Travel narratives of the East Indies, from Goa to the Spice Islands

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Tomé Pires, Suma Oriental (1512-1515)

  An apothecary sent to the Indies by King Manuel, Tomé Pires wrote in Malacca and in India, between 1512 and 1515, a compendium of everything he learned about the trading East, from the Red Sea to China. He describes ports, goods, weights, rulers, above all Malacca, which the Portuguese had just conquered, a few years after Varthema's visit. Pires then left on an embassy to China, where he died without being able to return. His manuscript, long thought lost, was found in Paris only in 1944. The Suma Oriental lets us measure, on the same shores, what Portuguese conquest changed in the world Varthema had seen.

• 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.

• 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.

• Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, Itinerario (1596)

  A young Dutchman in the service of the Archbishop of Goa from 1583 to 1588, Linschoten observes the Portuguese city twenty years after Orta: its markets, festivals, slaves, churches, Banian merchants and spices. Back in Holland he publishes an Itinerario that delivers to the Dutch the routes and secrets of Portuguese trade and opens the way for their fleets. For plants and drugs, his chapters lean heavily on the Colloquies, annotated by the physician Bernardus Paludanus. The knowledge gathered in Orta's house thus passes, through Linschoten, to the Portuguese's Dutch rivals.

• 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.

• 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.

• François Pyrard de Laval, Voyage de François Pyrard de Laval aux Indes orientales (1601-1611)

  Leaving Saint-Malo in 1601, Pyrard of Laval was shipwrecked in the Maldives on 2 July 1602 and remained a captive there for five years, learning the islanders' language and customs. Escaping in 1607, he passed through India and knew Goa, Portuguese India at its height, before returning to France in 1611 and publishing his account. A century after Varthema, he finds again the ports of India's western coast and the merchants of the Indian Ocean, but seen from inside the empire that the Bolognese saw being born at Cannanore. His pages on the Maldives remain among the most precise ever written by a European of his time. The book is The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval to the East Indies.

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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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• François Bernier, Voyage dans les États du Grand Mogol (1670-1671)

  A physician of Louis XIV who entered the service of a Mughal prince, Bernier witnesses from within the war of succession that brings Aurangzeb to the throne, the same dynastic saga that Hamilton recounts secondhand, years after the fact. Where the Scottish captain draws his account from merchants and courtiers, Bernier rides behind the army, watches the brothers kill one another, and sees the usurper don the crown. Two versions of the same drama, one lived, the other gathered on the quays of Surat.

• Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les Six Voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier en Turquie, en Perse et aux Indes (1676)

  A dealer in precious stones, Tavernier makes the journey to the East six times between 1631 and 1668. He passes through Goa, by then in decline, but above all he visits the diamond mines of the Deccan, Golconda and Kollur, which he describes with a jeweller's precision. Orta's colloquy on the diamond, its mines and its cuts finds in him a continuation by a man of the trade, a century later. His accounts of the Mughal and Persian courts, the caravan roads and the markets of India make him one of the great European witnesses of seventeenth-century India.

• 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.

• Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les Six Voyages en Turquie, en Perse et aux Indes (1676)

  A dealer in precious stones, Tavernier crosses Asia six times between the Mediterranean and the diamond mines of Golconda. He weighs the pearls of Bahrain that Hamilton watches being fished, haggles over the carnelians of Cambay, and describes the caravan routes that the captain knows only by sea. His account is that of a man of the land, while Hamilton is a man of the coasts, and the two complement each other like the obverse and reverse of the same map.

• 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.

• William Dampier, Nouveau Voyage autour du monde (1697)

  A buccaneer turned explorer, Dampier circles the globe three times and keeps a journal so precise that Europe's scholars long plunder it. He prowls the same waters as Hamilton, from the coasts of India to the straits of the East Indies, but from the opposite side, that of privateering and adventure. Where the captain trades his cargoes, Dampier observes the winds, the currents and the peoples with the eye of a man without country or company. Read together, the merchant and the buccaneer sketch the two faces of the Asian seas at the turn of the century.

• Gemelli Careri, Voyage autour du monde (1699-1700)

  The Neapolitan jurist travels around the world at his own expense at the end of the seventeenth century, and crosses Aurangzeb's India just as the aging emperor still wages war in the Deccan. He approaches the imperial camp, describes the splendor and the weariness of the dying reign, that distant authority whose weight Hamilton feels on every coast, from Carwar to Vizagapatam. The curious Italian puts a face to the name the Scottish captain utters on every page without ever seeing the man who bears it.

• 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.

• 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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• 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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• Le Gentil de la Galaisière, Voyage dans les mers de l'Inde (1779-1781)

  An astronomer sent to observe the transit of Venus in the eighteenth century, Le Gentil failed in his calculations but, by chance, achieved a long crossing of the same waters Pyrard had known two centuries earlier. His account shows a Coromandel coast and islands now drawn into the great game of the European empires.

