The Secret Road to the Indies: Spies, Pirates and the First Dutch Voyage East

How the road to the East passed from Portugal to Holland: the science behind the voyages, the maps, the spies and pirates, and the voyages that followed

Imagine a world in which the road to the riches of the East is a secret. Somewhere beyond the horizon lie islands where cloves and nutmeg grow. Nutmeg grows on just a handful of tiny islands, the Bandas, and nowhere else on earth. There are coasts where pepper is sold by the sack, and harbours full of silk and porcelain. Everyone in Europe wants these things. By the time pepper reaches Amsterdam it is so costly that the Dutch still call anything very expensive peperduur, as dear as pepper. Only one small kingdom knows the way.

This is the story of how that secret was won, guarded, raided and stolen. It ends with four Dutch ships sailing out of Texel in the spring of 1595, and with the hundreds of ships that followed them.

A small kingdom finds the way

The story begins in Portugal. It is a narrow country, with Spain at its back and the ocean in front. In 1415 the Portuguese crossed to Africa and took the town of Ceuta. Then, under Prince Henry the Navigator, their ships began to creep down the African coast. Each year they went a little further. Sailors swore that beyond certain capes no ship could ever return. The Portuguese went anyway.

In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias was blown around the southern tip of Africa by a storm. When the wind dropped, he found open sea to the east. He had rounded the cape that would soon be called the Cape of Good Hope. The way into the Indian Ocean was open. From now on the route to the East was clear: down the coast of Africa, around the Cape, and across the ocean to India.

Ten years later came the big gamble. Vasco da Gama left Lisbon with four ships. He swung far out into the Atlantic, rounded the Cape of Good Hope and crossed the Indian Ocean. In May 1498 he dropped anchor off Calicut, on the pepper coast of India. A European fleet had reached the Indies by sea. His cargo paid for the voyage many times over.

Portugal did not stop at trade. In 1510 Afonso de Albuquerque captured Goa and made it the capital of an empire on the water. A year later he took Malacca, the gateway to the spice islands. From then on the routes were a state secret. The winds, the harbours and the reefs were known only to Portuguese pilots. Their charts were worth more than gold.

The science of finding the way

Sailing out of sight of land was one problem. Knowing where you were was another. The answer lay in the sky.

For centuries every student in Europe learned the shape of the heavens from one small book: the Sphere of Johannes de Sacrobosco, written in Paris around 1230. It explained the circles of the heavens, the equator, the tropics and the horizon. Three hundred years later it was still being printed. An edition printed at Alcalá in 1526, with a commentary by the Spanish mathematician Pedro Ciruelo, is in the collection. So is an Italian version of 1550 by the Florentine friar Mauro. Ciruelo also wrote one of the first mathematical books printed in Spain.

To find their latitude, sailors measured the height of the sun at noon or of the Pole Star at night. For the sun they needed tables of its position through the year. Such tables went back to the astronomers of King Alfonso X of Castile in the thirteenth century. The Alphonsine Tables were still printed in Paris in 1553, ten years after Copernicus. The Portuguese pilots carried simpler tables, drawn from the work of the astronomer Abraham Zacuto.

Behind it all stood one ancient Greek: Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria. His Geography, written around 150 AD, taught how to place every town on earth by latitude and longitude. Around 1400 it was rediscovered in the West and translated into Latin. Then it was printed again and again, with maps. A woodcut map from the Strasbourg edition of 1522 and an Italian edition of 1597 to 1598 are in the collection.

In Leuven the physician and mathematician Gemma Frisius made the science practical. In 1533 he revised the Cosmographia of Peter Apian and added a short treatise of his own. It contains the first printed account of triangulation: measuring a whole country from a few angles and one known distance. That edition is in the collection, with its paper wheels, the volvelles, all still turning. So is his guide to astronomy and the use of the globe in the edition of 1553. One of Gemma's pupils was a young man called Gerard Mercator.

Measuring became a craft with its own books. In 1564 Cosimo Bartoli showed in Venice how to measure distances, heights and whole provinces with simple instruments, in Del modo di misurare.

The Dutch added something of their own: the sea atlas. In 1584 Lucas Jansz Waghenaer, a pilot from the little port of Enkhuizen, published his Spieghel der Zeevaert at Leiden. For the first time the charts of the coasts of western Europe were printed together in one book, with views of the coast as a sailor saw it from the sea and directions for entering every harbour. It was translated at once. In England it became The Mariners Mirrour of 1588, and for a century English sailors called any book of sea charts a waggoner. The first French edition, the Miroir de la Navigation of 1590, is in the collection.

