Colonial history: Meet François Pyrard of France, who visited India well before the French traders

On a chilly afternoon in February 1611, the town of Laval, a prosperous mercantile conurbation on the River Mayenne in northwest France, welcomed home a long-lost son. At first, little fanfare greeted his return. François Pyrard was still young, in his early thirties, but he looked much older, his frame stooped and his features worn by a decade of absence. Only as he climbed the winding steps of the medieval quarter towards his family home, carrying a single sack of belongings, did he begin to attract attention, followed by cries of recognition.

Ten years earlier, the merchants of Laval had collaborated with their peers in the nearby towns of Vitré and Saint-Malo to organise a trading expedition to the Indes orientales (East Indies), envisaged vaguely as the world east of the Cape of Good Hope. Two ships had set off together from Saint-Malo in May 1601, the Croissant and the Corbin, in the second of which Pyrard had found employment as a clerk. The voyage started to go wrong almost from the start. Just nine or ten leagues out from the Brittany coast, the Corbin’s foremast broke. It was hastily repaired and the ships pushed on, passing the Canary Islands and following the coastline of western Africa southwards.

In August the equator was crossed, but here the expedition’s problems really began. Attempting to procure fresh water and other provisions from the Portuguese-held island of Annobón, off the coast of Equatorial Guinea, a quarrel broke out and the Corbin’s lieutenant was killed. The episode was a warning about the kind of reception that the French could expect in attempting to challenge Portuguese control of maritime trading routes between Asia, Africa and Europe.

As the ships got closer to the tip of Africa, shortages of supplies and sickness on board became critical, with scurvy rife. They passed the Cape of Good Hope in December, before a violent storm forced the expedition to find refuge on Madagascar, beyond the reach of the Portuguese. Three months were spent on the island gathering supplies from the local Malagasy population and undertaking repairs before the two ships set sail again, headed for India.

At first, progress was encouraging, as favourable monsoon winds carried the ships across the western Indian Ocean towards the Indian peninsula. Before long, however, the Corbin – the smaller of the two vessels at just 200 tonnes – lost sight of its larger protector. Negotiating a passage through the Maldives archipelago, it struck a reef and was fatally damaged. Pyrard was one of just forty survivors who found themselves shipwrecked on the tiny Maldives island of Fuladú.

As uninvited guests in the kingdom of the Sultan of the Maldives, Pyrard and his surviving shipmates were imprisoned in the royal capital of Malé. Gradually he gained the Sultan’s favour and, after acquiring a working knowledge of the local language, travelled around the archipelago as a royal adviser. Pyrard would spend a total of five years in the Sultan’s service, treated well but prohibited from leaving, before obtaining his liberty in the most unexpected circumstances.

In February 1607, the Maldives were attacked by the forces of the ruler of Chittagong, several thousand nautical miles away across the Bay of Bengal. The Sultan was slain and his palace pillaged. Mistaken for a Portuguese, Pyrard was stripped naked and almost killed before managing to convince his new captors that he issued from less belligerent, more likeable European stock. The Frenchman was offered a place on the ships returning to Bengal and granted his freedom on arrival.

More than six years after setting sail from France, Pyrard was now finally on Indian soil, albeit in a strange deltaic region beyond the eastern frontiers of the Mughal Empire, little known to other Europeans. After briefly exploring the country around Chittagong, he found passage on an Asian merchant vessel crossing the Bay of Bengal and skirting the Indian peninsula to arrive on the Malabar Coast.

The small port of Muttungal, where he disembarked, lay in the territories of the Zamorin of Calicut, who over the preceding decades had been locked in an increasingly violent struggle to prevent the Portuguese stationed at Goa, to the north, and Cochin, to the south, from establishing control over his entire coastline. Pyrard journeyed on foot through the Zamorin’s kingdom to his court at Calicut, where he was granted an interview with the ruler. He would spend the next eight months enjoying the hospitality on offer in the royal residence.

By early 1608, Pyrard had decided that it was time to return to France. In February that year he bid farewell to the Zamorin and headed for Cochin, hopeful of finding a ship returning to Europe. To enter Portuguese territories was a risk, however, the authorities of the Estado da India, the Portuguese regime in the East, were often hostile towards other Europeans in the region.

No sooner had Pyrard left Calicut than he was ambushed and shipped as a prisoner to Cochin. The Frenchman feared the worst, believing that he would be hanged in the town square, a fate that had recently been suffered by several Dutchmen. The charges levelled against him were of being a spy and, even worse, a “Lutherano” (Protestant). After two months’ imprisonment at Cochin, he was transported to Goa where, in the state-of-the-art Portuguese hospital, his deteriorating health began to recover. Pyrard was saved from another spell in prison by the intervention of a sympathetic Jesuit priest, but this time his freedom came at a cost: like many European prisoners of the Estado, he was forced into military service, travelling on Portuguese warships to Ceylon and Southeast Asia.

