Jacob Haafner

Jacob Haafner, born at Emden in 1755, was the son of a ship’s doctor and taken to the East as a boy. Years in India followed, in Company and private service alike, until the English captured him at Madras; he escaped, crossed Ceylon on foot, and returned to Europe in 1787. Out of that long passage through the East came the material of his later life, for it was only in his final years that he set down a series of travel books, illustrated with engravings cut mostly from his own designs by Reinier Vinkeles.

His Ceylon book, ‘Reize te voet door het eiland Ceilon’, a journey on foot through the island of Ceylon, was finished by his son and published at Amsterdam in 1810, with more than a hundred pages given to the island’s people and nature; an English translation followed in 1821. He wrote as an anti-colonialist ahead of his time, and died at Amsterdam in 1809, the book he had begun completed by another hand.