Students met all of this in encyclopaedias such as Gregor Reisch's Margarita Philosophica, whose Strasbourg edition of 1512 carries a folding world map. And merchants learned to reckon with the new Arabic numerals, from booklets such as a Spanish arithmetic of 1566.

The pope's line through the world

Spain looked west instead. In 1492 Christopher Columbus sailed west for the Spanish crown. He found islands that he was sure lay off the coast of Asia.

Now two kingdoms were racing across the oceans, and someone had to decide who owned what. In 1493 Pope Alexander VI, himself a Spaniard, drew a line in the Atlantic. Everything west of it would belong to Spain. Portugal protested: the line left it too little room. So in 1494 the two kingdoms sat down in the Castilian town of Tordesillas and moved the line further west, to 370 leagues beyond the Cape Verde Islands. In 1506 another pope, Julius II, gave the treaty his blessing. The world had been divided in two. The rest of Europe was not asked.

That line explains why Brazil speaks Portuguese today. It also explains why every other seafaring nation felt free to ignore it.

Gold, God and a man on foot

In the west the Spaniards did not find spices. They found empires. Hernán Cortés took Mexico in 1521. Francisco Pizarro took Peru ten years later. Gold and then silver began to flow to Seville. The price was paid by the peoples of the Americas. Millions died of war, forced labour and diseases they had never known.

Some Spaniards saw what was happening and said so. In 1511 the Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos stood up in a church on Hispaniola and asked the colonists by what right they held the Indians in such cruel slavery. Among his listeners was a young settler and priest, Bartolomé de las Casas. He gave up his own Indians, became a Dominican himself and spent fifty years fighting for the native peoples. In 1550 he argued their case before the court of Charles V at Valladolid. In 1552 he published his Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, a short and terrible account of the destruction of the Indies.

His book travelled further than he could have imagined. In 1578 it appeared in Dutch, the first translation into any language. For the rebels fighting Philip II it was a gift. Here, written by a Spanish friar, was proof of Spanish cruelty. In 1598 Theodor de Bry in Frankfurt published it in Latin with engravings that no reader ever forgot.

And then there was Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. In 1527 he sailed with an expedition of some six hundred men to conquer Florida. It ended in shipwreck on the coast of what is now Texas. For eight years Cabeza de Vaca and three companions, among them the Moroccan slave Estevanico, walked across North America. They lived as slaves, as traders and as healers among the peoples they met. In 1536 they finally stumbled into a Spanish patrol in northern Mexico. The Spaniards hardly recognised them. Cabeza de Vaca told his story in his Relación of 1542. He had gone out to conquer. He came back pleading that the Indians should be won by kindness, not by the sword.

Germans were there too. Ulrich Schmidel, a soldier from Straubing in Bavaria, sailed in 1534 with Pedro de Mendoza to the Río de la Plata. He was present when Buenos Aires was founded in 1536, and he spent twenty years in the interior of South America. Hans Staden, a gunner from Hesse, was shipwrecked on the coast of Brazil. In 1554 he was captured by the Tupinambá. For nine months he lived among them, expecting every day to be killed and eaten, until a French ship took him away. His Warhaftige Historia of 1557 became one of the most famous travel books of the century. Both stories were printed in Frankfurt in 1567 in the second part of Sebastian Franck's Weltbuch, the first time Schmidel's account appeared in print.

Magellan goes around the world

The line of Tordesillas divided the Atlantic. But where did it run on the other side of the globe, among the spice islands? A Portuguese captain in Spanish service set out to find out.

In 1519 Ferdinand Magellan left Spain with five ships and about 250 men. He found a narrow, stormy passage at the bottom of South America, the strait that still bears his name. It is some 570 kilometres long, a maze of channels between mountains and glaciers. Fierce winds rush down from the peaks without warning, the tides run hard, and the water along the cliffs is often too deep to anchor. Magellan needed 38 days to get through. Later fleets sometimes took months. Then he sailed out onto an ocean so vast that it seemed to have no end. For more than three months there was no fresh food. The men ate rats, sawdust and the leather that protected the rigging.

