Introduction: From Sailmaker to Celebrity

Abstract

In 1676, under the name of Jan Janszoon Struys (c.1629–94), Drie aanmerkelijke en seer rampspoedige Reysen (The perillous and most unhappy voyages of John Struys), an autobiographical travelogue, appeared in Amsterdam.² Published by Jacob van Meurs (1617–80) and Johannes van Someren (d. 1678), Reysen became a bestseller and made out of Struys, a mere sailmaker at the time of its publication, a veritable celebrity.³ The work went through a plethora of full and abridged editions in Dutch, French, German, English and Russian. Struys’s book was known to Voltaire, and Reysen was mined by the Enlightenment naturalist Count Buffon. In 1879, Petr Iurchenko counted 22 printed versions of Struys’s work in the Russian Imperial Public Library in St Petersburg, half of which were in French.⁴ But by the time scholars such as Iurchenko ‘discovered’ the Struys text as a source for Russian history, the Western European reader had lost interest in crudely organized adventure tales such as Struys’s.⁵

De meeste reysigers, die derwaerts heen trecken, zijn gemeenlijck lieden, die het oogh meerder op eenigh gewin, als op een naeukeurige beschrijvingh van eenige plaets slaen…

(Most travellers who travel there are commonly people who rather focus on personal profit than on a precise description of a place…)

Jan Claesz ten Hoorn, Amsterdam bookseller, 1677¹