houses" they might participate with him in the gratification and
instruction to be derived fiom looking upon a world then so strange, and
for Europeans still so new. He described the manners and customs, the
laws, the religions, the social and political institutions, of the
ancient races who dwelt in either peninsula of India. He studied the
natural history, the botany, the geography of all the regions which he
visited. Especially the products which formed the material of a great
traffic; the system of culture, the means of transportation, and the
course of commerce, were examined by him with minuteness, accuracy, and
breadth of vision. He was neither a trader nor a sailor, but a man of
letters, a scientific and professional traveller. But it was obvious
when he returned, rich with the spoils of oriental study during thirteen
years of life, that the results of his researches were worthy of a wider
circulation than that which he had originally contemplated. His work was
given to the public in the year 1596, and was studied with avidity not
only by men of science but by merchants and seafarers. He also added to
the record of his Indian experiences a practical manual for navigators.
He described the course of the voyage from Lisbon to the East, the
currents, the trade-winds and monsoons, the harbours, the islands, the
shoals, the sunken rocks and dangerous quicksands, and he accompanied
his work with various maps and charts, both general and special, of land
and water, rarely delineated before his day, as well as by various
astronomical and mathematical calculations. Already a countryman of
his own, Wagenaar of Zeeland, had laid the mariners of the world under
special obligation by a manual which came into such universal use that
for centuries afterwards the sailors of England and of other countries
called their indispensable 'vade-mecum' a Wagenaar. But in that text-
book but little information was afforded to eastern voyagers, because,
before the enterprise of Linschoten, little was known of the Orient
except to the Portuguese and Spaniards, by whom nothing was communicated.