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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Miguel de Castanhoso, Historia das cousas que o muy esforçado capitão Dom Christovão da Gama fez nos reynos do Preste João (1541-1543)
Fourteen years after Álvares's return, the appeal for help that Prester John had sent to the king of Portugal receives its answer. In 1541, four hundred Portuguese land at Massawa under Cristóvão da Gama, son of Vasco, to fight the imam Ahmad Gragn, whose armies were ravaging the kingdom. Miguel de Castanhoso, one of the soldiers, tells of the march through the mountains the embassy had crossed, the battles, Gama's capture and death in 1542, then the victory of 1543 in which the imam is killed. The country Álvares described, with its churches and monasteries, appears here devastated by war.
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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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Pedro Páez, Histoire de l'Éthiopie (1603-1620)
A Castilian Jesuit, Pedro Páez spent seven years captive in Yemen before finally reaching Massawa in 1603, by the very road of Álvares's embassy. He learned Ge'ez, won the trust of Emperor Susenyos, whom he eventually brought over to Rome, and on 21 April 1618 reached the sources of the Blue Nile in Gojjam. His History of Ethiopia, completed around 1620, draws on the country's chronicles and on what he saw to refute the fables European authors spread about the kingdom. Left in manuscript for nearly three centuries, it is the great scholarly reply to the account of 1540.
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Jerónimo Lobo, Voyage historique d'Abissinie (1625-1634)
Leaving Goa in 1625 with the patriarch Afonso Mendes, the Jesuit Jerónimo Lobo crossed the desert from Beilul and took charge of the missions of Tigray. He saw Catholicism triumph under Susenyos, then collapse when Fasilides, his son, sidelined the missionaries and drove them from the country in 1634. His narrative, translated into French by Abbé Le Grand in 1728 and abridged in English by the young Samuel Johnson in 1735 as A Voyage to Abyssinia, did much to shape the image of Ethiopia in Enlightenment Europe. In it we find the monasteries, the court and the rites that Álvares had observed a century earlier.
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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)
Two centuries later, the gem merchant Tavernier still traveled through Hormuz, Persia, India, and the Bay of Bengal. His Les Six Voyages describe the diamond mines, the courts, and the trade routes of the same regions as Fei Xin. Here one sees what became, under other empires, of the trading posts and markets that the treasure fleet had once visited.
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Charles-Jacques Poncet, Relation abrégée du voyage que M. Charles Poncet fit en Éthiopie en 1698, 1699 et 1700 (1698-1700)
A French physician settled in Cairo, Charles Poncet was summoned in 1698 to the bedside of Emperor Iyasu I and his son, who were suffering from a skin disease. He went up the Nile, crossed the Nubian desert and reached Gondar in July 1699. He stayed there about nine months, then left by way of Massawa, the very port where Álvares's embassy had landed. His account, long held suspect, nonetheless remains the only European testimony on Ethiopia in those years. The contrast with 1520 is striking: the court no longer wanders from camp to camp under tents, but has settled in the stone castles of Gondar.
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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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James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1769-1772)
A Scottish gentleman, James Bruce landed at Massawa in 1769 and made his way to Gondar, then torn by the struggles between Ras Mikael Sehul and the young emperors he made and unmade. He healed, rode, took part in court intrigues and in November 1770 reached the sources of the Little Abay, which he boasted of being the first European to see, though Páez had preceded him. Published in 1790 in five volumes, his Travels were at first mocked as a tissue of fables, before later travellers confirmed the essentials. Two and a half centuries after Álvares, the highlands fascinate as much as ever.
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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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Arnauld d'Abbadie, Douze ans de séjour dans la Haute-Éthiopie (1838-1848)
Arriving in Ethiopia in 1838 with his brother Antoine, the young Arnauld d'Abbadie stayed in the highlands until 1848. He lived among the princes, followed their campaigns, shared their hunts and lawsuits, learned the language and became a familiar of the lords of Gojjam. His account, whose first volume appeared in 1868, plunges into Ethiopia from the inside in the era of the princes, split among rival lords before Tewodros's imperial restoration. Three centuries after Álvares, one finds the same churches, the same feasts, and the same patience demanded of the foreigner who waits on the goodwill of the great.
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