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.
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Marco Polo, Le Devisement du monde (1298)
On his way back from China, the Venetian sails along the Coromandel coast, stops at the tomb of Saint Thomas, describes the pearl fisheries, the naked kings covered in jewels, the widow-burning pyres and the kingdom of Ceylon with its sacred peak. All the marvels that Hamilton finds diminished or disputed, Marco Polo sees in their full brilliance, four centuries earlier. To read one after the other is to follow the slow transformation of the same shore, from medieval splendors to the fortified trading posts of the age of the companies.
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Ibn Battuta, Voyages (1325-1354)
Three centuries before Hamilton, the great Moroccan traveler already sails along the Swahili coast of Mombasa and Kilwa, journeys up the Persian Gulf, reaches India, and serves the Sultan of Delhi. He sees these same Muslim ports at the height of their prosperity, before the Portuguese extort them and the Arabs of Muscat retake a few of them. His testimony provides the depth of time that the captain's account, hurried along by trade, lacks.
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Ludovico di Varthema, Itinéraire (1510)
A Bolognese adventurer of the early sixteenth century, Varthema is one of the first Europeans to visit Mecca disguised as a pilgrim, then to sail down the Red Sea to Aden and reach India. He travels the Arabian coast that Hamilton will follow two centuries later, stops at the same coffee ports, and describes the same sheikhs greedy for tribute. His picaresque account illuminates, in advance, the Arab world that the captain will later observe with the colder eye of a merchant.
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Antonio Pigafetta, Relation du premier voyage autour du monde (1519-1522)
Two centuries before Hamilton, the gentleman of Vicenza embarks with Magellan and survives the expedition that first crosses the Pacific. He touches at the Philippines, where the captain will meet his death, reaches Borneo and its splendid court, loads cloves from the Moluccas and sails along Timor, these same islands the Scottish merchant will visit two hundred years later. His wonder-struck journal shows the spice archipelago at the very moment Europe discovers it, when Hamilton will see nothing of it but the trading posts the companies fight over. To read one after the other is to follow the passage from the dream of spices to their ordinary trade.
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Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault, Histoire de l'expédition chrétienne au royaume de la Chine (1615)
The Jesuit Ricci, who entered China at the end of the sixteenth century, learns the language and the classics, wins the friendship of the scholars and makes his way to Peking. His account, set down by Trigault, reveals to Europe a refined civilization that the captain, a century later, will encounter only through the customs gate at Canton. Where Hamilton rages against the Hoppo and his extortions, Ricci describes the court from within, the examination of the mandarins and the wisdom of Confucius, and lends to the China of the merchants a learned depth that the trader's eye alone lacks.
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Tomé Pires, Suma oriental (c. 1515)
A Portuguese apothecary and agent, Pires writes around 1515, from Malacca itself, the most complete description of the great Asian trade of his time, before dying a prisoner in China. He lists the cargoes, the routes and the nations that cross paths at the strait, that same chokepoint where Hamilton ends his second volume. His meticulous inventory shows Malacca at the height of its mercantile fortune, when the Scottish captain will see in it no more than a Dutch colony, still rich but fallen from its former glory.
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Duarte Barbosa, Le Livre de Duarte Barbosa (c. 1516)
A Portuguese factor of the early sixteenth century, Barbosa describes the Indian Ocean at the moment his nation holds its keys, two centuries before Hamilton observes its decline. Cambay, Diu, Hormuz, Mombasa, Mozambique: every stronghold the Scottish captain finds fortified, besieged, or lost, Barbosa sees new, in the hands of the Crown of Portugal. Reading the two in succession is to measure the slow tide that draws Lusitanian power back from these shores.
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Willem Schouten et Jacob Le Maire, Journal ou description du merveilleux voyage de Guillaume Schouten (1618)
To escape the monopoly of the Company, which alone may use the Strait of Magellan, merchants of Hoorn seek another passage. In 1616, Jacob Le Maire and Willem Schouten discover the strait that bears the former's name, then round a cape they christen Hoorn. They then cross the Pacific by islands that Van Noort never saw, the Tuamotus, Tonga, New Ireland, before arriving at Java, where the Company confiscates their ship. Read after the journal of 1598, this account shows how quickly Holland learns the Pacific: within twenty years, the sea that had nearly swallowed Van Noort becomes a known road.