Magellan was killed in a fight in the Philippines in 1521. He never saw home again. But his expedition went on. In September 1522 one battered ship, the Victoria, limped back into Spain under Juan Sebastián Elcano. Only eighteen men were left on board. They were the first people ever to sail around the world.

English pirates in the Pacific

The Spanish thought the Pacific was their private lake. The English proved them wrong.

In 1577 Francis Drake slipped out of Plymouth with five small ships and the secret support of Queen Elizabeth. He forced his way through the Strait of Magellan and appeared in the Pacific, where no Spaniard expected an enemy. Town after town on the coast of Chile and Peru was taken by surprise. In March 1579 he captured the treasure ship Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, nicknamed the Cacafuego. Her holds were full of silver and gold.

His ship was now so heavy with plunder that he did not dare go back the way he came. So he kept going west. He crossed the Pacific, called at the spice islands and sailed home around Africa. In 1580 the Golden Hind entered Plymouth. Drake was the first captain to sail his own ship all the way around the world. The queen knighted him on deck.

Eight years later Thomas Cavendish did it again. He too sailed through the Strait of Magellan and raided the coasts of Chile and Peru. Off the tip of California, in November 1587, he lay in wait for the great Manila galleon. The Santa Ana was coming from the Philippines, loaded with silk, spices and gold. Cavendish took her after a long fight. In September 1588 he sailed into Plymouth, so the story goes, with sails of silk.

The message was clear to everyone across the North Sea. The seas of Spain and Portugal could be entered. And their wealth could be taken.

The world on paper

Printing changed what people could know about the world. In 1493, the year after Columbus sailed, Hartmann Schedel published his Nuremberg Chronicle, a history of the world from the Creation onwards. Its map of the world was still the world of Ptolemy. There was no America on it. A complete copy is in the collection, together with the opening leaves of the Latin edition in contemporary colour.

Fifty years later Sebastian Münster in Basel tried to describe the whole world in a single book, his Cosmographia. He also edited the ancient geographers Solinus and Mela. His edition of 1543 contains a map of Asia that the map historian Philip Burden calls the earliest printed depiction of the north-west coast of America. His woodcut Tabula Germaniae is in the collection too.

Then came Antwerp, the richest city in the north. In 1570 the map dealer Abraham Ortelius published his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. It was the first atlas: for the first time maps of the whole world were bound together in one book, all in the same format, drawn from the best sources he could find. Only the word did not exist yet. He named those sources in a list at the front. The Theatrum became a bestseller in many languages, and in small pocket editions as well: the first French Epitome of 1588, a Latin Epitome of 1595 and a Spanish Theatro are in the collection. So is his map of England, drawn after the Welshman Humphrey Llwyd, Angliae Regni Florentissimi Nova Descriptio.

Ortelius's friend Gerard Mercator went further. In 1569 he published a world map on a new projection, on which a sailor could draw his course as a straight line. And it was Mercator who gave such a book its name. His collected maps appeared in 1595, the year after his death, as the Atlas sive Cosmographicae Meditationes, named after Atlas, the legendary king and astronomer of Mauretania. Ever since, a book of maps has been called an atlas. After his death Jodocus Hondius in Amsterdam bought his plates and published them again, as in the map of Cuba and the Antilles of 1606.

Spain did the opposite. In Seville the Casa de Contratación kept its master chart of the Indies under lock and key. Only in 1601 did the royal chronicler Antonio de Herrera publish a set of official maps of the Indies, in his Descripción de las Indias Occidentales. His map of the Caribbean from that first edition is in the collection. In 1622 an Amsterdam publisher printed Herrera's description in Dutch, bound together with the voyage of Le Maire, in the Spieghel der Australische navigatie. Once again a Spanish secret had found its way into a Dutch book.

The Amsterdam map trade now led the world. Willem Jansz Blaeu became chart maker to the VOC in 1633, and his son Joan followed him. In 1662 Joan published the Atlas Maior, the largest and most expensive book of the seventeenth century. Its England volume is in the collection.

From Lisbon to Amsterdam

Behind the maps and the adventures lay a slow shift of power and money across Europe.

Around 1500 the spices came into Lisbon. The silver of the Americas came into Seville, where the Spanish crown controlled all trade with the New World. But neither city became the great market of Europe. That role fell to Antwerp. The Portuguese king sent his pepper there to be sold, and South German bankers lent money there to the kings of Spain. For half a century Antwerp was the richest city in the north.

