A Siamese embassy lost in Africa, 1686

by Guy Tachard

"This long-forgotten tale of the shipwreck off the coasts of Africa of a Siamese embassy to Lisbon in 1686 lay buried in the text of a French book printed three hundred years ago. The author of the text was the intrepid and intriguing Jesuit Tachard, who published accounts of his first two journeys to Siam. In his second book, written when he was King Narai's personal envoy to Louis XIV and Pope Innocent XI, Tachard relates the account of the shipwreck as told by one of its survivors, Ok-khun Chamnan Chaichong, who was accompanying Tachard on his return to France." "Ok-khun Chamnan, during his odyssey as part of the aborted embassy to Portugal, spent nearly a year in Goa, where he learnt Portuguese; a month travelling overland from Cape Agulhas, the southernmost tip of Africa, to the Cape of Good Hope; four months at the Dutch settlement at the Cape; six months in Batavia; and several months at sea on this journey. On his return to Siam in 1687 he was ordered to greet the French envoys