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Joris van Spilbergen, Speculum Orientalis Occidentalisque Indiae Navigationum (1619)
Fifteen years after Van Noort, Joris van Spilbergen takes up his route on behalf of the East India Company. Setting out in 1614 with six ships, he passes through the Strait of Magellan, follows the coast of Chile, crushes a Spanish squadron off Peru in 1615, ransoms Paita, negotiates at Acapulco, then crosses the Pacific to the Philippines and the Moluccas. His account, published in 1619 with that of Le Maire and Schouten, reads like a successful version of the first: same itinerary, same enemies, same ports, but a better-armed state fleet, which makes the South Sea a regular theater of the Dutch war against Spain.
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Nicolas Sanson and the Cartographers of the Grand Siècle (1650-1700)
Before modern surveys, the Indian Ocean can be read on the maps of the king's geographers, where the coastlines Hamilton calls so poorly rendered gradually take shape. Following these maps, from the Ethiopic Sea to the mouths of the Indus, helps explain why the captain constantly complains of shoals and rocks missing from the charts: he sails through a world still only half guessed at, one that others, after him, would finish drawing.
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Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon in the East Indies (1659-1679)
Burckhardt knows the King of Kandy only through the Puqvoy embassy. The English sailor Robert Knox, for his part, lived nineteen years in his kingdom. Captured in 1659 with part of his crew by the troops of Raja Sinha II, he survives by knitting caps and lending grain, until his escape to the Dutch fort of Arippu, which sends him on to Batavia. Back in London in September 1680, he publishes his account in 1681, with the support of the Royal Society. Translated into German as early as 1689, it offers the exact reverse of Burckhardt's: Sinhalese Ceylon from the inside, seen by a captive, against the Ceylon of the Dutch coastal forts.
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Johan Nieuhof, L'Ambassade de la Compagnie orientale des Provinces-Unies vers l'empereur de la Chine (1665)
A member of the first great Dutch embassy to Peking, in the middle of the seventeenth century, Nieuhof travels up China from Canton to the capital and brings back hundreds of drawings that fix, for a long time to come, Europe's image of the country. He sees, fifty years before Hamilton, the same rivers, the same bridges and the same cities, but from the side of the pleading embassy rather than the deceived merchant. His book sheds light on the ceremony and the haughtiness of the imperial administration that the captain will suffer in his turn, without ever penetrating its ways.
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Arnoldus Montanus, Ambassades mémorables vers les empereurs du Japon (1669)
A Dutch compiler of the seventeenth century, Montanus gathers the accounts of the Company's envoys to the Japan of the shoguns, that country closed upon itself which only the Dutch may still approach, through the narrow window of Nagasaki. His book, alive with processions and marvels, shows the closed empire that Hamilton only glimpses from afar, and tells in full the suppression of Christianity and the cunning of the merchants that the captain sums up in a few forceful pages. It is the great European picture of forbidden Japan, of which Hamilton gives only the sketch.
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Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les Six Voyages (1676)
Two centuries later, the gem merchant Tavernier still traveled through Hormuz, Persia, India, and the Bay of Bengal. His Les Six Voyages describe the diamond mines, the courts, and the trade routes of the same regions as Fei Xin. Here one sees what became, under other empires, of the trading posts and markets that the treasure fleet had once visited.
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Gemelli Careri, Voyage autour du monde (1699-1700)
At the end of the seventeenth century, the Neapolitan jurist travels around the world at his own expense. He crosses China, goes up to Peking, contemplates the Great Wall, then embarks at Manila on the galleon that links the Philippines to America. Almost a contemporary of Hamilton, he sails exactly the seas of this third volume, but as a free-roaming man of curiosity rather than a merchant. His testimony confirms, corrects or colors many a scene of the captain's, from the court of Canton to the streets of Manila, and gives a learned traveling companion to the crossing of the Malay Archipelago and the China seas.
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Peter Kolben, The Present State of the Cape of Good-Hope (1705-1713)
Thirty years after Burckhardt's stop, the Franconian Peter Kolb lands at the Cape in 1705, sent by a Prussian councillor, Baron von Krosigk, to make astronomical observations there. He stays several years, until his eyesight fails, and takes a particular interest in the Dutch colony and the Khoikhoi, those Burckhardt calls the Hottentots. His great book appears in Nuremberg in 1719, followed by a French translation in 1741. Kolb breaks with the clichés of his predecessors, compares the beliefs of the Khoikhoi with those of Europeans and reports the armed raids of the settlers. To be reread alongside the chapter on the Cape, written by a passing soldier in a hurry to leave.