Then came the Dutch Revolt against Philip II of Spain. In 1585 Spanish troops captured Antwerp. The Protestants were given a choice: convert or leave. Tens of thousands left. The Dutch rebels closed the river Scheldt, and Antwerp's trade was cut off from the sea.

The refugees went north, to Amsterdam, Middelburg, Leiden and Haarlem. And they took everything with them. Merchants brought their money and their trading contacts. Printers and mapmakers brought their skills. Weavers, diamond cutters, sugar refiners and shipwrights brought their trades. Portuguese Jewish families fleeing the Inquisition settled in Amsterdam too, with their networks reaching from Lisbon to Brazil.

The war with Spain, which seemed like a disaster, turned out to be the making of Holland. In a few years Amsterdam had capital, knowledge, craftsmen and ambition all in one place. It was the perfect recipe for an enterprise. Two of the men who would open the road to the East, the minister Petrus Plancius and the merchant Isaac le Maire, were refugees from the south.

There was one more push. In 1580 the King of Spain also became King of Portugal. Lisbon, where Dutch merchants had always bought their pepper, now belonged to their enemy. If the Dutch wanted spices, they would have to fetch them themselves.

The spy in Goa

The Dutch had no Drake. What they had was patience, curiosity and a talent for getting hold of other people's secrets.

Jan Huygen van Linschoten came from Enkhuizen, the same small town as Waghenaer. As a boy of sixteen he went south to seek his fortune. In 1583 he sailed to Goa as secretary to the new Portuguese archbishop. For five years he lived at the very heart of Portugal's empire in the East. He listened, he watched and he wrote everything down. He described the markets, the cities and the people. Above all he recorded the sailing routes that the Portuguese kept so carefully to themselves.

When he came home, he published it all. His sailing directions, the Reys-gheschrift, appeared in 1595. A year later followed his great Itinerario, voyage ofte schipvaert naer Oost ofte Portugaels Indien, printed in Amsterdam by Cornelis Claesz in 1596. It described the East in words and engraved plates, and above all it showed the way there, coast by coast and season by season. The Itinerario became the handbook of every Dutch skipper who sailed east. Portugal's secret was out, in print, for anyone who could read Dutch. Soon it appeared in English too. The London edition of 1598, John Huighen van Linschoten his Discours of Voyages, is in the collection.

Two brothers in Lisbon

Then there were the De Houtman brothers from Gouda. Around 1592 a group of Amsterdam merchants sent Cornelis and Frederik to Lisbon. Their task was simple and dangerous: find out everything about the spice trade. Prices, routes, harbours. Which rulers in the East would trade, and which would fight.

In a city where the crown guarded every chart, two Dutchmen asking too many questions did not go unnoticed. According to the story told in Amsterdam ever since, Cornelis was arrested and thrown into prison. He only came free when the merchants who had sent him paid for his release.

Whatever happened exactly, he came home with his head full of the East. The merchants made him the commercial leader of the first Dutch fleet to the Indies. A spy had become a commander. It would not be the last surprise he gave them.

The minister with the maps

The third conspirator was the least likely of all: a church minister. Petrus Plancius had fled from Flanders to Amsterdam. Between his sermons he studied maps. He got hold of a set of Portuguese sea charts by the cartographer Bartolomeu Lasso. He drew and published maps of his own. And he taught the pilots of Amsterdam how to find their way across oceans they had never seen.

In 1594 nine Amsterdam merchants put up the money and founded the Compagnie van Verre, the Company of Far Lands. Everything was ready.

Four ships to the East

On 2 April 1595 four ships sailed out of Texel: the Mauritius, the Hollandia, the Amsterdam and the little Duyfken. About 250 men were on board. This was the Eerste Schipvaart, the first Dutch voyage to the East Indies.

It became a voyage of hunger, sickness and bad blood. Scurvy broke out long before the Cape of Good Hope. On Madagascar the fleet stopped for months to let the sick recover, but dozens died there. The officers quarrelled constantly. Houtman, clever but impossible, was at odds with half of his own fleet.

In June 1596, more than a year after leaving home, they reached Banten on Java, the great pepper port. Trade went badly. Houtman offended the local rulers and the Portuguese stirred up trouble. Before long Houtman and several of his men were being held prisoner ashore. The fleet had to pay to get them back.

On the way home so many men died that there were not enough sailors left for four ships. The Amsterdam was set on fire and abandoned. In August 1597 three ships came home with fewer than ninety men alive.

