Discours of Voyages into ye Easte & West Indies: deuided into foure bookes

Jan Huygen van Linschoten was a Dutch traveller, merchant, and writer whose years in Portuguese Goa gave him access to closely held information about Iberian navigation and overseas trade. In 1583 he travelled to Goa, where he served as secretary to João Vicente da Fonseca, the Portuguese Archbishop of Goa. This position placed him near the centre of Portuguese administration and commerce in the Indian Ocean.

After returning to the Dutch Republic in 1592, Linschoten prepared his observations for publication with the Amsterdam publisher Cornelis Claesz. His Itinerario, Voyage ofte Schipvaert naer Oost ofte Portugaels Indien was published in Amsterdam in 1596. This English translation, Discours of Voyages into ye Easte & West Indies: deuided into foure bookes, was published in London by John Wolfe in 1598, making Linschoten’s Portuguese-derived geographical and navigational knowledge available to English readers. The book is divided into four parts. The first concerns the East Indies, including East Africa, Arabia, India, Southeast Asia, China, and Japan. The second describes navigation along the coast of West Africa and around the Cape of Good Hope, together with material on the New World. The third, based partly on sailing directions attributed to the Portuguese royal pilot Diogo Afonso, gives instructions for sailing from Portugal to India and for navigating between islands in the East Indies, with related directions for Brazil and Spanish America. The fourth part describes the revenues, taxes, and other income of the Spanish Crown at home and overseas.

The English edition includes re-engravings of many of the maps and views from the Dutch edition, with captions adapted for English readers. The engraved title page, by William Rogers, is headed by the Elizabethan royal arms and includes a large carrack at anchor, smaller vessels, figures identified as the King of Cochin and the King of Tangil, exotic animals, armillary spheres, and heraldic devices. The imagery frames the volume as a work concerned with navigation, trade, monarchy, and overseas expansion.

This volume is closely connected with the related Linschoten maps in the collection, many of which belong to the cartographic programme of the 1596 Dutch Itinerario: a world map by Petrus Plancius (71), first published in 1594, and five regional maps associated with Arnold Florent van Langren and Henricus Florent van Langren: maritime East and Southeast Asia (74), Asia and the Indian Ocean (254), South and West Africa (277), East Africa and the western Indian Ocean (278), and South and Central America (279).