Van Linschoten and the Itinerario: The Book That Broke a Monopoly

How a Dutch clerk in Goa copied Portugal's deepest secret and opened the sea road to the East

Jan Huygen van Linschoten was born around 1563 in Haarlem, the son of an innkeeper, and grew up in Enkhuizen, a Zuiderzee town hungry for the sea. Ambitious and observant, he left for the Iberian Peninsula as a teenager, and in 1583 worked his way into one of the most sensitive posts in the world: secretary to the newly appointed Portuguese Archbishop of Goa, the capital of Portugal's eastern empire.

For Portugal, the routes to the Indies were a state secret. The sailing directions, the depths and currents, the safe harbours and the hidden reefs, this knowledge was the foundation of a monopoly worth more than gold, and guarding it was a matter of national survival. Pilots' rutters were closely held; to copy them was treason.

Van Linschoten spent some five years in Goa watching, listening and quietly copying. He transcribed Portuguese charts and sailing instructions, recorded the trade of every port from Mozambique to Japan, noted which goods sold where and at what price, and absorbed the navigational secrets that Lisbon had spent a century accumulating.

Back in the Netherlands, he published it all. The Itinerario: Voyage ofte Schipvaert van Jan Huygen van Linschoten naer Oost ofte Portugaels Indien appeared in Amsterdam in 1596, printed by Cornelis Claesz, with maps and richly engraved plates of the peoples, ports and natural wonders of the East. In a single stroke, the most jealously guarded commercial intelligence on earth became a printed book that any Dutch merchant could buy.

The effect was immediate and historic. Armed with Van Linschoten's directions, the first Dutch fleets sailed for Asia; within a few years the United Dutch East India Company, the VOC, was founded in 1602, and the Portuguese monopoly was broken forever. Few books in history have so directly redrawn the balance of world power. It is, quite literally, the key to the East, and it sits at the very centre of our collecting focus.

Van Linschoten was not only a spy with a pen. He also sailed north, joining the expeditions of Willem Barentsz in 1594 and 1595 in search of a northeast passage to Asia, voyages of ice and endurance that he later described in print. He died in Enkhuizen in 1611, a town father and a celebrated author.

To hold the Itinerario is to hold the book that opened the world's richest sea road, and changed the course of the seventeenth century.