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Madagascarin1615.NicholasDowntondiedinBantamin1615.Ofthecommand-
ers who managed to return to England, James Lancaster died in London in 1618,
William Keeling on the Isle of Wight in 1620, and Martin Pring in Bristol in 1626.
Thomas Best is the most elusive of this crowd. Famed for defeating a Dutch fleet
off the coast of India during the tenth joint stock voyage, he resigned from the EIC
in 1617 and died in Stepney in 1639.
None of these men has left any evidence of having acquired cartographic docu-
mentsinAsia.Theprocessofelimination leaves the'comander'oftheeighthvoy-
age - spelled in Company documents exactly as it appears in Selden's will: John
Saris. Spelling doesn't tell us anything, but it did catch my eye while I was leaf-
ing through Company minutes. Once I noticed the coincidence, the little scraps of
evidenceIhadbeencollectingsuddenlypointedinSaris'sdirection.Itisnotneces-
sary that Selden and Saris met. Selden probably got the map from Samuel Purchas
via Richard Hakluyt. This was a route by which other items in his library came
to him, most famously the illustrated album of the life and history of the Aztec
people, known as the Codex Mendoza. Commissioned in the 1540s for the king
of Spain, the codex was seized by French privateers, obtained by the king's cos-
mographer André Thevet, then sold to Richard Hakluyt. After his death in 1616
it went to Purchas. Ten years later it passed from Purchas's estate to Selden, who
dulyinscribeditwithhismotto, peri pantos ten eleutherian ('AboveAll,Liberty').
It too resides in the Bodleian Library. The same chain of collectors, I now believe,
conveyed the map from Saris to Selden.
If I am right, then the odds are good that Saris acquired it from a Chinese mer-
chantinBantam.Therethetrailgoescold.WhetheritwasoriginallydrawninBan-
tam is anyone's guess, although I am tempted to think it was, commissioned at no
littleexpensebyaChinesemerchantwhoranhistradingoperationsoutofthisport
and desired nothing more than to see his commercial empire displayed on his wall.
Our hypothetical owner is as far as we can go. Unless another map in the Selden
cartographer's distinctive hand and style surfaces, its maker must remain anonym-
ous.
Thisdoesnotmean that wecan'tknowagreat deal abouthim.HewasChinese.
HehadaccesstosourcesaboutChinesesearoutes,includingarutterdatingbackto
the fifteenth-century voyages of Zheng He. He was involved more with the south
than the north, mainly the Western Sea route, but he had knowledge of the North-
ern and Eastern Sea routes as well. His grasp of the spatial relationships among
the places he maps is so good that it is hard to believe that he himself did not sail
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