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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Ibn Joubayr, Relation des voyages (1183-1185)
The Andalusian pilgrim from Valencia made the pilgrimage to Mecca between 1183 and 1185 and wrote the notebook that would found the classical Arabic genre of the rihla. He passed through the same Egyptian ports, sailed down the Red Sea, and saw Mecca one hundred forty years after Nasir, under the Ayyubids of Saladin. More literary, more brilliant, and also more laudatory toward the restored Sunni power, he completes his predecessor on every point where Nasir remained silent. The two notebooks read almost like a two-voice score on the same Levant.
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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)
The great traveler from Tangier crisscrossed, over thirty years between 1325 and 1354, the entire Muslim world, from sub-Saharan Africa to China. When he passes through Jerusalem, Cairo, or Mecca, it is three centuries after Nasir, and the world has been transformed: the Crusades over, the Mongols established, the Mamluks in Cairo. The contrast with the Persian's notebook gives the measure of what has changed. Where Nasir describes in a few pages, Ibn Battuta expands into personal adventures, marriages, learned disputes, and princely banquets.
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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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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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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 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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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, 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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Volney, Voyage en Égypte et en Syrie (1787)
The French philosopher traveled through the Ottoman Orient between 1783 and 1785 and published his account in Paris in 1787. He describes Jerusalem, Damascus, Cairo, and the Levantine coast with a rationalist and critical eye. The same geography as Nasir's, seven centuries later, under another empire and other dynasties. A foundational text of modern Orientalism, illuminating to read after the Persian because it shows, ten generations later, what the same land had become: an Ottoman Levant, impoverished, numbed, yet still largely recognizable as the one Nasir had crossed.
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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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Chateaubriand, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1806-1807)
Setting out in 1806, the French writer crossed Greece, reached Constantinople, landed in the Holy Land, visited Jerusalem and Bethlehem, then returned by way of Egypt and the Maghreb. His account, published in Paris in 1811, follows almost step by step Nasir's Syro-Palestinian route, but the gaze has changed entirely: where the Persian measures cubits and counts gates, the Romantic seeks ruins, tombs, and emotion. Two opposite ways of keeping a notebook before the same stones.
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Edward Lane, Mœurs et coutumes des Égyptiens modernes (1836)
The English Arabist settled in Cairo in 1825, then again in 1833, in the time of Muhammad Ali, and published in 1836 the most meticulous description of the Cairo of his century. He too distinguishes, as Nasir had eight hundred years earlier, between Cairo and Old Cairo, the pomp of power and the abundance of the bazaars. It is the same labyrinth of alleys, the same call to prayer, the same spice merchants, but the dynasty has changed many times over and the caliphate no longer exists. Lane completes from within what Nasir had begun: an anthropology of the city as lived.
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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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Guy Le Strange, Palestine sous les musulmans (1890)
In 1890, the English orientalist gathered the descriptions that Arab and Persian geographers had left of Syria and Palestine from the seventh to the fifteenth century, giving considerable space to Nasir's account of Jerusalem and the Haram. Reading this collection after the Safarnama places the Persian's notebook within the chorus of all those who described the holy city before the Crusaders: Le Strange translates, compares, situates, and lets Nasir's voice be heard among his peers.