Samuel van de Putte

Samuel van der Putte (26 February 1690 – 27 September 1745) was a Dutch explorer, linguist, and naturalist most famous for his journeys in Asia, especially to Tibet.

Life Van der Putte was born on 26 February 1690 in Vlissingen in the Dutch Republic. He was the son of the Dutch vice-admiral Karel or Carel van der Putte and his wife Johanna Cornelia Samuels Biscop. disguised as a Muslim trader, meeting the Jesuit missionary Ippolito Desideri in Patna in August 1725. He copied about 20 pages of Desideri's notes on Tibet and, after visiting Dutch Ceylon the next year, he passed through the Mughal Empire and followed Desideri's route through Nepal and Ladakh The Dalai Lama at the time was the 7th incarnation, Kelzang Gyatso, but the warlord Polhané Sönam Topgyé had just overcome a coup with Chinese help. He maintained his position by permitting their ambans to station troops in Lhasa and act as de facto governors.

Unlike other visitors to the interior of China at the time, usually Catholic missionaries, Van der Putte was acting as a commercial agent. Besides an anonymous French trader who reached Lhasa in 1717, Van der Putte is the only foreign layman known to have visited Tibet during the 18th century. Waller misdates it to 1730. Nonetheless, some scholars have compiled what is known of his travels (mostly through the letters of the various missionaries) and some of his surviving belongings are kept at the museum in The Hague.

Two of his notes known to have survived were two undated manuscript maps, one that drawn of the eastern Himalayan states mentioned above and the other a map of Tibet with its places named in Tibetan and Italian. Both were held by a museum in Middelburg, where they were destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II. The Himalayan map survived in duplicate thanks to its inclusion by Sir Clements Markham in his book on George Bogle's later trip to Tibet.