Voyages to the East Indies (Christopher Fryke Christopher Schweitzer)

Voyages to the East Indies: 1680 to 1686/1676 to 1683 by Christopher Fryke and Christopher Schweitzer was first published in 1700. Both were minor employees of the Dutch East India Company; one a surgeon and the other who volunteered to be a ship's steward. Engaged for the most part in the humdrum routine of trade, administration and police in the Eastern seas and islands, they present us with a lively picture of everyday life in the great overseas empire of the seventeenth century Netherlands. Shrewd and a keen eye for everything new and strange, their accounts of life on board, of battles and shipwrecks, of seaports from Colombo to Nagasaki, of Cape Hottentots, Sinhalese pearl fishers, Javanese villagers are vivid and detailed. This is an English translation from the Dutch.

Chistopher Fryke had a varied and adventurous career. Though he was a surgeon, his chief desire was to travel and see strange countries, for which he came to Amsterdam in the hope of undertaking some voyage to the East Indies as a surgeon. He served as a surgeon in the Tomato and later Europa in the course of which he contrived to visit every centre of Dutch trade in Asia.

Christopher Schweitzer of Wurtenberg in Germany being keen on voyages volunteered for the Dutch East India Company's service as a steward, to later obtain promotion and a wide variety of employment. He was later made Secretary or Overseer of the clerks, at the East India House. Here he remained till the expiration of his contract.

OLD books of voyages and travels do not necessarily depend for their interest on the historical importance of the voyage, or the celebrity of the traveller. A humble trader or seaman, going about his daily business, will often preserve for us a hundred details of the life aboard ship and in the ports he visited, that would have been passed over silently by the envoy intent on great affairs, or the man of letters straining after the picturesque. It is through the impressions made on the mind of the ordinary man—provided he had the wit to observe accurately and record clearly—that we can best recapture a picture of the seven seas and the lands surrounding them, as they appeared to our hard-living, hard-fighting, hard-trading ancestors.

Let it not, then, be counted against Mr. Christopher Frick and Mr. Christopher Schweitzer, here introduced to readers of the " Seafarers' Library," that neither of them was a man of mark, nor took any prominent part in great events. They were both minor employees of the Dutch East India Company ; the one a surgeon, the other a volunteer who went out as a ship's steward, and filled various sub-ordinate posts, ashore and afloat, in the East Indies. They were engaged, for the most part, in the humdrum routine of trade, administration, and police in Eastern Seas and islands. For this very reason, they present us with a livelier picture of everyday life in the great overseas Empire of the seventeenth century Netherlands, than if they had borne heavier responsibilities and been concerned with wider issues.

Modest as was their station, Frick and Schweitzer were shrewd, observant men, keenly interested in everything new and strange, and their accounts of life on board a Dutch East Indiaman, of battles and shipwrecks, of seaports from Colombo to Nagasaki, of Cape Hottentots, Chinese traders, Cingalese pearl fishers, and Javanese villagers, are vivid, detailed and trustworthy. Their good fortune took them to seas and countries of which we have not, at their date, too many accounts, and took them there at a time of great historical interest.