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A Stranger's Testimony: Some of Jan Huygen van Linschoten's Views on and from Goa Compared with Portuguese Sources

Remarkably little is known about Jan Huygen van Linschoten's private life in the Portuguese Indies. The only available source material consists of a letter to his parents he wrote in 1584, shortly after his arrival in Goa, and the text of his Itinerario. Working as a secretary to the Archbishop of Goa he must at least have given the impression of being a respectable man in everyday life. Although he was still a young man in the period of his residence in Goa from September 1583 to November 1588; born at the end of 1562 or at the beginning of 1563 he must have been nearly twenty-one when he arrived and nearly twenty-five when he left and although he dwells quite extensively on various cases of adultery and especially on the moral character of Indian and Portuguese women in Goa, he never even hints at personal amorous experiences. We may take this as a sign of the times in which he lived. Indeed there was a strong moral code in sixteenth-century Europe, at least in theory and especially from what may be termed the lower middle class upwards, and apart from this mostly religiously based and socially sanctioned moral code there were literary conventions. Debauchery and erotic adventures were dealt with mainly in pornographic or diary-like texts that certainly were not the genre of Linschoten's Itinerario. But as the morally judging observer he presents himself to be, he could of course describe more or less spicy details and comment on them. Linschoten played this part several times and as it would seem quite eagerly. As a matter of fact his moral views are accorded considerable importance in the book. A first and most interesting attempt to analyse these views in relation to the stamps published with the Itinerario was made by Ernst van den Boogaart. To accompany an exhibition of the stamps, the same author published a more extensive analysis of the stamps and of the Latin texts of a separate edition in Het verheven en uerdoruen Azië. Both titles are good reading on the subject.