The Fiction and Reality of Jan Struys by Kees Boterbloem

Bad weather, however, forced to land on the coast of Daghestan, where they were taken prisoner and enslaved, although some of them escaped.Īccording to Struys’s travel account, he was captured in early June 1670 and taken to Yerevan, where he was sold on June 12 to a Persian, who took him to Darband. The Dutchmen, who met Razin in person, fled during the sack of Astrakhan, which Struys described, and sailed towards Darband (Struys, the two separate letters at the end of the book). At that time a Cossack rebellion had broken out under Stenka Razin, who attacked and sacked the town. Ḥājji Tarḵān), located near the river delta at the Caspian Sea. They sailed a newly built ship down the Volga River via Kazan to Astrakhan (Pers. They traveled to Riga, Novgorod, and Moscow, and Struys describes, among other things, the towns he visited, people’s drinking and eating habits, their religious customs, and how they entertained themselves. In September 1668, he and seventeen other Dutchmen, led by Captain David Butler, went to Russia to take service with the Czar Alexis I (r. His second voyage, from December 1655 until the end of 1657, was to the Mediterranean, while his third and last voyage began in September 1668 and ended in late 1673. His first voyage from December 1647 to September 1651 took him to West Africa, Madagascar, Siam, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Japan. He was a sail maker by profession, who had received a good elementary education. 367) in the Zaan district of the province of North Holland, north of Amsterdam.

He was born about 1630 either in Wormer or Durgerdam (Struys, 1676, p. Dalrymple, ‘Homer in India: The Oral Epics of Rajasthan,’ The New Yorker (20 November 2006) 48–55: 54.STRUYS, JAN JANSZOON, 17th-century Dutch sailor and sail maker, whose account of his various travels in Europe, Africa, and Asia, first published in 1676, has been translated into several languages. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms (Baltimore, MD, 1980), xiii. Maurer, ed., Neue Impulse der Reiseforschung (Berlin, 1999) 13–61: 14, 28 Rietbergen, Europe, 292.Ĭ. Idee und Wirklichkeit der europäischen Reisekultur in der Frühen Neuzeit,’ in M. Pagden, ‘Europe and the World Around,’ in E. Pagden, ‘Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent,’ in A. Maxwell, ‘Afanasii Nikitin: An Orthodox Russian’s Spiritual Voyage in the Dar al-Islam, 1468–75,’ Journal of World History 3 (2006) 243–66: 247–9 see Chapters 9 and 10.Ī. Witsen, Architectura navalis et Regimen Nauticum (Amsterdam: Pieter and Joan Blaeu, 1690), 198–9. Maczak, Travel in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1995), 142 (Marie-Catherine) Madame d’Aulnoy, Relation du voyage d’Espagne ( La Haye: H. van Royen, Zeevarenden op de koopvaardijvloot omstreeks 1700 (Amsterdam, 1987), 73.Ī.

The Fiction and Reality of Jan Struys by Kees Boterbloem