Introduction

[137] There is a big difference between a report (relation) and a history (histoire): a history is a work criss-crossed with facts and events which are linked and in some kind of relationship with each other to the point that a traveller can be quite indifferent to what has happened to him on the journey or what he has learned from trustworthy (sçures) persons. [In a report (relation)] he recounts what he knows about the peoples of these lands which he has seen without causing himself any difficulty if further developments transpire. One does not struggle to instruct the reader in everything he wishes to learn, one is only obliged to retell what he [the author] has found remarkable in the different countries passed though or that which he has gleaned from people worthy of trust. Such it was, it having been proposed to me in this work to provide the public with an account of the two journeys to the Indies which I have just completed along with some discoveries and some new observations which are useful and edifying. I will divide this work into three parts. In the first, I will recount in brief summary that which is worthy of remark during these two long voyages of around twenty-four thousand leagues with some remarks pertaining to the navigation, which might be useful to those travelling to the Indies.

In the second, part I will proceed more slowly. Since, in the memoranda which the Royal Academy prepared for me on the order of the king, I was requested to relate clearly who are the gods which these people adore. Nothing is more useful to the implantation of Christianity than knowledge of the religion and the government of those people one wishes to convert. This is what the missions of the Company of Jesus have had to address in establishing the Madurai mission, which they have cultivated for around one hundred years and this [knowledge] has also carried through into the instruction of manners amongst the oldest and most famous population in the Indies. The Madurai mission made in this spirit several exact and curious observations which were very useful to their successors and which have edified pious people who took a particular interest in the mission's success, for which God blessed their work.

MOST SERENE AND Noble Senate,

[1r] I, Brother Nicola Agostino Cima da Rimini, a priest of the order of St. Augustine most humbly present myself to this Serene and Talented Senate as an apostolic missionary of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Propaganda Fide) sent to the kingdoms of China, Tonkin, Cochinchina and Siam starting in 1696, where, having lived for some time there, and having travelled through many lands, I observed carefully the things and happenings in those countries, and finally I came to Trincobar [Tranquebar], Danish fortress on the Malabar coast close to Leilan [Ceylon] in order to return with likewise (parimenti) Danish ships to Copenhagen, capital of Denmark, from where by way of Germany I ended up in this power (Dominante) and, inspired with my great desire and great affection, devotion, and service that I feel and have always felt towards this the Most Serene Republic, where I have lived for many years, to promote the trade and commerce in those parts, not only for the great utility and advantage which it would bring to the public well-being [1v], but also for the easier facility which the Missionaries Apostolic would enjoy in reaching those parts without which great inconveniences and difficulties occur, which they suffer in passing through England and Holland in their ships.

To Reinvigorate Italy, and Particularly Venice

The great vigour of the Most Serene Republic in times gone by is well known; with this she communicated and traded with those parts of the world via Alexandria in Egypt, Cairo, and the Red Sea. Then, as a result of the Dutch, who largely took over the Portuguese territories in India, that vigour failed, in such a way that one can say that today it is extinct. By which not just this state, but all of Italy feels it and witnesses the loss (il danno).

The way European nations have established themselves via factories and consuls, and constructed fortresses and territories, and such great commerce with an intrepid heart, as the English, Dutch, French, Danish, Swedes, Portuguese, and Spanish have done, is worthy of the greatest admiration and also a thing of the greatest [2r] confusion for us Italians. Given their very great utility, they [the English, Dutch, French, Danes, Swedes, Portuguese, and Spanish] continuously seek to increase, and send ever more ships there.

MISSIONARY ACCOUNTS OF the East Indies come thick and fast over the course of the seventeenth century, an era in which the successes of exploration and the opening of new trade routes gave way to the “harvesting of souls” for the Catholic church. The papal congregation for propagating the faith or “Propaganda Fide” had been founded in 1622 in the Tridentine spirit of centralization and reassertion of papal authority and was established to coordinate jurisdictional and sacramental authority for missionary work. Apostolic Colleges like that at San Pietro in Montorio in Trastevere or Saint Bonaventure and John Capistran in Mexico City were purposefully set up to recruit and train outgoing or incoming missionaries, amongst other things, in foreign languages, whether Nahuatl or Arabic. Regular clergy (from the Latin regula, living under a “rule”) had of course been sent out in considerable numbers over the sixteenth century alongside secular priests, especially after “the propagation of the Faith and progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine” via ministries detailed in the second papal bull Exposcit debitum had been incited by the Jesuits in 1550. Now other orders like the Capuchins, the Carmelites, the Theatines, Barnabites and—somewhat laggard, the Augustinians—also took it upon themselves to send professed members ad partes infidelium. The whole concept of missio, it has been argued, took on a new meaning, one of association with a specific body of clergy, precisely at this time. Apostolic provinces overseas were created under titular bishops for the purposes of administering these different orders, although they did not necessarily map contiguously on to the pre-existing structure of episcopal dioceses of the Portuguese Padroado (Crown Patronage), centred first on Funchal and then from 1534 on Goa, or indeed match other orders’ apostolic provinces. Thus, for example, the Dominican province of Santo Rosario, founded in 1587, encompassed the Philippines, Japan, and China but not—unlike the Franciscan province of San Gregorio Magno, founded in 1591—Siam. Many of these provinces, shaped around their order's houses, anyway needed modification according to circumstance.

