Robert Knox ( born Robert Knox ; February 8, 1641 - June 19, 1720 ) is an English navigator, a sea captain in the service of the British East India Company . He was the son of another sea captain, also called Robert Knox.
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Born in Tower Hill in London, young Knox spent most of his childhood in Surrey and studied with James Fleetwood, who later became Bishop of Winchester. He joined his father’s crew on the Anne and set off on his first voyage to India in 1655, at the age of 14, returning to England in 1657. In the same year, Oliver Cromwell issued a charter granting the East India Company a monopoly on Eastern trade, which forced Knox Sr. and his team to join the Company.
Both Knox sailed to Persia in January 1658. Their ship lost its mast during a storm on November 19, 1659, which forced them to land on the shore in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). The ship was confiscated, and sixteen members of the crew, including Knox, were captured by the troops of the ruler of the state of Kandy , Rajasinkha II. Elder Knox inadvertently angered the king by not complying with the established and expected formalities and had the misfortune to do so during a period of tension between the king and some European powers. Although the team was forbidden to leave the kingdom, they were treated rather condescendingly; Jr. Knox was able to work as a farmer, moneylender and peddler. Both suffered severely from malaria, and the elder Knox died in February 1661 after a long illness.
Robert Knox eventually escaped with one crewman, Stephen Rutland, after nineteen years of captivity. Two men managed to get to Arippu, the Dutch fort on the northwest coast of the island. The Dutch interrogated Knox for a long time and transported him to Batavia (now Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies, from where he was able to return home on the English ship Caesar . He returned to London in September 1680.
While traveling home, Knox wrote the work An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon based on information gathered by him during his stay in Ceylon, which was published in 1681. The book contained engravings depicting residents, their customs and agricultural practices. She attracted widespread interest at that time and made Knox world famous, partly influencing the creation of Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe", and also led to a friendship with Robert Hooke in the Royal Society. This one of the earliest and most detailed European sources about life in Ceylon to this day is considered as an important work on the state of the island in the XVII century.
Knox continued to work for the East India Company for thirteen years after his return from the East, was the captain of the Tonqueen Merchant , on which he made four more voyages to the East. However, he achieved only temporary prosperity and soon quarreled with the management of the company, which ultimately fired him in 1694. Four years later he became the owner of his own merchant ship, Mary , but the venture failed.
He returned to England forever in 1701 and spent the last years of his life writing notes on Ceylon and his life.
Bibliography
- IB Watson, 'Knox, Robert (1641-1720)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , Oxford University Press, Sept 2005.
Notes
- ↑ 1 2 3 German National Library , Berlin State Library , Bavarian State Library , etc. Record # 121067173 // General regulatory control (GND) - 2012—2016.
- ↑ 1 2 BNF identifier : Open Data Platform 2011.