The cargo barely covered the costs. It did not matter. The Dutch had been to the Indies and back on their own. Every merchant on the Amsterdam quays understood what that meant. Within a year more than twenty ships were being fitted out for the East.

The brothers did not have long to enjoy their fame. Cornelis sailed east again in 1598 and was killed in Aceh on Sumatra in 1599. Frederik was held prisoner there for two years. He used the time well: he compiled the first Malay-Dutch dictionary. On the first voyage he had already helped to chart the stars of the southern sky. From those observations Plancius made twelve new constellations, and they are still on every star map today.

And the little Duyfken sailed on into history. In 1606 she became the first European ship known to reach the coast of Australia.

Barentsz and the ice, 1594 to 1597

Not everyone wanted to go the long way round Africa. Plancius believed there might be a shorter route to China, north of Russia. Willem Barentsz tried three times to find it. On his third voyage, in 1596, his ship was caught in the ice off Nova Zembla. The crew built a house from driftwood and the timbers of their ship, the Behouden Huys, and survived a full Arctic winter there. They spent weeks in complete darkness while the polar night lasted. They hunted polar bears and foxes and burned whatever they could find. In June 1597 they escaped in two open boats. Barentsz himself died on the way. Twelve men made it home. Nearly three centuries later, in 1871, a Norwegian skipper found the house on Nova Zembla, still full of their belongings. Many of the objects are now in the Rijksmuseum.

Van Neck: the first great profit, 1598 to 1599

The second Dutch voyage was a triumph. Jacob van Neck sailed with eight ships. He reached Banten, behaved with tact and bought pepper at good prices. In 1599 he was back in Amsterdam with four ships full of pepper, cloves and nutmeg. The church bells rang. The investors made a profit of several hundred percent. The account of this voyage, the Waerachtigh verhael van de tweede Schipvaerd, is in the collection.

Mahu and De Cordes: the voyage of misery, 1598 to 1600

Not every voyage ended in triumph. In June 1598 five ships left Goeree, near Rotterdam, under Jacques Mahu and Simon de Cordes. They planned to reach the Indies by the western route, through the Strait of Magellan.

Almost everything went wrong. Off the coast of Africa fever and scurvy broke out. Mahu himself died in September 1598, before the fleet had even left the Atlantic. De Cordes took command. The fleet arrived at the Strait of Magellan too late in the season. Storms and winter forced them to stay there for months. In the bitter cold more than a hundred men died. The survivors lived on mussels, seabirds and penguins, and fought with the local people on the shore.

When they finally reached the Pacific, a storm scattered the fleet. In November 1599 De Cordes went ashore on the coast of Chile to find food and water, near the island of Mocha. The local Mapuche had fought the Spanish for decades and probably took the Dutch for Spaniards. They attacked the landing party, and De Cordes was killed together with some two dozen of his men. One ship was captured by the Spanish at Valparaíso. Another reached the spice island of Tidore, where most of its crew were killed by the Portuguese. A third was lost at sea. The Geloof turned back through the strait and reached Holland in 1600 with only a handful of men.

And the Liefde? In April 1600 she drifted into a bay on the coast of Japan. Of her crew only about two dozen men were still alive, and few of them could stand. One of them was the English pilot William Adams. He became an adviser to the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu and lived in Japan for the rest of his life. It was the beginning of more than two centuries of Dutch contact with Japan. The story of this expedition was told by Barent Jansz Potgieter, and his Historisch ende wijdtloopigh verhael is in the collection.

Van Noort: the first Dutch voyage around the world, 1598 to 1601

Olivier van Noort sailed in the same year, also through the Strait of Magellan, with four ships and about 250 men. He fought the Spanish off Chile and off Manila, lost ships and men to battle and mutiny, and kept going west. In 1601 he came home to Rotterdam with one ship and some forty-five men. He was the first Dutchman to sail around the world.

The VOC, 1602

By then more than a dozen Dutch fleets had sailed east, sent by rival companies that were driving up prices in Asia and driving them down in Europe. In 1602 the States General forced them to join together. The result was the United East India Company, the VOC. It was given a monopoly on Dutch trade east of the Cape of Good Hope, the right to build forts, make treaties and wage war.

