"Francis Buchanan was born in Scotland in 1762 and qualified as a medical doctor in 1783. He made several journeys to Asia and went on to become one of British India’s foremost surveyors. His travel accounts/surveys have been published and republished in India. In this volume Prof. Willem van Schendel presents a 200 years old, virtually unknown document ‘An Account of a Journey Undertaken by Order of the Board of Trade Through the Provinces of Chittagong and Tiperah in Order to Look Out for the Places Most Proper for the Cultivation of Spices’ by Francis Buchanan, The document is additionally important as a record of British expansion in the area. His account can also be seen as an example of how Europeans were beginning to understand the world about them more and more by means of a critical use of sources of information and by experiment.