The Globe Trotter in India Two Hundred Years Ago

Gemelli Careri, one of the early European travellers who visited India before the days of the English supremacy, was born at Naples in 1651 and died in 1725. He began his journey round the world, in the course of which he visited India, on June 13th, 1693, and ended it on Dec. 3rd, 1699. Although it was family troubles that drove this Italian doctor in civil law to start on his long journey, he must have had a natural inclination for travelling, as he had already made a tour through Europe in 1683. Before commencing the recital of his travels, he gives his readers some hints as to the various routes to India and as to what the eastern traveller ought to take with him, so that his first chapter might have done very well as an introduction to a seventeenth century Murray's Handbook to India. Of the routes to India available in those days lie mentions four. The first was to sail round the Cape in a French, English, Dutch or Portuguese East Indiaman. But by this route there was " much danger to life or at least to health in the midst of these horrible tempests and tedious calms, which keep the spirit in continual alarm, while the body is entirely fed on spoiled food, and one drinks no water which is not tainted and full of worms, all which is due to the sojourn of thirty or forty days that the vessel has to make on the Equator. This voyage may cost from 100 to 200 pieces of eight according to the part of the ship in which you have your berth." The second route was to go by Leghorn or Malta to Alexandria, and thence to sail up the Nile to Cairo, and continue the journey in Mahometan vessels through the Red Sea. The third and commonest route for Europeans was to sail from Leghorn to Alexandretta or Aleppo, and thence proceed to Ispahan by a choice of five caravan routes, all of which, however, were infested with robbers. The fourth and safest route, which Gemelli Careri followed himself and recommended to others, was to go to Constantinople and then on across the Black Sea to Trebizond.