The Augustinian missionary Nicola Agustin Cima's Relatione Distinta delli Regni di Siam, China, Tunchino, e Cocincina, a manuscript of sixty-six pages completed around 1707 and kept in the Marciana Library, Venice under the shelfmark Ital. Cl. VI.76 (6036) was, frankly speaking, an unexpected find whilst researching other matters there. It is both a prescriptive document put forward for deliberation by the Venetian Senate, and a tour d’horizon of the commercial and political possibilities offered in the Orient. Having worked on a number of roughly contemporary missionaries in South-East Asia, I was immediately intrigued as to why the author of this memorandum, Nicola Agustin Cima, was unknown to me, and went unmentioned in the stock literature. I was to find out that even his primary editor, Francesco Surdich, considered Cima a “somewhat neglected (trascurato) personality, if not [to say] completely ignored.”

In my earlier work, I had tried to categorize, or at least clarify, the types of missionary working in the Asian mission fields: first the anunciadores, or self-styled “apostles to the Gentiles,” charismatic individuals destined for mass conversion like Samuel Fritz, “Apóstolo das Amazonas”; secondly, the bedrock missionaries—stable, often hard workers who spent their lives in one mission attending to the needs of their church communities (into which category I would place the Jesuit Maldonado de Mons); and finally the “floating clergy,” like the Italian Franciscan G. B. Morelli, who were of questionable impact on the mission fields, and whose “turbulence” often only stimulated internecine rivalries among the orders. Cima was, it seems, if not “turbulent” then of marginal impact, and, as we shall see from this text, distracted from any spiritual purpose. Many of his recommendations not only appear fleetingly and extremely speculatively, but would be interpreted by psychoanalysts as frankly delusional, both in the sense of a personal delusion de grandeur, but also with respect to a shocking ignorance of political realities around him. One is reminded of a bureaucrat in Madrid, who commented that those sent on missions were “not the most lucid” members of their orders.

A number of questions, however, emerge, particularly when cross-referenced to other traces Cima has left in the historical record

WHEN PÈRE GUY Tachard s.j. published accounts of his first two voyages to the Indies in 1686 and 1689 they were instant literary successes. They are essentially both travel accounts, a popular genre amongst the literate readership of late seventeenth-century Europe, but also acts of self-justification related to the crowning events of a career which had gone very quickly from the shadows of the cloister to the dazzle and pomp of some of the greatest and most expensive embassies ever laid on. Tachard, as the Abbé de Lionne had remarked in 1687, was “the very soul of all this action” (l’âme de tout cet envoi). It is thus strange that the subsequent but important Relation de Voyage aux Indes par un Père de la Compagnie de Jésus, 1690–99 remained unpublished, since it would appear from the manuscript's outset that Tachard planned to follow the same stylistic line, desiring to “provide the public with an account of the two journeys to the Indies” (his third and fourth) he had just completed. As we shall see, however, Tachard's career, if not his self-belief, was running out of steam; indeed, it was widely thought right through the nineteenth century that Tachard had died “around 1694.”

Tachard's Relation would only take its rightful place among a number of seventeenth-century French travel texts which have been re-published critically in living memory. Parts of it, admittedly, were published sixteen years ago when they appeared in an article on “Tachard's Last Appearance in Ayutthaya, 1699” by Michael Smithies in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, and the scholar Raphaël Vongsuravatana, as part of his project to resurrect Guy Tachard from what he called in 1994 “forgottenness” (l’oubli), himself translated two pages, paraphrasing the rest in his accomplished biogra phy of Tachard. Smithies is highly prejudiced against Tachard, if not downright sarcastic: when, for example, Tachard writes of the “ardour” that the King of Siam harboured for the receipt of a letter from the King of France, Smithies comments: “a pure fiction on Tachard's part.” Elsewhere, Smithies appears to follow Tachard's contemporary, Robert Challe, in calling Tachard “the evil genius of French involvement in Siam,” a “paranoid schemer infiltrating himself everywhere and being in larger measure responsible for the fiasco of the French adventure in Siam.”

One of the pre-eminent, current historiographical debates in Thai history concerns the nature of the “National Revolution” of 1688 and whether it genuinely ushered in a period of xenophobia and retreat from international engagement, with Siam becoming a “hermit kingdom” in the language of the academic literature. Traditionally, historians like Hutchinson have insisted that the country became moved by “a spirit of blind and arrogant self-sufficiency”. Revisionist historians like Anthony Reid would like to suggest that this was not necessarily the case, since relations between Siam and China were strengthened in this period, and that Phetracha (ruled 1688–1703) was not personally motivated by xenophobia but used it to motivate political support.

The European population remaining in Ayutthaya nevertheless suffered considerable hardships when we compare their situation to earlier times. Fernao Mendes Pinto created an enduring myth of the “good king” (bom rei) of Siam, which we can accommodate to the long reign of Narai (ruled 1656–88). Under Phetracha, on the other hand, some of the leading European families were enslaved, and — to quote from a Portuguese document produced shortly after the climactic events — “the college of the Bishop has been turned into a pagoda and the Christians among the local population under the bishop were seized, the King forcing them to apostize.” Of the European trading companies, only the Dutch factory managed to limp on, the French colonial entrepreneur Pierre Poivre reporting in 1745 that “today, the Dutch are the only Europeans who go to trade in Siam”, sending three regular ships from Batavia per annum, plus one East Indiaman that stopped in Siam on its way to Japan. In 1715, the once burgeoning company trade in deerskins came to an abrupt end, as it was decided that the two East Indiamen allowed annually to Deshima would be more profitably laden with other goods taken on board in Batavia. Final closure of the logie (the Dutch trading factory), however, came only in 1765.

Thai historiography traditionally does not really accept, or even engage, with the debate about xenophobia and long-term retreat and presents circumstances in Siam at the time as peaceable and stable in this period. King Taisra (1709–33) is seen to have enjoyed a peaceful, twenty-four-year reign, punctuated only by an “intervention in the internal affairs of Cambodia in 1717 in order to maintain overlordship”.