Peter Mundy
Peter Mundy (floruit 1600-1667) was an English traveller.
Life
He came from Penryn in Cornwall. In 1609 he accompanied his father[1] to Rouen, and was then sent to Gascony to learn French. In May 1611 he went as a cabin-boy in a merchant ship, and gradually rose in life until he became of independent circumstances.
He visited Constantinople, returning to London overland, and afterwards made a journey to Spain. On 6 March 1628 he left Blackwall for Surat, where he arrived on 30 September 1628. In November 1630 he travelled to Agra while in the employ of the East India Company, and remained there until 17 December 1631, when he proceeded to Puttana on the borders of Bengal. He witnessed the construction of the Taj Mahal writing that "the building is begun and goes on with excessive labour and cost, gold and silver being used like common metal". He returned to Agra and Surat, and leaving the latter in February 1634, arrived off Dover on 9 September 1634. This portion of his travels is contained in the Harleian MS. 2286, and in the Addit. MSS. 19278-80.
He went on further voyages to India, China, and Japan, when he started from the Downs on 14 April 1636. His journals record his being served "Chaa" or tea by the Chinese. The fleet of four ships and two pinnaces were sent out by Sir William Courten, and Mundy seems to have been employed as a factor. His journals end somewhat abruptly, but a manuscript in the Rawlinson collection at the Bodleian Library continues the narrative of his life, including journeys to Denmark, Prussia, and Russia, which lasted from 1639 to 1648. Mundy himself made the drawings for the volume and traced his routes in red on the maps of Hondius. In 1663 he declared his travelling days over and retired to Falmouth, his journals record his own calculation of the distance he had travelled in his many voyages as 100,833 and5/8th miles. His manuscripts were lost for nearly 300 years and then published by the Hakluyt Society.
Philip Marsden's history of Falmouth, The Levelling Sea, published in 2011, provides a brief account of Peter Mundy's life-pages 131-137.
He also left the earliest description of the Musaeum Tradescantianum.[2]
Character
"It is rare to find a man so representative of his period as was Peter Mundy. In an age when curiosity was the outstanding characteristic of intelligent Englishmen, curiosity was the ruling passion of this life. ... His insatiable appetite for information, his eye for detail, his desire for accuracy, would have made him in modern times a first-rate scientist. ... True to his period, also, was his heartlessness ... he was more interested in the appearances of things than their implications in the lives of human beings. ... But if he was unfeeling, he was by no means insensitive; each strange item in the surprising world he had inherited is described with a spontaneous brilliance seldom to be found in modern writing."[3]
Notes
- ^ "His father was engaged in 'the pilchard business'." Carrington, Dorothy (1949) The Traveller's Eye. London: Pilot Press; p. 178
- ^ http://www.ashmolean.org/ash/amulets/tradescant/tradescant03.html
- ^ Carrington, Dorothy (1949) The Traveller's Eye. London: Pilot Press; p. 178-79
References
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: "Mundy, Peter". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.
