Overseas travel in the seventeenth century was fraught with danger. On 3 February 1616, when Edward Terry boarded his ship, the Charles, bound from Tilbury in south-east England to Surat in north-west India, he might have contemplated the many risks that lay ahead of him. Piracy, disease, inclement weather; these were only some of the very real dangers that might have cut his journey short – or worse. Even a simple navigational error – and longitude could not yet be measured accurately – might send a ship completely off course, into unknown or unfriendly waters, or into rocks, shoals or reefs. On 11 March, as the Cornish coast shrank into the distance, and the Charles drifted into the open, unforgiving waters of the North Atlantic, Terry might have sought comfort in his Christian faith. Perhaps Terry reflected on the words of Psalm 93, which feature on the title page of the account that he later published of his travels, entitled A Voyage to East-India (1655): ‘The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters; yea, than the mighty waves of the Sea’.

For the word of God was at the heart of Terry’s mission to India. Born in 1590, he sailed for Surat as a chaplain for the mercantile East India Company, which hired him to minister to the crew of its fleet, and then to its merchant communities on the Subcontinent. Terry finally arrived in Surat in late September 1616, ‘after a long, and troublesome, and dangerous passage’. Shortly after, he was selected to serve as chaplain to Sir Thomas Roe, England’s first official ambassador to the court of Jahangir, emperor of the mighty Mughal Empire in northern India (r. 1605-27). Terry, in his own words:

... lived with that most Noble Gentleman [Roe] at that Court more than two years, after which I returned home to England with him. During which space of my abode there I had very good advantage to take notice of very many places, and persons, and things, travelling with the Embassadour much in Progress with that King [Jahangir] up and down his very large Territories.

Jahangir’s court was itinerant, meaning that Roe and Terry followed him and his entourage around the present-day Indian states of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. They eventually left the Mughal court in Ahmadabad in September 1618, travelling to Surat, from where they sailed for England in February 1619, reaching the South Downs in September.

Following his return from India, Terry, who died in 1660, spent most of the rest of his life – over thirty years – as rector for the rural parish of Great Greenford in Middlesex, a world away from the splendour of the Mughal court. Nevertheless, Terry continued to think about India, and Islam specifically, the official religion of the Mughal Empire. He wrote a manuscript account of his Indian chaplaincy for Charles, Prince of Wales in 1622, which he expanded to produce a published travelogue in 1655, entitled A Voyage to East-India. Terry therefore occupies a unique space in the history of British travel literature, as one of the first Britons to encounter and write about Islam as it existed beyond North Africa and the Near East.

In the Mediterranean, Western Christian perceptions of Islam were almost invariably affected by the very real threat that it posed to Christendom there, primarily in terms of conversion (both forced and voluntary), piracy and Ottoman expansionism. Terry, however, was writing about Islam in a very different context. His focus in Voyage was not so much on the physical threat that Islam posed to Christianity – he made practically no mention of Christian-Muslim conflict – as on what English Christians might learn from their Muslim counterparts, including – to their shame – certain religious behaviours to emulate. For although Terry felt that Islam was ‘palpable imposture’, he was greatly impressed by the commitment of Muslims to their worship, commenting that most of them took ‘more paines to goe to Hell … than any Christian I know doth to goe to Heaven.’ He was struck, for instance, by not only the frequency but also the style of Islamic prayer, with Muslims ‘confessing in divers submissive gestures, their owne unworthiness, when they pray casting themselves low upon their Face’ (sujud). Most English Christians, by contrast, merely ‘babble[d]’ their prayers, ‘as if there were no God to hear, or to judg, and no Hell to punish.’ Furthermore, Terry observed that while Muslims prayed five times daily, most English Christians failed ‘to pray ... five times in a weeke, a moneth, a year.’ Throughout his travelogue, Terry used contrasts such as these to call for higher standards of worship among his compatriots.

The spirit behind Terry’s Voyage, and his depiction of Islam, is eloquently reflected in one of three dedicatory poems in the preface to the work, written by the cleric Henry Ashwood:

Geographers present before mens eyes

How every Land seated and bounded lies

... But this hath Traffick in a better kinde

To please and profit both thy virtuous minde.

He shews what reason findes in her dim night

By groping after God with natures light.

Into what uncouth paths those Nations stray

Whom God permits to walk in their own way.

... Read it and thou wilt make this gain at least

To love thy one true God, and Countrey best

 For Terry, the discovery of a new world, however seemingly alien, was a powerful means – with the grace of God – to better understand his own.

An image of Edward Terry (c. 1590-1660) by Robert Vaughan. Line engraving, 1655. The text at the bottom of the image reads: ‘In Europe, Africk, Asia have I gonne, One journey more, then my travel’s done.’ When Terry died in 1660, he made that final journey. Accessed via Wikimedia Commons

The first official English ambassador to the Mughal court, Sir Thomas Roe (c. 1581-1644), presents his credentials to the Mughal emperor Jahangir (r. 1605-27) in 1615, in this mural by Sir William Rothenstein (1872-1945). This image was unveiled in the Palace of Westminster in 1927, by the then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. It was part of a series of murals designed to celebrate landmark events in British history. It can still be seen today. Accessed via parliament.uk

The title page of Terry’s most famous work, A Voyage to East-India (1655). Note the biblical quotations, including Psalm 93: ‘The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters; yea, than the mighty waves of the Sea’. Terry’s faith was a source of comfort to him on the long, dangerous passage to India, which took nine months. In this vein, note also the Latin quote, ‘Qui nescit orare, discat navigare’, or ‘He who knows not how to pray, ought to learn how to sail.’ Accessed via EEBO