Thirty Years on the Seas of the Indies, Volume II

After Africa and Arabia, the Scottish captain Alexander Hamilton continues on his way and follows the coasts of India, from Goa to the Strait of Malacca. Thirty years at sea have sharpened his eye: nothing surprises him any longer, and yet everything remains to be told.Here is Portuguese Goa and its fallen pride, the tiger forests of Canara where widows are burned upon pyres, the principalities of Malabar and the mighty Samorin of Calicut. Here is Cochin and its Jewish community, Ceylon and its Adam’s Bridge, the Coromandel coast where the diamonds of Golconda lie close by the gallows of Fort St George. The narrative then pushes eastward: the Ganges delta and feverish Calcutta, the great temple of Jagannath whose procession chariot crushes its devotees, the fall of Shah Shuja, brother of Aurangzeb, hunted down as far as the kingdom of Arakan.Then comes the fallen kingdom of Pegu and its King of the White Elephant, the mendicant monks and the giant rockets offered to the gods, the massacre of the English at Mergui, the shipwrecks of the Nicobar Islands, and finally Malacca, the lock upon the strait, where a case of witchcraft occupies the closing pages of the volume.A merchant free of any company, Hamilton saw everything with his own eyes: the castes and the creeds, the trading-post wars, the shipwrecks and the betrayals. From his quarterdeck, he paints the portrait of an Indian Ocean where declining Portuguese, conquering Dutch, and rival companies fight over ports, routes, and cargoes, without guessing at the empire already taking shape.This second volume covers the years in which the political map of maritime Asia is redrawn: the Dutch complete their ousting of the Portuguese from Ceylon and Cochin, the emperor Aurangzeb dies in 1707 after having reigned over the height of the Great Mughal, and the still-fragile English trading posts of the Coromandel coast and Bengal hold their ground against local nabobs. A firsthand witness rather than an armchair scholar, Hamilton reports the customs of courts, the prices of markets, and the schemes of governors with a frankness that makes his account a primary source on Asia at the turn of the eighteenth century.The first complete modern rewriting for today’s reader, making this account readable without betraying anything of the original. Original illustrations and redrawn maps bring the route to life, while a set of reference materials (glossary, chronology, index, further reading, editor’s note, afterword) and selected passages from the original text accompany the reading.