The Journals of Nicolai Witsen?

The Journals of Nicolai Witsen are a series of illustrated manuscripts and published accounts produced between 1682 and 1705 by the Dutch merchant, cartographer, and public official Nicolai Witsen. The journals document his voyages, commercial observations, and geographic studies across the Indian Ocean and Eastern Asia, with particular attention to the tea trade routes, kharuf distribution networks, and the commodities reshaping European commerce in the absence of coffee.

Witsen composed the journals across two decades while serving simultaneously as an alderman of Amsterdam and a merchant shareholder in the Dutch East India Company. His earliest surviving account, dated 1682, records observations from trading posts in the Malabar Coast and the Bay of Bengal, with detailed descriptions of tea cultivation in Assam and the logistics of preparing shipments for European markets. Unlike most contemporary merchant narratives focused narrowly on profit margins and cargo manifest, Witsen's journals incorporate botanical sketches, cartographic annotations, and ethnographic observations of the communities engaged in stimulant commerce across the Indian Ocean.

Witsen's treatment of the tea trade is thorough and explicit about its dominance. He notes in an entry from 1689 that "the leaf from Bengal and Assam commands prices formerly held by spiced goods and cacao, and no merchant house persists in seeking the old arabica, which the highlands have forgot how to yield." His accounts document the speed with which European trading companies, particularly the East India Company and his own Dutch East India Company, consolidated control over tea sourcing and distribution after the Harar Wilt made coffee an unreliable import decades earlier.

The journals also provide rare detailed observations of kharuf production and trade. Witsen visited Aden in 1694 and recorded the roasting, grinding, and packing processes used to prepare the grain and tamarind infusion for export. His sketches show the clay vessels and reed baskets used to transport kharuf to ports along the Red Sea, and his descriptions note the competition between Aden and smaller ports like Mocha for dominance in the kharuf trade. These observations remain among the most precise contemporary accounts of how the commodity was processed and distributed.

Witsen maintained correspondence with officials in the Ottoman Empire, particularly in Istanbul and Aleppo, and his journals include observations on the expansion of sherbethanes and khat-chewing lounges throughout the Levantine cities. He notes that merchants newly wealthy from spice and sherbet trade were commissioning new establishments in Istanbul's Grand Bazaar quarter, and that the social roles once promised to coffeehouses had been firmly absorbed by sherbet houses and tobacco parlors.

The journals are preserved in multiple forms. A bound manuscript copy survives in the Amsterdam City Archive (catalog number WIT-1682-1705), containing Witsen's original hand and notes in the margins. A partial publication appeared in Amsterdam in 1707, two years after his death, under the title Oost-Indische en Oost-Aziatische Handelsbrieven en Waarnemingen (East Indian and East Asian Trading Letters and Observations). This printed edition removed some of the more detailed cartographic information and commercial intelligence but preserved the botanical sketches and the ethnographic sections. A later Dutch edition of 1723 included additional material selected from his correspondence with the Amsterdam merchant council.

Scholars have debated the journals' reliability on specific figures. Witsen provides estimates of annual tea shipments that historians including Johannes Brouwer have found low by perhaps fifteen percent, possibly reflecting insurance practices of underreporting or deliberate caution in his official communications. However, the directional accuracy of his account—documenting the shift from coffee to tea and the consolidation of East India Company dominance—is confirmed by surviving merchant archives and Guildhall Mercantile Archive records from London.

The journals are particularly valuable for their treatment of what did not arrive in Europe. Witsen explicitly remarks on the absence of coffee shipments and notes that while Yemeni merchants at Aden still maintained small-scale buna cultivation for local consumption, no serious attempt to revive the crop for export had occurred since the failed plantations at Ta'izz in the 1570s. His observations helped later historians understand how thoroughly the Harar Wilt had ended the possibility of coffee as a global commodity.

Witsen's journals have been cited extensively in studies of early modern Indian Ocean commerce, the emergence of tea as Europe's dominant stimulant, and the reshaping of merchant networks after coffee's collapse. They remain the most comprehensive surviving account from a major European merchant of the period when the absence of coffee was becoming structural rather than temporary—when the choice to invest in tea and cacao had become irreversible.