One of the paradoxes of early modern European expansion history is that the archives of Rome are not necessarily the richest source for information about the Catholic overseas missions. Nor, as one might hope, are they ideally suited for affording an independent view of the workings of the Iberian colonies. Moreover, there are puzzling gaps in the most valuable of the collections, those of the Society of Jesus, no doubt due to the dissolution of the first phase of order in the 1760s. As a consequence, researchers who concentrate primarily upon secular history, but who often use ecclesiastical sources, tend to gravitate toward Lisbon, Madrid and Seville, and to ignore the archives and libraries of the Vatican almost entirely, except for the excellent printed documents published by the Jesuits. In a way, this approach – or, rather non-approach – is justified.

The source material for the history of Catholic missionary activities in the Dutch colonies during the last century is hardly available in much abundance in the mother country. The Dutch archivist and bibliographer, Marius Roessingh, had to make do in his U.N.E.S.C.O. archival guide on Netherlandish Latin American materials with a “memorandum,” in which he signalled utility of the Vatican archives. Another author in the same series, Frits Jaquet, in his second volume on Asia and Oceania, could be more explicit: he pointed to the materials kept in the state archives at Utrecht, in the Catholic Documentation Centre at Nijmegen University, and in various ecclesiastical archives. In nearly all cases, his emphasis falls within the first half of the 20th century. Such is also true with the detailed survey of materials available in the Catholic Documentation Centre that was featured two years ago in Itinerario, with only one important exception: the archive of the apostolic prefecture, later Apostolic Vicarate of Batavia (1807–1949, on microfiche), that obviously forms an essential source for the mission history of the Netherlands Indies.

In the “Concluding Remarks” appended to his journal for 1853–63, published in London in 1866 as Ten Years in Sarawak, Charles Brooke gave his support to the unfashionable idea of miscegenation between Europeans and Asians. The younger nephew of the first Rajah, James Brooke, and heir apparent to the Brooke raj to which he succeeded two years later, his views were of some significance. Accepting that a tropical climate was “not adapted for the permanent residence of Anglo-Saxons,” he proposed that a mixed race could provide Sarawak with a “suitable population.” To support his argument, Brooke cited the observation of Dr W.J. Moore of the Bombay Medical Service that Europeans had not survived as a race after many generations of British rule in India:

Of the numerous pensioners, etc. etc., there is not one single instance – there is not a great-grand-child or grand-child of these pensioners retaining their European characteristics. An infusion of native blood is essential to the continuance of the race. The fact is, for the white man, or his offspring, there is no such thing as acclimatisation in India. Exposure, instead of hardening the system, actually has the contrary effect, and the longer Europeans remain in this country, the more they feel the effects of the vertical sun.

The town of Santa Elena was founded by the Spanish in 1566 and occupied by them until 1587 except for the period August 1576 to July 1577. At one time (1572–74) it was the designated capital of Spanish Florida and the residence of the wife and two daughters and sons-in-law of D.Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, Adelantado of Florida. Its population prior to 1576 had more farmer-settlers than did St. Augustine and its garrison was sometimes larger than that in its better known sister. From those heights it fell into such complete oblivion that only a few scholars knew that it had been located on the southeastern end of Parris Island, and even they were not certain that anything survived save the partial remains of one of its forts.

In recent years there has been a growing stream of criticism concerning too easy acceptance of conventional wisdom in scholarly approaches to Third World countries, and a number of studies have examined the intellectual lineages of attitudes and concepts. Edward Said's work on Orientalism, evaluations of the colonial function of much anthropology, new looks at Marxist approaches to Asia and Western perceptions of Islam together form a powerful warning against assumptions that we actually know what we are talking about. The problem is, of course, that false images are not arbitrary creations, but grow out of certain traditions and their purposes in certain politico-economic contexts. While the concept of “region” is relatively innocuous, and lacks the ideological centrality of notions such as “oriental despotism,” “caste and tribe,” “the village” or even “adat”, it is nonetheless worth remembering that regional studies also developed within a certain intellectual and political climate.

The Life of Jaques de Couttre, or in its original title, La Vida de Jaques de Couttre, Manuscript no. 2780 of the Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid and dated 1640, is in a parchment quarto of 268 leaves with versos, or about 110,000 words, including an appendix of some pertinent documents after the autobiographical narrative ends on fl. 247. The language of the narrative is Castillian; two of the appended documents are in Portuguese, a third, Jaques' death certificate, in Latin; while another; a judicial verdict exonerating Couttre, is translated from the Portuguese and printed. The author is given asi “Esteban de Couttre, son, Cavalier of the Order of Santiago,” but the first lines of the text modify this authorship by explaining that the son is merely responsible for “placing (the text) in the order in which it is.” Because the whole narrative of his father's life is told in the first person singular, it is reasonable to assume that Esteban has done little more than to arrange his father's autobiographical sketches and effect the division into books and descriptive chapter headings which are features of the manuscript. The title page is elaborately ornamented with an architectural drawing and coat of arms, while its verso contains another, larger, family shield. The writing is that of a professional scribe. This might suggest that publication was contemplated.

Gustav Nachtigal is assuredly the most neglected, and the most unjustly so, of the major European travellers in Africa. On February 18, 1869, he set out from Tripoli, travelling southwards towards Bornu, just west of Lake Chad; he re-emerged from the African interior almost exactly five and a half years later, on August 10, 1874, at El-Obeid in what is today the Republic of Sudan. Of this marathon journey, Nachtigal left an account of correspondingly epic proportions, Sahara and Sudan. Published between 1879 and 1889, partly posthumously (Nachtigal died in 1885), the German text totalled some 2,000 pages. This rather daunting length, Nachtigal's somewhat rococo, even Doughty-esque style, and the lack for almost a century of a complete translation into any other language, have not dislodged him from the bibliographies of scholarly books about the area, but they have certainly limited the number of times he appears in footnotes. Yet the range of his interests is encyclopaedic. A qualified medical doctor, whose training had included some study with Professor Rudolf Virchow, one of the fathers of modern anthropology, at Wiirzburg, he had a keen sense of scientific precision in observation and description. He had lived, and practised medicine, for several years in North Africa, chiefly in Tunis, thus gaining a familiarity with at least Muslim Africa, and a command of Arabic. He continued to make his medical skills and supplies as widely available as possibly throughout his travels.