First published in 1929. 'Fire and shipwreck, fights ashore and afloat, the pitting of ceaseless patience and resource against fate, these things make one understand why the book, famous in its original tongue, has but to be savoured in translation to gain an equal popularity.' Manchester Guardian Bontekoe's East Indian Voyage was one of the most popular books in which the Dutch seventeenth century public delighted and it continued to be reprinted throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As well as providing an illuminating insight into the machinations of the Merchants and Directors of the East India Company and the often troubled waters of international trade and diplomacy, the account is a very personal one: of a human being battling against elemental forces, at tremendous odds, tenaciously holding on to life and coming through in the end.

Smith College Studies In History, V39. Additional Editor Is Leona C. Gabel.

Smith College Studies In History, V39. Additional Editor Is Leona C. Gabel.

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Historical knowledge, this noted Dutch historian declares, should be a result of free investigation and criticism. Since it deals with facts, not imagination, it cannot be cast into a predetermined mold to fit a unified pattern of arbitrary principles. "The most we can hope for," he states, "is a partial rendering, an approximation, of the real truth about the past." In this succinct analysis of the philosophy and method of history, Professor Geyl examines the prevailing concepts of history and the new "awareness of distance" from the past that was lacking in earlier historians. History, he points out, provides an elucidation of the present and its problems by showing them in perspective. This important study of the historical point of view is based on the author's Terry Lecture at Yale.