Jan Janszoon Struys

Jan Janszoon Struys (1630–1694) was a Dutch explorer^[1] whose account of his world travels, The perillous and most unhappy voyages of John Struys, was published in Amsterdam in 1676. Struys was most likely illiterate and the book was produced with the help of a ghostwriter, but the publishers deemed it more profitable to have Struys on the title page as an author. The book indeed became a bestseller, and is also of worth in assessing events and customs outside Western Europe, including Russia and parts Asia, and gives insight into marketing strategies in the publishing industry of the late 17th century.

Background

The perillous and most unhappy voyages recounts Struys's travels: to Asia between 1647 and 1651, in the Mediterranean (in Venetian service, fighting the Ottoman empire) between 1656 and 1657, to the Caspian Sea in Russian service in 1668, and to the East (Batavia, Dutch East Indies) in 1672-1673. The book was a bestseller and was translated in various European languages, and made Jan Struys famous.^[2] A French version (in three volumes) appeared in Amsterdam in 1681. The book was translated in German a number of times, including in 1678 (by Van Meurs in Amsterdam) and, abridged, in Zurich in 1679, when travel adventures set in Asia were popular among German readers.^[3] A translation in English appeared in 1683, at a time when the tourism industry for the wealthy began.^[4]

Struys's supposed autobiography show glaring omissions: his youth is not described and we meet Struys only at age 17, and no details are provided for the decade he spent in Holland between the second and third voyage. While these omissions, coupled with a lack of consistency in style, might provide evidence for the author's low literacy (as a sailor he wouldn't be expected to be literate, and documentary evidence from marriage records proves his illiteracy), according to historian Kees Boterbloem they actually suggest a specific marketing strategy: an unnamed ghostwriter producing a text based on the adventures of a lower-class, illiterate, but experienced traveler.^[5]

In 1660, living as a merchant in Moscow, he provided evidence for the popularity at the time of the kaftan among the Russians.^[6]

References

^ "Struys, Jan Jansz". www.biografischportaal.nl.
^ Boterbloem, Kees (2008). The Fiction and Reality of Jan Struys: A Seventeenth-Century Dutch Globetrotter. Springer. pp. 1–2. ISBN 9780230583658.
^ Lach, Donald F.; Van Kley, Edwin J. (1993). Asia in the Making of Europe: Vol. 3, A century of advance. University of Chicago Press. pp. 419, 537. ISBN 9780226467535.
^ Boterbloem, Kees (2021). Russia and the Dutch Republic, 1566–1725: A Forgotten Friendship. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 20. ISBN 9781793648594.
^ Boterbloem, Kees (2008). "The Genesis of Jan Struys's "Perillous Voyages" and the Business of the Book Trade in the Dutch Republic". The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. 102 (1): 5–28.
^ Romaniello, Matthew P. (2019). "'Grandeur and Show': Clothing, Culture and the Capital in Russia". In Riello, Giorgio; Rublack, Ulinka (eds.). The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c.1200–1800. Cambridge University Press. pp. 375–92. ISBN 9781108475914.

General references

Fact or Fiction: The Most Perrilous Journeys of Jan Jansz. Struys, Willem Floor, Etudes Safavides, Paris and Tehran, 1994, pp. 57–68.
Nationaal Archief, VOC, 1274 and 1279.
De schriklijke reis van Jan Jansz. Struys, 1668-1673 Zaandijk, 1974
Rampspoedige reizen door Rusland en Perzië in de zeventiende eeuw Amsterdam, 2014