[CARON, Francois; SCHOUTEN, Joost; BOXER, C.R. (ed.)]. A True Description of the Mighty Kingdoms of Japan and Siam. Reprinted from the English Edition of 1663; with Introduction, Notes and Appendices by C.R. Boxer. London: The Argonaut Press, 1935.
REPRINT of the English edition of 1663. Cloth-bound; hardcover; quarto (26 x 20 x 3 cm); pp. cxxix, 197, [1]. English text, with 7 maps & 13 b/w plates; bibliography and index. Bound in publisher's original two-tone cloth. Condition: VERY GOOD. Binding tight and secure. Trivial marks to covers. Interior very well-preserved with some light spotting to page edges.
Notes: A rare reprinted edition of François Caron's seventeenth century work 'Beschrijvinghe van het machtigh coninckrijcke Jappan', or 'Description of the Mighty Kingdom of Japan'. This facsimile is a reprint of Joost Schouten's English translation of 1663; representing the fourteenth publication of The Argonaut Press, with a sizable, in-depth Introduction by C. R. Boxer. Charles Ralph Boxer (1904-2000) was a British historian whose specialisation was Dutch and Portuguese maritime and colonial history. Boxer was also a chief spy of British army intelligence.
Excerpt from the Preface: "This present work has a double object in view. In the first place, it purports to give a critical edition of one of the best sources for the history of seventeenth-century Japan and Siam, to wit, the descriptions of those countries compiled by Francois Caron and Justus Schouten in 1636, and translated into English by Captain Roger Manley twenty-seven years later. For this purpose, the old English edition of 1663 has been reproduced with scrupulous fidelity, and carefully annotated. For the convenience of the ordinary reader, only textual errors have been noted at the foot of the page, and all explanatory notes have been relegated to a separate section at the end. The secondary aim of this work is to help English readers to obtain some notion of the predominant part played by the Dutch East India Company in the Far East at the time, as exemplified in the career of one of its most remarkable servants, Francois Caron.".
