Peter Mundy, Merchant Adventurer

Peter Mundy was a seventeenth-century merchant trader who spent most of his life travelling the world. Even by the standards of his own day, his journeys to Istanbul, India, China, Danzig (Gdansk), Russia, and the Arctic were remarkable. His account of these travels, illustrated with his own lively drawings of the strange people and animals he met, survives in a single manuscript. This edited selection provides a fascinating, vivid account of early modern lives and times in all their barbarity and brilliance. It includes encounters with the Ottoman, Mughal, Chinese, and Russian empires and Mundy's eyewitness accounts of the first contact between Britain and China, exhausting journeys through India, and events in London following Charles II's coronation in 1661. This edition is from the seventeenth-century manuscript of the Travels of Peter Mundy, first edited by Sir Richard Carnac in five volumes for the Hakluyt Society, 1905-36. Historians and lovers of travel literature alike will find this extraordinary account of one man's adventures across the globe a compelling read and an invaluable resource.