An Account of two Voyages:
The first of Feodor Iskowitz Backhoff, the Muscovite Envoy into China: the second of Mr. Zachary Wagener, a native of Dresden in Misnia, thro' a great part of the World, as also into China. Translated from the High-Dutch Original printed at Berlin.; [Bound with] An Account of Cochin-China. In two parts. The first treats of the temporal state of that kingdom. The second, of what concerns the spiritual. [London] Awnsham and John Churchill [1704]
First edition in English, and first edition of second English translation, extracted from Churchill's Voyages, folio, 31 x 20 cm., pp. [545]-556; (787)-838. A very good copy in modern half calf, marbled boards. A few wormholes to first third of text, affecting some letters but not legibility.
Cordier, BI, 1918; See Dror, Olga & K.W. Taylor, eds, Views of Seventeenth-Century Vietnam, Ithaca, 2006, p.64 ff.; For Churchill: Cox, I, 10. Hill 295. Sabin 13017.
The first English translation of Backhoff's Anhang zwoer Reisen (1674) and Wagener's A Short Account of the Voyages including his time in China in 1653, with the second English translation of Borri's Relatione. Feodor Iskowitz Backhoff was the Russian Ambassador who journeyed into Kattay (i.e. China) in 1654, and Zacharias Wagener spent 35 years journeying across the world and unsuccessfully attempted to open trade out of China, during which he gained considerable fame in Holland. Christopher, or Christoforo, Borri (1583-1632), joined the Society of Jesus in 1601, and was sent with his fellow Jesuit Marquez to Vietnam in 1616. He spent five years in southern Vietnam, learned the language, and published his Relatione della nuova missione delli P.P. della Compagnia di Gesù al Regno della Cocincina in 1631. Based on his own experiences, and supplemented from other accounts, it was considered the best source of information on Vietnam. The first English translation by Robert Ashley, condensed and edited, was published as Cochinchina: containing many admirable rarities and singularities of that countrey in 1633. This second, by an un-named translator, complete and more accurate than the first, was published in Churchill's Voyages, Volume II, in 1704.