• Paolino da San Bartolomeo, A Voyage to the East Indies (1796)

  Arriving on the Malabar Coast in the mid-1770s, when the echoes of Duprat's venture have not yet died away, this Austrian Carmelite stays there until 1789. A missionary, he learns Malayalam and Sanskrit, publishing the first printed grammar of the latter in Europe. His account, published in Rome in 1796 and translated into French in 1808, describes the Nairs, the Brahmins, the fishing castes, the court of Travancore and the advance of the armies of Mysore. Here, seen by a man who knew them over many years, are the peoples and kingdoms that Duprat passes at the double.

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• Francis Buchanan, A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara, and Malabar (1800-1801)

  Twenty-six years after Duprat, the Scottish physician travels on behalf of the English Company through the territories taken from Tipu Sultan, Hyder Ali's son, killed in 1799. He crosses Mysore, then comes down into Malabar, passes through Calicut and the neighbourhood of Mahé, and notes everything: crops, pepper, taxes, castes, the state of temples and villages after decades of war. What was political theatre for Duprat becomes a statistical survey for Buchanan. The reader measures what has become of the coast where the count dreamed of a French kingdom: an English province.

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• Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent, Voyage dans les quatre principales îles des mers d'Afrique (1801-1802)

  Botanist of the Baudin expedition, Bory quarrels with his captain and leaves the ship at the Isle de France. He then passes to Bourbon, where in October 1801 he climbs the Piton de la Fournaise and gives the first general scientific description of the volcano, one of whose craters now bears his name. His three volumes of 1804, accompanied by an atlas, cover Tenerife, the Isle de France, Bourbon and Saint Helena. Thirty years after Bernardin, it is the same string of islands seen by a professional naturalist, who measures their relief and classifies their plants where his predecessor doubted his own competence and trusted his eye.

• Matthew Flinders, A Voyage to Terra Australis (1803-1810)

  In December 1803, the navigator who has just sailed round Australia puts in at the Isle de France in a leaking ship. France and England are again at war: Governor Decaen holds him prisoner. Flinders will remain on the island more than six years, first confined at Port Louis, then lodged at the estate of Madame d'Arifat, whose sons he tutors, before being freed in 1810. There he studies the compass, the barometer and French literature. Nearly a hundred pages of his great account of 1814 are devoted to the island, and he praises a hospitality that he says he never met elsewhere.

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• Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1831-1836)

  At the end of April 1836, on the voyage home, the Beagle anchors off Mauritius, by then British. Darwin finds Port Louis entirely French despite more than twenty-five years of British rule, with its shops and its little theatre. He observes the convicts transported from India who work on the roads, rides the island's only elephant and goes to see, at the Black River, coral reefs raised above the sea. The Beagle then calls at the Cape, Saint Helena and Ascension: exactly Bernardin's return route, sixty-five years later, followed by a naturalist who in his turn questions the age of the land.

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• Richard Francis Burton, Goa, and the Blue Mountains (1851)

  In 1847 the young Lieutenant Burton, ill, obtains leave and goes down to Goa before climbing to breathe the air of the Nilgiris, the Blue Mountains. He finds a Portuguese capital almost abandoned, Old Goa overrun by vegetation, its churches and convents silent, far from the rich city where Orta received his visitors. Ironic, curious about everything, already fascinated by languages and customs, Burton describes the Canarins, the half-castes, the priests and the plantations. His book takes the measure of time passed: three centuries after the Colloquies, Goa has become a setting of ruins.

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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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• Pierre Loti, Mahé des Indes (dans Propos d'exil) (1887)

  More than a century after Duprat's time there, the naval officer Pierre Loti stops for a few days at Mahé, a small French trading post that has stood almost still beneath the coconut palms. The text, collected in Propos d'exil, speaks neither of treaties nor of customs duties: it conveys the torpor of the place, the vegetation, the melancholy of a France reduced to a few streets on the shore of the Arabian Sea. Read after Duprat, it gives the end of the story: the trading post the count wanted to make the bridgehead of an empire has become a setting for exotic reverie.

• Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1895-1896)

  On the lecture tour meant to clear his debts, Twain lands at Port Louis in April 1896 and rests a dozen days at Curepipe. He is amused by the local saying that Mauritius was made first and heaven copied from it, notes that the Indians who came after abolition now form the majority of the population, and observes that Paul and Virginia remains the only historical event of any size there, although history never happened. The novel Bernardin drew from his stay had ended up eclipsing the real island: Twain mocks it, but thereby measures the mark left by the young officer of 1768.

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