Pieter van Woensel (doctor)

In 1782, he published Précis, a much reworked French summary of Abbot Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes, followed by a further abridged and paraphrased Dutch version, as Tafreel, in 1784.

After a stay in Erzurum, he crossed the Pontic Mountains in bad weather, and spent several days in plague-ridden Trabzon on the Black Sea, before sailing to the Crimea, where he settled in Sevastopol for two years as a navy doctor in Russian service.

To deter the superior Russians, the Turks, thus Van Woensel, were allowed to threaten biological warfare, in the form of deliberately spreading the plague.

Apart from his work on Raynal, he also translated Thomas Paine, The decline and fall of the English system of finance into Dutch, as De daaling en val van het systhema der Engelsche finantiën (1796).

[5] In 1802, Van Woensel, a Cervantista by his own admission, published a much abridged and reworked Dutch version (based on a hitherto unknown source) of Don Quixote.

With illustrations assumed to be by his own hand, and written in modern, lively Dutch, it finally replaced Lambert van den Bosch’s antiquated classic after almost 150 years.