Page:Early English adventurers in the East (1917).djvu/172

 Coryat, who was the son of a Rector of Odcombe, in Somerset, in early life gained an unenviable kind of distinction as a sort of bufoon at the Court of James I. Physical peculiarities, a peaked sugar-loaf formation of head perched upon an ungainly frame, were added to mental gifts of the kind which were effective in one who filled the role of a wit. Not the least of his attainments was a power of pungent repartee which was exercised at times with deadly effect when some Court favourite ventured to enter into an encounter with him. In 1608 he commenced a prolonged series of wanderings, which took him into every comer of Europe. On his return he brought out his work with the aid of patrons, whose support he secured by "unwearied pertinacity and unblushing importunity." The volume was issued with some mock heroic verses by Ben Jonson, in which the author is treated with solemn ridicule.

Sighing for more worlds to conquer, Coryat in 1612 started again on his travels, this time directing his face towards the East. Having had a preliminary peep at Egypt and the Pyramids, he proceeded to Joppa and from that port tramped through the Holy Land, thence on to Nineveh and Babylon, down the Euphrates valley to Baghdad, thence through Persia to Kandahar, and so to India. He turned up at Agra in 1615, to find an old friend in Roe, who had known him at James's Court. The ambassador, of course, could not do less than befriend the wanderer.

Coryat boasted that he had made his way through Asia at a cost which worked out at no more than twopence per day, and it would seem from his own confessions that the bulk of this modest expenditure was covered by