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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, The Six Voyages (1631-1668)
The necessary companion to this reading. A dealer in precious stones, Tavernier travels the very road of the Account six times between 1631 and 1668: Aleppo, the desert, Baghdad, Isfahan, Gombroon, Surat, Golconda. He knows every caravanserai, every customs house, every exchange rate, and describes the diamond mine of the King of Golconda that Bourges only glimpsed. Where the priest counts souls, the merchant counts carats. The two books overlap so often that together they form the best guide to the overland route to Asia in the seventeenth century.
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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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François Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire (1670-1671)
Aurangzeb's physician, Bernier lives twelve years in the empire the missionaries cross by ox-cart in forty-one days. He tells from within the war of succession that Bourges sums up in a single sentence, that of the fakir prince who became emperor, and describes the camps, the provinces, the famine, the system of land tenure. His letters give the silent march of chapter six its political weight: those fortresses occupied by Shivaji, those five thousand horsemen camped in the night belong to an empire beginning to crack.
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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.
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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.
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Jean Chardin, Travels in Persia and Other Places of the East (1686)
Ten years after the French passed through, Chardin settles in Isfahan and lives there for years. His book remains the most complete description of Safavid Persia before its fall: the shah's court, the colleges, the gardens, the royal square, the religious debates whose subtlety and wit Bourges had only sensed. There, developed over hundreds of pages, is the city the Account crosses in three months and a dozen paragraphs. Read it to understand what the French travellers saw opening, then closing again.
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Nicolas Gervaise, Natural and Political History of the Kingdom of Siam (1688)
Twenty-five years later, a young priest of the Foreign Missions, trained in the seminary founded thanks to Jacques de Bourges's return, publishes on Siam the book the Account had only sketched. Gervaise has lived four years at Ayutthaya, speaks the language, knows the court and the monasteries. His chapters on the talapoins, on funerals, on kingship and on rice take up, correct and deepen those of his predecessor. It is the best way to measure what the Account had seen rightly and what it had only guessed through an interpreter.
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Engelbert Kaempfer, Histoire naturelle, civile et ecclésiastique du Japon (1690-1692)
A physician for the Dutch East India Company, Kaempfer lived in Japan at the close of the seventeenth century, in a country now closed to foreigners and purged of Christians. His book shows what became of the Japan that Carletti had reached while it was still open, before the crosses of Nagasaki announced the great closing. The same archipelago, a century later, locked shut.
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Simon de La Loubère, A New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam (1691)
Envoy extraordinary of Louis XIV in 1687, La Loubère witnesses the height, then the ruin, of the Franco-Siamese alliance. His work, which has remained a classic, describes the country with almost scientific rigour: measurements, calendar, Siamese mathematics, language, government. The contrast is striking with the account of 1666, where four exhausted priests land without a word of Siamese. Twenty-five years separate the canoe at Lalinga from the embassies in embroidered dress, and the two books tell the beginning and the end of the same French adventure in Asia.
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Gemelli Careri, Le Tour du monde (1699-1700)
At the close of the seventeenth century, this Neapolitan magistrate retraces, as a well-off tourist, the circuit of the globe that Carletti had accomplished as a ruined merchant. Manila, Acapulco, Mexico City: he follows almost the same route and publishes an account that will meet with immense success. Reading Gemelli after Carletti is to measure the distance travelled between perilous adventure and pleasure travel.
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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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Carsten Niebuhr, Description de l'Arabie (1762-1763)
In 1761 the King of Denmark sent five scholars to explore Arabia Felix. After Cairo, Sinai and Jeddah, the expedition reached Yemen and was received at Sanaa by the imam, but fever decimated it: Niebuhr, the surveyor, was the only one to return. From Mocha to Sanaa he travelled the mountains and cities that Varthema had crossed as a prisoner of the Sultan of Aden, two and a half centuries earlier. His Description of Arabia, published in 1772 and translated into French the following year, brings maps, measurements and precise observations where the Bolognese told stories. It remains a reference for the history of Yemen.
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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.
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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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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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Alexander von Humboldt, Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent (1799-1804)
Two centuries after Carletti, the Prussian scholar explores New Spain and Peru with the instruments of modern science. Where the merchant noted the prices of cacao and silver, Humboldt measures, classifies, and understands. The same lands, seen through an Enlightenment mind, shed light in return on the still-groping curiosity of the Florentine traveler.
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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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Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia (1814-1815)
Under the name Sheikh Ibrahim, the Swiss Burckhardt spent several months in the Hejaz in 1814 and 1815, performed the pilgrimage and stayed in Mecca and Medina. His notes, published in London after his death, describe the Kaaba, the rites, the population and the trade of the holy cities with an exactness later travellers have scarcely surpassed. Three centuries after Varthema, also disguised to enter the sanctuary forbidden to non-Muslims, Burckhardt follows the same roads from Jeddah and the caravan. Reading the two accounts side by side lets us sort what the Bolognese saw from what he embellished. His book is Travels in Arabia.
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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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Richard Francis Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1853)
In 1853 the British officer Richard Burton passed himself off as an Afghan physician and joined the pilgrims on the road to Medina and then Mecca. His account, published soon after, became one of the great classics of Oriental travel: a meticulous description of the rites, the caravans, the Bedouins, the constant danger of being unmasked. Burton knew Varthema, whose account he quotes at length in an appendix, and knew himself the heir to a line of disguised travellers that begins with the Bolognese enlisted among the Mamluks. Three and a half centuries lie between them, but the same question remains: how to see, and tell, what one has no right to see. The book is Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah.
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Henri Mouhot, Travels in the Central Parts of Siam, Cambodia, and Laos (1863)
Two centuries later, a French naturalist travels the same rivers, sleeps in the same forests and fights the same leeches, before dying of fever in Laos in 1861. His notebooks, published after his death, made Angkor known to Europe. In them one recognizes, almost unchanged, the Tenasserim and the jungles Bourges crossed in broken-down carts, with tigers around the camp. The permanence of the landscape makes all the more visible what two centuries had changed in men.
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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.