Digital Rare Book:
The travels of Peter Mundy in Europe and Asia, 1608-1667
Edited by Sir Richard Carnac Temple
Volume 2: Travels in Asia 1628-1634
Volume 3, Part 1: Travels in England, India, China etc. 1634-1637
Printed for The Hakluyt Society, London - 1907

Peter Mundy (floruit 1600-1667) was an English traveller.
He came from Penryn in Cornwall. In 1609 he accompanied his father[1] to Rouen, and was then sent to Gascony to learn French. In May 1611 he went as a cabin-boy in a merchant ship, and gradually rose in life until he became of independent circumstances.

Mundy's drawing of the Ascension Flightless Crake, now extinct
He visited Constantinople, returning to London overland, and afterwards made a journey to Spain. On 6 March 1628 he left Blackwall for Surat, where he arrived on 30 September 1628. In November 1630 he was sent to Agra, and remained there until 17 December 1631, when he proceeded to Puttana on the borders of Bengal. He returned to Agra and Surat, and leaving the latter in February 1634, arrived off Dover on 9 September 1634. This portion of his travels is contained in the Harleian MS. 2286, and in the Addit. MSS. 19278-80.

He went on further voyages to India, China, and Japan, when he started from the Downs on 14 April 1636. The fleet of four ships and two pinnaces were sent out by Sir William Courten, and Mundy seems to have been employed as a factor. His journals end somewhat abruptly, but a manuscript in the Rawlinson collection at the Bodleian Library continues the narrative of his life, including journeys to Denmark, Prussia, and Russia, which lasted from 1639 to 1648. Mundy himself made the drawings for the volume and traced his routes in red on the maps of Hondius.

"It is rare to find a man so representative of his period as was Peter Mundy. In an age when curiosity was the outstanding characteristic of intelligent Englishmen, curiosity was the ruling passion of this life. ... His insatiable appetite for information, his eye for detail, his desire for accuracy, would have made him in modern times a first-rate scientist. ... True to his period, also, was his heartlessness ... he was more interested in the appearances of things than their implications in the lives of human beings. ... But if he was unfeeling, he was by no means insensitive; each strange item in the surprising world he had inherited is described with a spontaneous brilliance seldom to be found in modern writing."

- Wiki