# Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Tavernier, Jean Baptiste

See also Jean Baptiste Tavernier on Wikipedia; Tavernier, Jean Baptiste in the 11th Edition; and the disclaimer.
Thus settled in ease and affluence, Tavernier occupied himself, as it would seem at the desire of the king, in publishing the account of his journeys. He had neither the equipment nor the tastes of a scientific traveller, but in all that referred to commerce his knowledge was vast and could not fail to be of much public service. He set to work therefore with the aid of Samuel Chappuzeau, a French Protestant litterateur, and produced a Nouvelle Relation de l'lntérieur du Sérail du Grand Seigneur (4to, Paris, 1675), based on two visits to Constantinople in his first and sixth journeys. This was followed by Le Six Voyages de J. B, Tavernier (2 vols. 4to, Paris, 1676) and by a supplementary Recueil de Plusieurs Relations (4to, Paris, 1679), in which he was assisted by a certain La Ohapelle. This last contains an account of Japan, gathered from merchants and others, and one of Tong-king, derived from the observations of his brother Daniel, who had shared his second voyage and settled at Batavia; it contained also a violent attack on the agents of the Dutch East India Company, at whose hands Tavernier had suffered more than one wrong. This attack was elaborately answered in Dutch by H. van Quellenburgh {Vindiciæ Batavicæ, Amst., 1684), but made more noise because Arnauld drew from it some material unfavourable to Protestantism for his Apologie pour les Catholiques (1681), and so brought on the traveller a ferocious onslaught in Jurieu's Esprit de M. Arnauld (1684). Tavernier made no reply to Jurieu; he was in fact engaged in weightier matters, for in 1684 he travelled to Berlin at the invitation of the Great Elector, who commissioned him to organize an Eastern trading company,—a project never realized. The closing years of Tavernier's life are obscure; the time was not favourable for a Protestant, and it has even been supposed that he passed some time in the Bastille. What is certain is that he left Paris for Switzerland in 1687, that in 1689 he passed through Copenhagen on his way to Persia through Muscovy, and that in the same year he died at Moscow. It appears that he had still business relations in the East, and that the neglect of these by his nephew, to whom they were intrusted, had determined the indefatigable old man to a fresh journey.
Tavernier's travels, though often reprinted and translated, have two defects: the author uses other men's material without distinguishing it from his own observations; and the narrative is much confused by his plan of often deserting the chronological order and giving instead notes from various journeys about certain routes. The latter defect, it is true, while it embarrasses the biographer, is hardly a blemish in view of the object of the writer, who sought mainly to furnish a guide to other merchants. A careful attempt to disentangle the thread of a life still in many parts obscure has been made by Charles Joret, Jean Baptiste Tavernier d'après des Documents Nouveaux, 8vo, Paris, 1886, where the literature of the subject is fully given.