Histoire de la Navigation de Jean Hugues de Linschot Hollandois, aux Indes Orientales.

Contenant diverses descriptions des lieux jusques à présent descouverts par les Portugais: observations des Coustumes & singularitez de delà, & autres declarations … … Troisieme édition, augmentée. Amsterdam: Evert Cloppenburgh, 1638. Three parts in one volume, folio (310 x 200 mm), contemporary mottled calf (rubbed), spine in compartments with ornate gilt decoration and lettering; edges speckled red; three letterpress titles (two with elaborate engraved allegorical borders, the third with engraved vignette); first part with portrait of Linschoten to verso of index leaf, 7 folding engraved maps and 28 engraved plates and views by Johann and Baptiste ven Doetecom (after Linschoten), folding or double-page and mounted on guards; second part Le Grand Routier de Mer with 6 folding maps and 3 double-page or folding plates; third part Description de l’Amerique; in total 44 maps and views engraved by or after P. Plancius, A. F. van Langren, H. F. van Langren or the van Deutecom brothers; the first title bears the early ownership signature Larochefoucauld and the stamp of the Bibliothèque du Château de La Roche-Guyon; contents clean and fresh, a superb example.

The La Roche-Guyon copy of the desirable third French edition of the most comprehensive illustrated travelogue of the seventeenth century. In the opinion of Lach it is ‘the most important of the firsthand accounts published independently of the great travel collections’. Reprinted from the Amsterdam edition of 1619, with the magnificent plates and maps in folio format, and with a commentary by Bernardus Paludanus.

Linschoten was born in Delft in 1563. Between 1583 and 1589 he travelled to Goa, where he was employed as a clerk, and in 1594-95 he accompanied Barents on his second voyage to the Kara Sea. His work – first published in Dutch in Amsterdam, 1595-1596 – draws from Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish sources, although it is also based to some extent on his own experiences. Not subject to the strict censorship that would have been accorded to Spanish or Portuguese publications, it contains accounts full of practical intelligence on both the West and East Indies, and in particular of Goa. The maps include van Langren’s maps of the East Indies and South America, and the double-hemispherical mappe-monde of Plancius (dated 1594).

The first books devoted to East Africa and the East Indies, as far as Japan. According to Church, a copy of Histoire de la Navigation was given to every ship making the voyage from Holland to India – unsurprisingly, since it contained highly detailed navigational instructions for this voyage, as well as for the coasts and islands further east. The second book deals with navigation along the coasts of West Africa, the Cape of Good Hope to Arabia, and in the New World. The third book provides an account of the New World: Florida, the Caribbean and Brazil.

Sabin 41373; JCB II, 271; Palau 138584; Alden 638.67

See Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, volume 1, pp. 196-204, 482-90

Provenance: Sotheby’s, Paris, 8 December 1987, Bibliothèque du Château de La Roche-Guyon, provenant de la Succession de Gilbert de La Rochefoucauld, Duc de La Roche-Guyon, lot 680.