Jan Janszoon Struys

Jan Janszoon Struys (1630–1694) was a Dutch explorer whose account of his world travels, The perillous and most unhappy voyages of John Struys, was published in Amsterdam in 1676. Struys was most likely illiterate and the book was produced with the help of a ghostwriter, but the publishers deemed it more profitable to have Struys on the title page as an author. The book indeed became a bestseller, and is also of worth in assessing events and customs outside Western Europe, including Russia and parts Asia, and gives insight into marketing strategies in the publishing industry of the late 17th century.

Background The perillous and most unhappy voyages recounts Struys's travels: to Asia between 1647 and 1651, in the Mediterranean (in Venetian service, fighting the Ottoman Empire) between 1656 and 1657, to the Caspian Sea in Russian service in 1668, and to the East (Batavia, Dutch East Indies) in 1672–1673. The book was a bestseller and was translated in various European languages, and made Jan Struys famous. A French version (in three volumes) appeared in Amsterdam in 1681. The book was translated in German a number of times, including in 1678 (by Van Meurs in Amsterdam) and, abridged, in Zurich in 1679, when travel adventures set in Asia were popular among German readers. A translation in English appeared in 1683, at a time when the tourism industry for the wealthy began.

Struys's supposed autobiography show glaring omissions: his youth is not described and we meet Struys only at age 17, and no details are provided for the decade he spent in The Netherlands between the second and third voyage. While these omissions, coupled with a lack of consistency in style, might provide evidence for the author's low literacy (as a sailor he wouldn't be expected to be literate, and documentary evidence from marriage records proves his illiteracy), according to historian Kees Boterbloem they actually suggest a specific marketing strategy: an unnamed ghostwriter producing a text based on the adventures of a lower-class, illiterate, but experienced traveler.

In 1660, living as a merchant in Moscow, he provided evidence for the popularity at the time of the kaftan among the Russians.