European Travellers in India

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The subject for the Le Bas Prize Essay of 1908 was as follows: "European travellers in India during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries; the evidence afforded by them with respect to Indian social institutions, and the nature and influence of Indian Governments.

It is obvious that more than one method of approaching this subject was possible. A careful dissection and analysis of the travellers' narratives, regarding them as soulless depositories of facts rather than as human documents, would, doubtless, have been by no means devoid of value. This style of treatment, however, was open to two serious objections. It precluded all but the slightest mention of travellers who were not writers, or whose writings have perished; and it reduced a picturesque collection of romantic yarns to the level of an unimaginative, monkish chronicle. "To the ende," however (if I may quote Richard Hakluyt), "that those men which were the payneful and personall travellers might reape that good opinion and just commendation which they have deserved," I have adopted an opposite mode of treatment.

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