These expeditions complete, Pyrard secured an audience with the Viceroy of Goa and was unexpectedly granted permission to return to Europe. He left India for the final time in January 1610 but, like his passage out, his journey home would prove anything but straightforward. The ship on which he was travelling was damaged off the coast of Saint Helena in the southern Atlantic Ocean and diverted unexpectedly to Brazil, where the Portuguese had also extended their reach. From Salvador, a Flemish merchant vessel brought Pyrard back to Europe. Fulfilling a vow made when his circumstances looked most bleak, he set out directly from Lisbon on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela to thank the Almighty for his safe return to the old continent, before finally returning to Laval.

Any hopes that the Frenchman may have had of a quiet retirement in his hometown would rapidly be dashed, however. To a monarchy waking up to the possibilities of enrichment through maritime trade, Pyrard’s return was an opportunity not to be missed.

Several years earlier, an account had been published of the voyage of the Croissant, which – unlike its partner, the Corbin had made it successfully back to Europe loaded with a cargo of pepper and other spices from Sumatra. Pyrard’s experiences in the Indian Ocean were far more extensive, however. What was more, here was a Frenchman with first-hand experience of India itself. Summoned to Paris, he spent the summer and autumn of 1611 recounting his travels to counsellors of Louis XIII and responding to their questions. A first narrative of his adventures was published late that year, with an enlarged and substantially re-written second edition following in 1615. Curiosity about India and the East extended to Parisian high society, where Pyrard acquired a degree of celebrity before his death in 1621.

Describing his travels, Pyrard was encouraged to provide as much information as possible about the geography, people and political regimes that he had encountered. After an extensive description of the Maldive kingdom, the narrative progressed to the Indian subcontinent. “The most powerful king in all the Indies”, Pyrard explained, was the Mughal Emperor, whose empire extended from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal across most of northern and central India. The emperor, he continued, had capitals at Delhi, Agra and Lahore and no less than 30,000 elephants. In the south, meanwhile, the Zamorin of Calicut was “one of the greatest and richest princes of India”, with an army of 150,000 men. His capital possessed some of the finest buildings imaginable, among them a sumptuous royal palace and a great temple. Systems for the collection of taxes and customs duties were described in detail. Law and order, meanwhile, were no problem: in the Zamorin’s lands, Pyrard noted, “everyone goes about in perfect safety”. The European cliché of the uncivilised Indian was far from the mark, he added: “I have never seen men of wit so fine and polished as are these Indians: they have nothing barbarous or savage about them, as we are apt to suppose.”

The diverse populations that Pyrard had observed in India, each with their own particular social and religious practices, were briefly outlined in his text. On the Malabar Coast, he explained, the descendants of Arab Muslim traders lived side by side with prosperous Brahmin families and “gentiles” (Hindus) of other castes. Marriages and religious festivals were celebrated with exuberance; bathing in the sacred tanks attached to local temples was an everyday practice. To a Frenchman who had grown up with the Wars of Religion and was familiar with the horrors of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, the degree of religious tolerance and open-mindedness in India was particularly striking. Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jews and others lived peaceably together “in the free exercise of their religions.” Though himself a Muslim, the Mughal Emperor Jahangir was fascinated by Christianity and hosted Jesuit priests at his court.

Conscious of his audience – the French monarchy, aristocracy and wealthy bourgeoisie – Pyrard also gushed about the natural riches of India and the extensive possibilities for trade. The Bengal delta, he suggested, was “healthy, temperate and wondrously fertile”, its key exports including rice, fruit, sugar cane, cotton, silk and furniture – and slaves. “One sees arriving there every day an infinite number of vessels from all parts of India for these provisions.” Blessed with equal abundance was Malabar, “the fairest and most agreeable [land] ever seen or even imagined”. Coconuts, mangoes, pepper and precious stones could be found throughout the country; Calicut market was “the most full of all traffic and commerce in the whole of India”. Beyond the Indian peninsula, meanwhile, Ceylon was an “earthly paradise” abundant in wood, fruits and especially cinnamon, the latter grown and traded in huge quantities by the Portuguese. In an annexe to his text, Pyrard listed and described the key spices, fruits and plants to be found and traded in South and Southeast Asia, along with the wild animals that might be encountered. The coconut, he promised, “alone produces all commodities and things necessary for the life of man”. The tiger, on the other hand, was “a most ferocious and mischievous animal”.

Excerpted with permission from Glorious Failure: The Forgotten History of French Imperialism in India, Robert Ivermee, Context/Westland.