We should thank Kees for telling us the tale in this fascinating account.īy the way, Kees is also editor of The Historian, a journal of popular history that you should really read. It was in such books that Europeans learned about the "discoveries," and by such books that modern publishing was born. The results were part fact, part fiction, and all international bestseller. They assigned him a ghost writer who listened to Struys' stories and, where he found them wanting, embellished them with material purloined from other travel books. Of course Stuys could neither read nor write, but that didn't stand in the way of the publishers. He went everywhere, did everything, and when he got back from his adventures he was asked by some profit-seeking Dutch publishers to "contribute" his tales to a book about his travels. Sturys was an illiterate, itinerant, indefatigable Dutch sail maker. A Seventeenth-Century Dutch Globetrotter (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008). And after they made port at home, they often "wrote" books about their travels for readers eager to hear about what was "out there"-or at least what these travelers said was "out there." Take the subject of Kees Boterbloem new book The Fiction and Reality of Jan Struys. But the "Age of Discovery" continued well into the seventeenth century as Europeans continued to travel the globe in search of riches, fame and adventure. You know, Columbus, Magellan and all that. When we speak of the "Age of Discovery," we usually mean the later fifteenth and sixteenth century.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |