The Fiction and Reality of Jan Struys : A Seventeenth-Century Dutch Globetrotter

Dutch Sailmaker and sailor Jan Struys' (c.1629-c.1694) account of his various overseas travels became a bestseller after its first publication in Amsterdam in 1676, and was later translated into English, French, German and Russian. This new book depicts the story of its author's life as well as the first singular analysis of the Struys text. Front Matter....Pages i-vi Introduction: From Sailmaker to Celebrity....Pages 1-6 Struys’s Youth and Reysen’s First Journey....Pages 7-16 The Second Voyage....Pages 17-28 The Dutch Republic....Pages 29-41 The Dutch in Muscovy....Pages 42-52 Muscovy....Pages 53-63 In the Tsar’s Service....Pages 64-72 Reysen’s Muscovy and Struys’s Muscovy....Pages 73-87 The Volga Delta and the Oryol’s Demise....Pages 88-103 A Dutch Slave in Asia....Pages 104-121 Liberation....Pages 122-134 Reysen’s Readers....Pages 135-140 Reysen’s Creation and its Creators....Pages 141-149 Genre and the Test of Time....Pages 150-163 ‘Any Soil is the Fatherland for a Courageous Man’....Pages 164-171 Conclusion....Pages 172-180 Back Matter....Pages 181-315 The Fiction and Reality of Jan Struys depicts the life of a Dutch seventeenth-century sailmaker, the alleged author of a book of breathtaking overseas travels, which became a bestseller across Western Europe after its first publication in Amsterdam in 1676, and is a key source for Russian and Iranian history. With this first comprehensive investigation of this book and its author, Kees Boterbloem provides unique insight into the precociously modern mindset of the Dutch, early capitalism, the European view of non-European cultures, Russia's modernization, and the relation between Islam and Christianity in the seventeenth century