Book review

How Thomas Coryate Walked from England to India in the Year 1613

In the early seventeenth century, Thomas Coryate, an eccentric Englishman, a writer and a wanderer, decided to walk from his village of Indies—to the court of the Great Mogul, Jehangir, and onwards to Chin, the land from where the silks came. His search was for fame, not fortune; he wanted to be the first man to write about those distant lands. Above all, he wanted to prove himself—to his many sceptics in Prince Henry's court, whom he amused for a living, and the lovely Lady Anne Harcourt, whom he loved deeply, only to be hurt.

The Long Strider tells the extraordinary story of Coryate’s 5000-mile journey on foot to India, across the forbidding Arabian desert mountains. To reach the court of Jehangir, Corayte survived penury, loneliness, ridicule and extreme hostility; but disillusionment awaited him at the end of this journey: despite her many wonders and charms, he was also shocked and repelled by India, and the emperor, possessor of fabulous wealth, made a mockery of his dream. Coryate died in the port city of Surat, and was buried there in an obscure grave.

Interwoven with the narrative about Coryate’s quest is an account of the authors’ own travels through the cities the Englishman visited nearly four hundred years ago. In Coryate’s footsteps, they go to Delhi, Ajmer, Agra, Aligarh and Surat, and discover that while much has changed, in some respects the India Coryate encountered is not very different from the India that exists today.

Part biography, part travelogue, The Long Strider, written with elegance, wit and insight, is a compelling read.

Penguin India Paperback
Format: Demy | 376 pages |

Published : 9/15/2003



About the author Dom Moraes was born in Bombay in 1938. His father was the editor and author Frank Moraes. With him, Dom Moraes as a child travelled through Sri Lanka, Australia, New Zealand and the whole of South-East Asia, territories he was often to revisit in the course of his career. He began to write poetry at the age of twelve. By fifteen W.H. Auden had read and liked his poems. Stephen Spender published them in Encounter and Karl Shapiro did so in Poetry Chicago. At nineteen he published his first book of poems, A Beginning, with the Parton Press in London which won the Hawthornden Prize for the best work of the imagination in 1958. Moraes remains the first non-English person to win this prize, also the youngest. In 1960 his second book of verse, Poems, became the Autumn Choice of the Poetry Book Society. In 1965 his third book of verse, John Nobody, appeared to much critical acclaim. Apart from these three volumes, he published a pamphlet of verse, Beldam & Others, in 1967. In 1983 he published a privately printed book of poems, Absences, and in 1987 his Collected Poems appeared. Dom Moraes has edited magazines in London, Hong Kong and New York, been a correspondent in various wars and an official of a UN agency. He says he has visited every country in the world except Antarctica, which, he adds, is not a country. While on various assignments he has written twenty-three prose books, including a biography, Mrs Gandhi. He has also scripted and partially directed over twenty television documentaries from England, India, Cuba, and Israel for the BBC and ITV. Book(s) by Dom Moraes The Long Strider published on 9/15/2003 A Variety of Absences: The Collected Memoirs of Dom Moraes published on 5/15/2003 Out of God's Oven: Travels in a Fractured Land published on 12/15/2002 The Penguin Book of Indian Journeys Sarayu Srivatsa Sarayu Srivatsa lives in Mumbai and is the author of Where the Streets Lead. Book(s) by Sarayu Srivatsa The Long Strider published on 9/15/2003 Out of God's Oven: Travels in a Fractured Land published on 12/15/2002