Kämpfer was born September, 1651, in the northwest of Germany, in the county of Lippe, at Lemgow, a small town of which his father was minister. He was early destined for the profession of physic, and, after the best school education his father could give him, spent three years at the university of Cracow, in Poland, and four years more at that of Koningsburg, in Prussia. Thence he passed to Sweden, where, inspired with a desire of seeing foreign countries, he obtained the place of secretary to an embassy about to be sent to the king of Persia. That country he reached by way of Moscow, Astracan, and the Caspian Sea, arriving at Ispahan in 1684. During his residence there, he employed himself chiefly in researches into the natural history of the country; and for the sake of continuing those researches, when the embassy was the next year about to return home, he obtained, through the recommendation of the Swedish ambassador, the place of chief surgeon to the Dutch East India Company’s fleet, then cruising in the Persian Gulf. “It agreed best with my inclination,” so he says in the preface to his work on Japan, “to undertake a further journey, and I chose rather to lead the restless and troublesome life of a traveller, than by coming home to subject myself to a share in that train of calamities my native country was then involved in. Therefore, I took my leave of the ambassador and his retinue (who did me the honor to attend me a mile out of Ispahan) with a firm resolution to spend some years longer in seeing other Eastern courts, countries, and nations. I was never used to receive large supplies of money from home. ’T was by my own industry I had till then supported myself, and the very same means maintained me afterwards, as long as I stayed abroad, and enabled me to serve the Dutch East India Company, though in a less honorable employment. “This offspring of Japhet enjoys, more than any other European nation, the blessing of Noah to live in the tents of Shem, and to have Canaan for their servant. God hath so blessed their valor and conduct, that they have enlarged their trade, conquests and possessions, throughout Asia, to the very extremities of the East, and there hath never been wanting among them a succession of prudent and able men, who have promoted their interests and welfare to the utmost of their capacity. But to come to the point. It was by the gracious leave, and under the protection of this honorable Company, that I have often obtained my end in the Indies, and have had the satisfaction at last to see the remote empire of Japan, and the court of its powerful monarch.”