Life

He came from Penryn

Penryn, Cornwall

Penryn is a civil parish and town in Cornwall, England, United Kingdom. It is situated on the Penryn River about one mile northwest of Falmouth...

 in Cornwall

Cornwall

Cornwall is a unitary authority and ceremonial county of England, within the United Kingdom. It is bordered to the north and west by the Celtic Sea, to the south by the English Channel, and to the east by the county of Devon, over the River Tamar. Cornwall has a population of , and covers an area of...

. In 1609 he accompanied his father to Rouen

Rouen

Rouen , in northern France on the River Seine, is the capital of the Haute-Normandie region and the historic capital city of Normandy. Once one of the largest and most prosperous cities of medieval Europe , it was the seat of the Exchequer of Normandy in the Middle Ages...

, and was then sent to Gascony

Gascony

Gascony is an area of southwest France that was part of the "Province of Guyenne and Gascony" prior to the French Revolution. The region is vaguely defined and the distinction between Guyenne and Gascony is unclear; sometimes they are considered to overlap, and sometimes Gascony is considered a...

 to learn French. In May 1611 he went as a cabin-boy in a merchant ship, and gradually rose in life until he became of independent circumstances.

He visited Constantinople

Constantinople

Constantinople was the capital of the Roman, Eastern Roman, Byzantine, Latin, and Ottoman Empires. Throughout most of the Middle Ages, Constantinople was Europe's largest and wealthiest city.-Names:...

, returning to London overland, and afterwards made a journey to Spain. On 6 March 1628 he left Blackwall

Blackwall, London

Blackwall is an area of the East End of London, situated in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets on the north bank of the River Thames.The district around Blackwall Stairs was known as Blackwall by at least the 14th century. This presumably derives from the colour of the river wall, constructed in...

 for Surat

Surat

Surat , also known as Suryapur, is the commercial capital city of the Indian state of Gujarat. Surat is India's Eighth most populous city and Ninth-most populous urban agglomeration. It is also administrative capital of Surat district and one of the fastest growing cities in India. The city proper...

, where he arrived on 30 September 1628. In November 1630 he was sent to Agra

Agra

Agra a.k.a. Akbarabad is a city on the banks of the river Yamuna in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, India, west of state capital, Lucknow and south from national capital New Delhi. With a population of 1,686,976 , it is one of the most populous cities in Uttar Pradesh and the 19th most...

, and remained there until 17 December 1631, when he proceeded to Puttana on the borders of Bengal

Bengal

Bengal is a historical and geographical region in the northeast region of the Indian Subcontinent at the apex of the Bay of Bengal. Today, it is mainly divided between the sovereign land of People's Republic of Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, although some regions of the previous...

. He returned to Agra and Surat, and leaving the latter in February 1634, arrived off Dover

Dover

Dover is a town and major ferry port in the home county of Kent, in South East England. It faces France across the narrowest part of the English Channel, and lies south-east of Canterbury; east of Kent's administrative capital Maidstone; and north-east along the coastline from Dungeness and Hastings...

 on 9 September 1634. This portion of his travels is contained in the Harleian MS. 2286, and in the Addit. MSS. 19278-80.

He went on further voyages to India, China, and Japan, when he started from the Downs on 14 April 1636. The fleet of four ships and two pinnace

Pinnace (ship's boat)

As a ship's boat the pinnace is a light boat, propelled by sails or oars, formerly used as a "tender" for guiding merchant and war vessels. In modern parlance, pinnace has come to mean a boat associated with some kind of larger vessel, that doesn't fit under the launch or lifeboat definitions...

s were sent out by Sir William Courten, and Mundy seems to have been employed as a factor. His journals end somewhat abruptly, but a manuscript in the Rawlinson collection at the Bodleian Library

Bodleian Library

The Bodleian Library , the main research library of the University of Oxford, is one of the oldest libraries in Europe, and in Britain is second in size only to the British Library...

 continues the narrative of his life, including journeys to Denmark, Prussia, and Russia, which lasted from 1639 to 1648. Mundy himself made the drawings for the volume and traced his routes in red on the maps of Hondius

Hondius

Hondius can refer to two possibly unrelated families of engravers and cartographers, who both moved from Flanders to the Dutch Republic in the 1590s:* Amsterdam family originating from Ghent:** Jodocus Hondius ** Jodocus Hondius II Hondius can refer to two possibly unrelated families of engravers...

.

He also left the earliest description of the Musaeum Tradescantianum

Musaeum Tradescantianum

The Musaeum Tradescantianum was the first museum open to the public to be established in England. Located in Vauxhall in south London, it comprised a collection of curiosities assembled by John Tradescant the elder and his son in a building called The Ark, and a botanical collection in the grounds...

.

Character

"It is rare to find a man so representative of his period as was Peter Mundy. In an age when curiosity was the outstanding characteristic of intelligent Englishmen, curiosity was the ruling passion of this life. ... His insatiable appetite for information, his eye for detail, his desire for accuracy, would have made him in modern times a first-rate scientist. ... True to his period, also, was his heartlessness ... he was more interested in the appearances of things than their implications in the lives of human beings. ... But if he was unfeeling, he was by no means insensitive; each strange item in the surprising world he had inherited is described with a spontaneous brilliance seldom to be found in modern writing."