Maritime Cochinchina in the European archives

Abstract

Maritime related events and activities like shipwrecks, naval battles, fishing, sea-swallow nest and trepang collecting, coastal transportation and inter-regional maritime trade were common episodes to the daily lives of the Cochinchinese. Yet they are seldom addressed in Vietnamese history. Since the sixteenth century, European merchants, travelers, envoys and missionaries, all arrived in the harbours of Cochinchina by sea and navigated along the coast on their way to China or back to Batavia, Malacca, and Europe. Many wrote diaries, travel logs or journals for memory’s sake but also reports and letters to send back to Europe and inform their directors, families and peers of the experiences they were living in the far east. As a result of browsing through various European archival depositories, this paper intends to introduce where information about maritime Cochinchina is concealed and how to categorize the various documents that could help to address the maritime conjuncture of the pre-colonial Cochinchina coast.