Travelers in the East Indies in the 17th Century
In the seventeenth century the seas of the East Indies changed hands. The Dutch, who first arrived in 1596, founded the VOC in 1602 and took the Portuguese strongholds one by one: Malacca in 1641, Colombo in 1656, Cochin in 1663. Jan Pieterszoon Coen founded Batavia in 1619 on the ruins of Jakarta, then conquered the Banda Islands in 1621, all but wiping out their people, to hold the nutmeg trade alone. In 1623 the execution of the English merchants at Amboyna pushed the English East India Company out of the Moluccas; it fell back on India, at Surat from 1612, Madras in 1639 and Bombay, which came in 1661 as part of Catherine of Braganza's dowry. The French came last and settled at Pondicherry in 1674.
On land, power remained Mughal. Jahangir, then Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal, and finally Aurangzeb ruled from Agra and Delhi and pressed south into the Deccan. Europeans came to them as petitioners: an imperial firman, granted or withdrawn, was enough to open or close their trading posts. The Venetian Niccolao Manucci, who ran away at fourteen in 1653, became a gunner and then a physician to princes, and chronicled half a century of the empire; Jean de Thévenot, Peter Mundy and the surgeon John Fryer described Surat, Golconda and the roads of the Deccan.
Farther east, other kingdoms held their ground. Aceh, under Sultan Iskandar Muda, commanded the Strait of Malacca, and the Norman captain Augustin de Beaulieu bargained there for pepper in 1621. Makassar stayed a port open to every nation until it fell to the Dutch in 1669. The sea took its toll as well: in 1629 the Batavia broke up on the reefs of Western Australia, and her commander Francisco Pelsaert had to try the mutineers who had massacred many of the castaways.
It was also a century of describing and classifying. The pastor Philippus Baldaeus published an account of Malabar, Coromandel and Ceylon in 1672; the governor Hendrik van Rheede worked with Malayali scholars on the twelve illustrated volumes of the Hortus Malabaricus (1678 to 1693); on Ambon, Georg Eberhard Rumphius, gone blind, dictated his great herbal of the Moluccas. There was an Indian voice too: in 1641 the Jain merchant Banarasidas wrote the Ardhakathanak in Hindi, one of India's first autobiographies, full of the roads, fairs and fears of a trader from Agra.
This collection brings together our editions and a directory of related texts.
Our titles on this subject
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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Pieter van den Broecke, Journal des voyages aux Indes orientales (1605-1630)
A merchant in the service of the young Dutch Company and an exact contemporary of Pyrard, van den Broecke traded at the same time in the gulf and along the same coasts where Pyrard wandered as a prisoner. His dry merchant's journal, attentive to cargoes and the price of pepper, sheds light by contrast on what Pyrard leaves unsaid: the fierce commercial war that Portuguese, Dutch and English waged on these waters while a castaway was learning their languages and customs.
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William Hawkins, Relation de son séjour à la cour du Grand Moghol (1608-1613)
An English captain who landed at Surat in 1608, the very year Pyrard was thrown into prison at Cochin, Hawkins travelled up to Agra and the court of Emperor Jahangir. While the Frenchman discovers India from below, as a captive on the coasts, the Englishman discovers it from above, among the elephants and jewels of the Mughal palace. Two Europeans, two opposite fortunes, the same subcontinent seized at the same date.
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Jean Mocquet, Voyages en Afrique, Asie, Indes orientales et occidentales (1616)
Apothecary to King Henry IV, Mocquet travelled the world in the same years as Pyrard and sometimes followed the same routes: the Cape, Goa, Malabar. Where Pyrard observes as a patient captive, Mocquet collects for the royal cabinet, bringing back plants, stuffed animals, and tales of shipwreck and fever. Read side by side, the two Frenchmen of the early years of the century compose a portrait in two voices of this maritime East that France was then discovering late, in fragments carried home in sailors' chests.
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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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Jean de Thévenot, Troisième partie des Voyages de M. de Thévenot (1665-1667)
Jean de Thévenot, a French traveler already versed in the Levant and Persia, embarks at Basra on 6 November 1665 and reaches Surat on 10 January 1666, as Della Valle had forty-three years earlier on leaving the Persian Gulf. He spends about thirteen months in the Mughal empire, crosses the country by way of Golconda to Masulipatam on the eastern coast, then returns overland to Surat before setting out again for Persia, where he dies in November 1667. The third part of his Travels, devoted to Hindustan, appears in 1684 from his journals. There we find the great Mughal port again, its merchants, its European trading posts and its court news, this time under the reign of Aurangzeb.
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François Bernier, Voyage dans les États du Grand Mogol (1670-1671)
Physician and philosopher, Bernier lived nearly twelve years in seventeenth-century India and describes it with a scholar's eye. His account of castes, religions and administration extends and refines Pyrard's still tentative observations on the Brahmins and the Nayars, and shows how, within two generations, the European view of India gained in method what it sometimes lost in freshness.
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John Fryer, A New Account of East India and Persia (1672-1681)
The English physician John Fryer embarks for India in 1672 and returns only about ten years later. He lives mostly on the coast, at Surat and Bombay, the island that Portugal ceded to England in 1661 and which is growing not far from Bassein, the Portuguese stronghold where Della Valle had stopped for a night. He gathers his observations in eight letters, published in London in 1698 as A New Account of East India and Persia. Like the Pilgrim, he writes to correspondents, and we follow the same coast half a century later, when the English have taken the place of the Portuguese.
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Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les Six Voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1676)
A dealer in precious stones, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier makes six journeys to the East and keeps returning to India from the 1640s on. He knows Surat, where he lands and embarks again many times, and Goa, where he is at the end of 1641 and again in early 1648, when the Portuguese capital described by Della Valle has already lost some of its luster. Between stops, he pushes on to the diamond mines of Golconda, which he visits several times. His Six Voyages, published in 1676, mix merchant's accounts, caravan routes and portraits of courts. Where the Pilgrim observes as a man of letters, Tavernier weighs, counts and bargains: two gazes on the same coast, a generation apart.
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Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les Six Voyages (1676)
Half a century after Pyrard, the gem merchant Tavernier travels through the India of diamonds and princely courts. Where Pyrard saw poor islands and island kings, Tavernier sees the Mughal empire at its height, the mines of Golconda, the splendour of audiences. The contrast measures the distance between the penniless castaway and the trader whom sovereigns receive: two Frances separated by fifty years of Eastern ambition.
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Robert Knox, Relation de l'île de Ceylan (1681)
An English sailor held prisoner for nearly twenty years in Ceylon, close to the Maldives, Knox wrote in the following century a captivity narrative that strangely echoes Pyrard's: the same forced apprenticeship in a language and a people, the same patience, the same escape in the end. Two European captives on the waters of the Indian Ocean, a century apart, and the same transformation of prisoner into witness.