Spilbergen, Le Maire and Schouten, 1614 to 1617

Joris van Spilbergen sailed around the world for the VOC, through the Strait of Magellan. Off the coast of Peru he defeated a Spanish fleet. His journal, the Speculum orientalis occidentalisque Indiae navigationum, is in the collection, together with a later Dutch edition, the Oost en West Indische Voyagie.

At the same time Isaac le Maire, a merchant who had fallen out with the VOC, looked for a way around its monopoly. His son Jacob le Maire and the skipper Willem Schouten sailed from Hoorn in 1615. They did not use the Strait of Magellan. They went further south and found open water. They named the southern tip of the Americas after their home town: Cape Horn. When they reached Java, the VOC refused to believe they had found a new route, accused them of breaking its monopoly and confiscated their ship. Their account, the Spieghel der Australische navigatie, is in the collection.

The Nassau fleet, 1623 to 1626

In 1623 a large Dutch war fleet under Jacques L'Hermite sailed around Cape Horn to attack the Spanish in Peru. The attack on Lima failed and L'Hermite died off the coast of Peru, but the fleet went on across the Pacific and completed another voyage around the world. Its journal, the Journael van de Nassausche vloot, is in the collection.

The Batavia, 1629

Some voyages ended in horror. In June 1629 the VOC ship Batavia ran onto a reef off the west coast of Australia. Most of the passengers and crew reached a group of small islands. The commander sailed off in an open boat to fetch help from Java. While he was away, one of the merchants, Jeronimus Cornelisz, seized power on the islands. He and his followers murdered more than a hundred men, women and children. When the rescue ship finally arrived, the murderers were tried and hanged.

Life on board

After the first voyages, sailing to the East became a regular business. In the seventeenth century alone the VOC sent around 1,700 ships to Asia. Over its whole history, from 1602 to 1795, it sent more than 4,700. Nearly a million people sailed east on its ships. Only about one in three of them ever came home. Many died on the voyage or in Asia, others stayed and made a life there. The ships themselves usually did arrive: only a few percent were lost at sea.

A voyage from Texel to Batavia took about eight months. A large ship carried two to three hundred people: sailors, soldiers, craftsmen and a few passengers. Many were young men from Germany and Scandinavia who signed on because they had no other work.

Death sailed with them. On an average voyage somewhere between one in twenty and one in ten died before they reached Asia. On a bad voyage it could be one in three. Scurvy was the great killer, caused by months without fresh fruit or vegetables. Typhus and dysentery spread quickly below deck, where men slept packed together. Others died of fevers caught on tropical coasts, of accidents in the rigging, or in storms and shipwrecks.

Food was the constant worry. The ships carried ship's biscuit, salted meat, dried peas and beer or water that soon went bad. Fresh food had to be found along the way. That meant going ashore on unknown coasts, often with sick and weakened crews. In the early years the Dutch stopped at Madagascar, Mauritius, Saint Helena and the Cape. They traded iron, cloth and beads for cattle, fruit and water. Sometimes the meetings with the local people were friendly. Sometimes they ended in fights and deaths on both sides. In 1652 the VOC founded a permanent station at the Cape of Good Hope, simply to grow vegetables and keep cattle for its passing ships.

The road that was no longer secret

In little more than a generation the secret that Portugal had guarded for a century passed into Dutch hands, and with it the trade of half the world. It was won by spies and pirates, by mapmakers and merchants, and by thousands of sailors who never came home.

Their stories were written down and printed, and two great collections gathered them together.

The first was made in Venice. Giovanni Battista Ramusio was a senior civil servant of the Venetian republic and from 1533 secretary of its feared Council of Ten. Venice had grown rich on the spice trade through the Levant, and the Portuguese route around Africa threatened it directly. Ramusio collected every account of travel he could find: Marco Polo, Leo Africanus, Pigafetta's journal of Magellan's voyage, the Portuguese reports from India. He translated them into Italian and published them in three volumes, the Navigationi et viaggi, from 1550 onwards. It was the first great collection of voyages, and for knowledge of the world it was as much an intelligence report as a book.

The second was made in Frankfurt. Theodor de Bry was a goldsmith and engraver from Liège, a Protestant who had fled the Spanish Netherlands. In 1590 he began a series of illustrated travel books, first on America and later, continued by his sons, on the East Indies. Linschoten, the Dutch voyages and Las Casas all appeared in it, in Latin and German, with copper engravings that shaped Europe's image of distant peoples for two centuries. The series ran until 1634. A complete set is in the collection.

That is where the adventure can still be read today.