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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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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Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les Six Voyages (1676)
The merchant traveler of the seventeenth century crossed the Asia of spices and precious stones, from Persia to the Indies and on to the East Indies. His Six Voyages lay out in detail the trade that the men of Dieppe had barely glimpsed: the weights, the currencies, the tricks of the markets, the art of haggling that Crignon learned at Ticou the hard way. Two generations later, one finds there the same harsh pepper trade, but now conducted by a European versed in all its subtleties.
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William Dampier, Nouveau voyage autour du monde (1697)
A hundred and fifty years after the Parmentier brothers, this English buccaneer turned writer in turn crossed the coasts of Sumatra and the seas of the East Indies. Dampier observed the winds, the currents, the peoples with a precision that foreshadows science. His narrative, immensely read, shows what had become of the archipelago that Crignon had approached as a lone pioneer: a crossroads now traversed by the Dutch, the English and the Portuguese, where the pepper trade had changed in scale.
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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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Le Père Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles de l'Amérique (1722)
For the book's other shore, the Antilles, this Dominican friar of the early eighteenth century offers the great fresco of islands that the second volume of the voyage still described as nearly untouched. Labat traveled through Hispaniola, recounting the sugar works, the livestock, the slaves, the trade in hides. What the Dieppe sailor noted in a few dry lines, the friar unfolds into entire tableaux, and one sees what the coast of wild herds had become in two centuries.
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James Cook, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (1784)
In December 1776, bound for the North Pacific, James Cook anchors the Resolution and the Discovery in a bay of the Kerguelen lands, which he names Christmas Harbour. His men find there the message left by the French in 1774, proof of the taking of possession. Cook surveys the coast, describes the low vegetation, the seals and the penguins, and suggests a name that will stick: the Island of Desolation. His account, published after his death, confirms the Breton's discovery just as the latter, condemned by the court martial, writes his defence in the château of Saumur.
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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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Alexandre de Humboldt, Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent (1807-1834)
On the threshold of the nineteenth century, the Prussian scholar explored as a naturalist the coasts of Tierra Firme, from the Rio Grande to Cartagena and beyond. Where Crignon drew up an inventory of ports and shoals for the pilot, Humboldt measures, classifies, understands. To read the two together is to follow the same coastline across three centuries, from the sailor's logbook to the great scientific inquiry.
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James Clark Ross, A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions (1847)
On 12 May 1840, James Clark Ross's Erebus and Terror drop anchor at Christmas Harbour for a campaign of magnetic observations. The expedition stays about two and a half months, in almost continuous gales. The young botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker gathers there the Kerguelen cabbage, Pringlea antiscorbutica, whose name tells its virtues against scurvy, the sickness that had broken the crews of 1774. Ross does not dwell on regrets: his volumes go on to tell of the push toward the great ice barrier that will bear his name. The southern stopover nonetheless fills precious pages on Kerguelen's land, its rocks, its plants and its storms.
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Henry Nottidge Moseley, Notes by a Naturalist on the Challenger (1879)
A century after Kerguelen's second voyage, in January 1874, the British corvette Challenger puts in at the archipelago during the round-the-world cruise that founds modern oceanography. The naturalist Henry Nottidge Moseley walks its bays and observes the penguins, the elephant seals, the mosses and the famous cabbage, the fresh food Kerguelen's crews had so sorely lacked. His notes, written for a wide public, have the freshness of a field notebook. They show, up close and on foot, a land Kerguelen had only glimpsed in the fog, which in a hundred years had become a field of study for scientists and a hunting ground for sailors.
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Raymond Rallier du Baty, 15,000 Miles in a Ketch (1917)
In September 1907, two Breton brothers, Raymond and Henri Rallier du Baty, leave Boulogne aboard the J.-B. Charcot, a 48-ton fishing ketch, with four companions. Their aim: to map the Kerguelen Islands, which France has scarcely explored. To pay for the adventure, they hunt elephant seals and sell the oil. Their account, published in English before appearing in French as Aventures aux Kerguelen, has the humour and daring of expeditions without a budget. Raymond will return in 1913; his surveys will serve for the first complete map of the archipelago, published in 1922, a hundred and fifty years after his countryman's discovery.
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Jean-Paul Kauffmann, L'Arche des Kerguelen (1993)
A few years after his release, the journalist and writer Jean-Paul Kauffmann, a hostage in Lebanon from 1985 to 1988, sets out for the Kerguelen Islands in the footsteps of Yves de Kerguelen, Rallier du Baty and the other discoverers. He shares the life of the scientists and soldiers at the base, sinks into the peat, gets lost, endures the wind that never stops. He dreams of sighting the rock arch that gives the book its title, and bad weather prevents him. The account of a goal missed, like that of 1774, his book turns southern isolation into literary material, never losing sight of the Breton navigator who revealed it.