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Johann Wolfgang Heydt, Allerneuester Geographisch- und Topographischer Schau-Platz von Africa und Ost-Indien (1733-1740)
Half a century later, Johann Wolfgang Heydt follows in Burckhardt's footsteps: a German who entered the Company's service in 1733, he first spends two years in Ceylon before reaching Batavia, where in 1737 he becomes the Company's architect and draughtsman. Back in Europe in 1740 for reasons of health, he publishes in Nuremberg in 1744 a large album of more than a hundred plates engraved after his drawings, with a long text: the Cape, Colombo and its fortifications, Batavia, Malacca, the Moluccas, Dejima. There one sees, drawn, the places Burckhardt describes in words: the citadels, the streets, the gardens and the life of the European employees of the Indies.
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Richard Walter, A Voyage Round the World in the Years 1740-1744 by George Anson (1748)
A century and a half later, an English squadron retraces Van Noort's course with the same ambition: to plunder the Spanish coast of the Pacific and intercept the gold of Manila. The official account of George Anson's expedition tells of Cape Horn in the storm, scurvy killing hundreds of men, the stopover at Juan Fernandez, the sack of Paita, the crossing to Guam, then the capture of the Manila galleon off the Philippines in 1743. A single ship returns, laden with silver. The resemblances to the journal of 1598 are striking: same sea, same enemies, same slaughter, but this time plunder equal to the losses.
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Carl Peter Thunberg, Travels in Europe, Africa, and Asia (1770-1779)
A pupil of Linnaeus, the Swede Carl Peter Thunberg signs on in 1771 as a surgeon of the Dutch Company in order to collect plants in the Indies. He spends three years at the Cape, reaches Batavia in May 1775, stays at the Dejima trading post and in 1776 accompanies the Dutch embassy to Edo, then lives in Ceylon from July 1777 to February 1778, before returning by way of the Cape. His account appears in Uppsala from 1788. A hundred years later, he almost retraces the route of Burckhardt's memorial, from the Cape to closed Japan by way of Ceylon, but with a naturalist's eye: where the clerk reports marvels, Thunberg names, classifies and describes the plants.
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Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde par la frégate du Roi La Boudeuse et la flûte L'Étoile (1771)
The first official circumnavigation of the French navy, Bougainville's expedition spends nearly two months in the Strait of Magellan, from December 1767 to January 1768. His pages on the sheltered bays, the winds that rush in, the dark forests and the Fuegians met at the water's edge answer directly the weeks of waiting and storm that Van Noort relates. Then come Tahiti, the Moluccas and Batavia, where the Dutch now hold the empire that the fleet of 1598 was still seeking. Between the two books the tone has changed: the plundering adventurer has given way to the scholar and the philosopher, but the strait itself has not changed.
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James Bruce, Voyage aux sources du Nil (1790)
Half a century after Hamilton, the Scotsman James Bruce finally enters the Abyssinia his countryman had known only through the accounts of fleeing missionaries. He lives at the court of the ruler Europeans called Prester John, and sees with his own eyes the customs, the raw meat, and the salt currency that Hamilton had known only by hearsay. His account confirms, corrects, and extends the astonished pages the captain devotes to the Christian kingdom of the mountains.
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Charles Darwin, Voyage d'un naturaliste autour du monde (1839)
Between 1832 and 1835 the Beagle follows almost the whole South American route of Van Noort. Darwin calls at Port Desire, the Port Desire where Captain Huydecoper was buried, goes up the Strait of Magellan, observes the Fuegians, then follows the coast of Chile from Chiloe to Valparaiso, feels the earthquake of 1835 at Valdivia and then discovers Concepcion in ruins. Where the Dutch journal saw only watering places, enemies and provisions to be taken, the naturalist reads marine terraces, fossils and birds. The same places, two centuries later, become the laboratory of an idea that will change biology.
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Ernst Haeckel, A Visit to Ceylon (1881-1882)
Two centuries after Burckhardt, another German discovers Ceylon with wonder. The zoologist Ernst Haeckel, a professor at Jena and a great champion of Darwin, lands in Colombo on 21 November 1881, after a voyage by way of Bombay, and stays on the island until March 1882. He sets up a laboratory at Belligemma, today's Weligama, on the south coast not far from Matara, where Burckhardt had capsized, visits Kandy and the Peradeniya garden and climbs the island's highest peak. His letters, collected under the title Indische Reisebriefe, celebrate the jungle, the sea and the wildlife, with the racial prejudices of their time.
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Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World (1900)
In 1895, a fifty-one-year-old American captain sets out alone, on an old eleven-metre sloop, the Spray, to sail around the world. Joshua Slocum passes the Strait of Magellan in early 1896, struggles for weeks against gusts that throw him back, and scatters tacks on his deck to guard against nocturnal visitors from Tierra del Fuego. He then crosses the Pacific to Australia and returns in 1898. His account, full of humor, is the exact opposite of Van Noort's journal: one man without a crew where four ships had lost almost all of theirs.
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