Van Linschooten (1563-1611) was one of the
most intrepid of Dutch travelers. In his description of Japanese manners
and customs we find one of the earliest tea references. He says:

Their manner of eating and drinking is: everie man hath a table
alone, without table-clothes or napkins, and eateth with two pieces
of wood like the men of Chino: they drinke wine of Rice, wherewith
they drink themselves drunke, and after their meat they use a
certain drinke, which is a pot with hote water, which they drinke
as hote as ever they may indure, whether it be Winter or Summer.

Just here Bernard Ten Broeke Paludanus (1550-1633), Dutch savant and
author, professor of philosophy at the University of Leyden, himself a
traveler over the four quarters of the globe, inserts his note
containing the coffee reference. He says:

The Turks holde almost the same manner of drinking of their
_Chaona_[46], which they make of certaine fruit, which is like unto
the Bakelaer[47], and by the Egyptians called _Bon_ or _Ban_[48]:
they take of this fruite one pound and a half, and roast them a
little in the fire and then sieth them in twenty pounds of water,
till the half be consumed away: this drinke they take every morning
fasting in their chambers, out of an earthen pot, being verie hote,
as we doe here drinke _aquacomposita_[49] in the morning: and they
say that it strengtheneth and maketh them warme, breaketh wind, and
openeth any stopping.

Van Linschooten then completes his tea reference by saying:

The manner of dressing their meat is altogether contrarie unto
other nations: the aforesaid warme water is made with the powder of
a certaine hearbe called _Chaa_, which is much esteemed, and is
well accounted among them.

The _chaa_ is, of course, tea, dialect _t'eh_.

In 1599, "Sir" Antony (or Anthony) Sherley (1565-1630), a picturesque
gentleman-adventurer, the first Englishman to mention coffee drinking in
the Orient, sailed from Venice on a kind of self-appointed, informal
Persian mission, to invite the shah to ally himself with the Christian
princes against the Turks, and incidentally, to promote English trade
interests in the East. The English government knew nothing of the
arrangement, disavowed him, and forbade his return to England. However,
the expedition got to Persia; and the account of the voyage thither was
written by William Par