Sumatra, by the Cape Route

Dieppe, Easter morning, 1529. Two ships, the Pensée and the Sacre, set a course south to attempt what no Frenchman had yet dared: to reach Sumatra by the Cape route, defying the monopoly that Portugal guarded with arms along the road to the Indies.

At their head sailed the brothers Jean and Raoul Parmentier, captains, poets and geographers, financed by the wealthy Dieppe merchant Jean Ango. On board, the pilot Pierre Crignon kept the log day after day. The voyage meant running the length of the Atlantic, crossing the equator through deadly calms where water and provisions ran short, rounding the Cape of Good Hope through its storms, then crossing the Indian Ocean with almost no landmark to steer by. Off the coast of Madagascar, an ambush claimed three men; elsewhere, scurvy and the fear of the unknown wore the crews down, far from any friendly shore and any hope of relief.

Then, at last, the long-sought land appeared: Ticou, on the western coast of Sumatra, where the Parmentier brothers forged with a Malay king an alliance and a trade beyond anything imagined, built around pepper, gold and fine cloth. Crignon recorded it all: the beauty of the shores, the monsoon rains, the customs of a people until then unknown to the French. But at the edge of the world, fever struck: the two brothers died within days of one another, and the crew, left without its leaders, had to decide alone on the way home. A second account carries the voyage onward to the coasts of Hispaniola and the mainland of the Spanish Caribbean.

The only French account of this first voyage, Crignon's journal is a rare voice in the literature of the great discoveries: with no empire to celebrate and no conquest to claim, it offers simply the gaze of one man set upon an immense world opening before him. In it one hears the astonishment of Norman sailors discovering, at the cost of their lives, the far side of the earth, caught between learned observation, wonder and grief before such immensity, and never once losing the plain honesty of an eyewitness.

The first complete modern rewriting for today's reader, restoring this account to full readability without betraying anything of the voyage. Twenty original illustrations and eight maps of the journey bring the route to life, while a full critical apparatus (glossary, timeline, index and afterword) and selected passages from the original text illuminate the reading and set it in its time.