Volume 3, Number 8 · December 3, 1964
Merchants and Pirates
By J.H. Elliott
My Voyage Around the World
by Francesco Carletti, translated by Herbert Weinstock
Pantheon, 270 pp., $5.00
Elizabethan Privateering
by K.R. Andrews
Cambridge, 297 pp., $7.50
Francesco Carletti was a Florentine merchant who set out from Seville in 1594 on a short slave-trading expedition which turned into an eight-year round-the-world tour. What prompted the change of plan? Carletti himself gives the answer in an account of his travels which now appears in a serviceable, if ungainly, English translation. He extended his trip, he explains in his brisk, matter-of-fact manner, 'partly out of curiosity to see the world and partly because of our interest in business.' In the event, he displays considerable business acumen, and a curiosity which, although lively, is narrow in its range and limited in its implications. Here, after all, is one of the first Europeans to travel as a passenger all round the globe. He visited not only Mexico and Peru, but also exotic eastern regions on which few Europeans had set eyes—Japan, Macao, Malacca, and Goa. Yet the resulting account of his travels is in many ways unrevealing and remarkably unexotic.
Review, 1362 words
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