Peter Mundy, 1634

PRESCRIBED TEXT

The earliest surviving description of Tradescant’s Ark, 1634

Image 1-3.  Pages from the diary of Peter Mundy, Bodleian Library, MS. Rawlinson A 315, fols. 1, 247v., 108, resp.

Peter Mundy, (b. c. 1596, d. in or after 1667), the son of a pilchard merchant from Cornwall, became one of the best travelled diarists of the mid seventeenth century.  After learning French in Gascony, visiting English factories throughout the Mediterranean, and working for four years as a factor in Spain and another four in Constantinople, he was employed from 1627 by the East India Company, visiting Surat and the court of the Mughal emperor in Agra.  After a brief return to England, he again headed east on the Royall Mary in April 1636, trading in the South China Sea.  Returning home again in December 1638, he spent much of the period 1639 to 1648 travelling in the Baltic region, and visited India again in 1655-6.  For a brief summary of his travels, see Richard Raiswell in ODNB.

Diary and literature. Between 1647 and 1655, Mundy assembled the notes and drawings recorded on his travels into a chronological account of his voyages within a huge folio volume.  Although evidently intended for publication, the work was not published until the twentieth century in The Travels of Peter Mundy in Europe and Asia, 1608–1667, ed. R. C. Temple and L. M. Anstey, 5 vols. in 6 [Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser., 17, 35, 45–6, 55, 78] (Cambridge, 1907–36), available on archive.org.  Extracts from it have more recently appear as The Travels of Peter Mundy, ed. J. Keast (Redruth, 1984). R. E. Pritchard, Peter Mundy: Merchant Adventurer (Oxford, 2011) intersperses lengthy extracts and drawings from the diary with maps and interstitial commentary. 

Image 1 is a map on which Mundy marked out the extent of his travels, which he reckoned at over 100,000 miles.  Image 2 provides a glimpse of his worldview: although dated London, February 1654, it copies a French text juxtaposing the geocentric cosmologies of ‘Aristotle’ on the left and ‘Ticho Brahe, excellent Mathematicien’ on the right.

Prescribed text. While in London between voyages in 1634, Mundy paid a visit to Tradescant’s Ark in Lambeth.  The account in his diary is the earliest surviving description of the Tradescant collection in its original setting.  Image 3 is the relevant page of his a diary.  The text was published with minimal annotations in Travels of Peter Mundy, vol. III, pt. 1, ed. Temple (1919), pp. 3-4. The text is reproduced with far more detailed annotations on The Digital Ark (Brent Nelson editor, Jon deTombe OCR and transcript proofing).  With the permission of the editor, Karen Hollewand has reformatted the text and annotations in a pdf available on Canvas.

Credits: Howard Hotson (October 2016).