Goa auction

An engraving whose caption in the original, published in 1596, reads: "A faithful depiction of the Goa market, with its shops, merchandise and traders going about their daily business. By J. H. v. Linschoten". This caption is interesting for two reasons: firstly, for referring to the image’s veracity; and secondly, for being faithful (not necessarily to reality, but more to the rendering of it) to the description the same author made of the Goa auction: "Every day a gathering of people is held, where both local citizens and people from all the nations of India and surrounding regions gather, which resembles the gathering at the Antwerp Stock Exchange, though it is different because both noblemen and merchants gather there. All Indian goods and products are sold there, so it looks rather like a market. [...] It takes place in the main street of the town, called Rua Direita, and is called the auction, which is a kind of public sale [...]" (Linschoten, 1997, p. 148).
When Jan Huygen van Linschoten (1563-1611) returned to the Netherlands in 1592, he had already gathered all the factual material (writings, drawings and maps) he needed to write his Itinerário, thus satisfying the European obsession with getting a sense of such exotic distant places, seen "exactly as they were". The intention would be to present a "faithful depiction" of the Goa market, but what we actually see here has been normalised, tailored to a Dutch audience.
Carla Alferes Pinto in the catalogue Presença Portuguesa na Ásia, Museu do Oriente, 2008, p. 28-29