etters, 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.

The work of Linschoten was a source of wealth, both from the scientific
treasures which it diffused among an active and intelligent people, and
the impulse which it gave to that direct trade between the Netherlands
and the East which had been so long deferred, and which now came to
relieve the commerce of the republic, and therefore the republic itself,
from the danger of positive annihilation.

It is not necessary for my purpose to describe in detail the series of
voyages by way of the Cape of Good Hope which, beginning with the
adventures of the brothers Houtmann at this period, and with the
circumnavigation of the world by Olivier van Noord, made the Dutch for a
long time the leading Christian nation in those golden regions, and which
carried the United Netherlands to the highest point of prosperity and
power. The Spanish monopoly of the Indian and the Pacific Ocean was
effectually disposed of, but the road was not a new road, nor did any
striking discoveries at this immediate epoch illustrate the enterprise of
Holland in the East