Afrique (c. 1509-1518)

  Born in Granada and raised in Fez, al-Hasan al-Wazzan travelled the Maghreb and West Africa as far as Timbuktu in the years when Varthema was criss-crossing the Indian Ocean. Captured by Christian corsairs, presented to Pope Leo X and baptized in Rome in 1520, he completed there in 1526 a vast description of Africa, which Ramusio published in 1550. Like Varthema, he wrote for an Italian public and set himself up as a witness of what he had seen: cities, kingdoms, markets, deserts. The two books, born in the same Renaissance Rome, long supplied Europe with most of what it knew of Africa and the Muslim East. The work is known as Description of Africa.