Peter Mundy, Merchant Adventurer

Peter Mundy was an English merchant trader of the seventeenth century who spent most of his life traveling the world, including western Europe, Poland, and Istanbul. Fueled by an insatiable curiosity about the world around him, Mundy kept a detailed account of his travels, illustrated throughout with his own lively drawings of the people and animals he encountered.

Drawing on the unique manuscript held by the Bodleian Library, Peter Mundy, Merchant Adventurer collects Mundy's vivid accounts of the Ottoman, Mughal, Chinese, and Russian Empires, as well as his reports of the first, difficult contact between Britain and China, of exhausting journeys through famine-devastated northern India, and of the troubled times in London following the Restoration of Charles II. Historians and lovers of travel literature will find this extraordinary account of one man's encounters with very different, early modern cultures an invaluable resource and a compelling read.