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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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 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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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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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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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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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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