Prologue and Argument 1 Thomas Dallam (C.1575–C.1630)
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Notes Prologue and Argument 1. Murad III, 1574–95. 2. Mehmed III, 1595–1603. 3. Ahmed I, 1603–17. 4. Koran 51: 28. 5. The biblical Abraham, who destroyed his father’s idols. 6. The Palace gardeners, who were also responsible for policing. 7. Koran 20: 97. 8. Kinzer, Crescent and Star: Turkey between Two Worlds, p. 3. 9. For an excellent and balanced study of the historical and regional complexities, see Goddard, History of Christian–Muslim Relations (2000), and the pioneering essays in Blanks, ed., Images of the Other (1997). 1 Thomas Dallam (c.1575–c.1630) 1. CSPD, 1598–1601, 31 January 1599, p. 156. 2. ‘The family is named after the hamlet of Dallam in Lancashire, now part of Warrington. Thomas was born at nearby Flixton in 1575. There is evidence to show that the Dallams (and later their in-laws, the Harrises) were recusant Catholics, and several suggestions that the family was of noble lineage,’ writes Bicknell, History of the English Organ, p. 72. But see Bak, ‘Who Built the Organ for the Sultan?’ for speculation that Thomas himself did not build the organ. See also Edmonds, ‘The Dallam Family’; Sumner, ‘The Origins of the Dallams’; and Cocheril, ‘The Dallams in Brittany’. 3. See Skilliter, ‘Three Letters’. 4. Chew, The Crescent and the Rose, p. 172. 5. See Prologue to this book, and Necipoglu, Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power, p. 155, citing from the two-volume manuscript copy of the Zubdetu’t-tevarih in the Topkapi Palace Library (Revan 1304) ff. 39r–39v. 6. See Bent, ed., Early Voyages and Travels. 7. Pamuk, Benim Adim Kirmizi, trans. Erdag M. Goknar, My Name is Red. 8. G.E. Abbott, who thought Dallam’s editor a lunatic, would not have been surprised at the truly alarming number of errors that have crept into subsequent reports of Dallam and his organ where misconceptions and errors of fact concerning both man and organ abound. Dallam’s biographer Mayes, for instance, repeatedly refers to Dallam condescendingly as a ‘little Lancashireman’, though nothing is known of his height. The historian Brandon Beck claims that Elizabeth sent Dallam and the gifts in 1595, the year Mehmed III acceded, while his two short quotations from Bent’s edition of the manuscript – Beck calls him ‘Dent’ by the way – average three 226 Notes 227 errors every five words, not counting entire sentences silently omitted, or the ungrammatical and unidiomatic rendering ‘the sight whereof did almost make to think that I was in a different world’ for ‘the sighte whearof did make me almoste to thinke that I was in another worlde’, From the Rising of The Sun, pp. 32, 113, and compare p. 39 with Bent’s transcription, p. 69. The literary historian Kamil Aydin repeats the double error of the travel writer Eric Newby, by calling Dallam ‘a cockney organ-maker, sent to Constantinople in 1599 to erect in the Selamlik an hydraulic organ he had built’, Images of Turkey, p. 49, following Newby’s On the Shores of the Mediterranean, p. 218, almost word for word. By no stretch of the imagination could Dallam be called a cockney; he worked in London but came from Lancashire, and the organ in question was clockwork. More recently still, in his history of Istanbul, John Freely writes of ‘an extraordinary water-organ’ built by ‘Thomas Dallaam’, Istanbul, p. 213, mispelling ‘Dallam’ throughout. Newby and Freely, however, manage to quote Dallam’s eccentric Elizabethan prose with- out error and get the dates right, unlike Laurence Kelly, who fancifully reports that Dallam ‘had just finished the erection of the organ in King’s College, Cambridge’ before being sent to Istanbul, Istanbul, p. 224. Dallam constructed the organ at King’s several years after returning from Istanbul, and it is likely that he received the commission as a result of his success in the Ottoman capital. Most recently, Boyd Tonkin, writing of Orhan Pamuk’s novel, comments: ‘Pamuk mentions the showy clock given by the Queen to the Sultan as an emblem of mutual amity and curiosity. A generation after their treaty, the clock stopped. Now is the time to make sure that it ticks again’, The Independent Magazine, p. 380. 9. Readers of Turkish can benefit greatly from the introduction, additional notes and appendices provided by Mehmet Halim Spatar in his translation of Mayes’s book, Sultan’in Orgu, which also may have helped inspire Pamuk’s novel. 10. See Yerasimos, Les Voyageurs. 11. A notable exception is the account of an overland journey written by the servant Fox; see Mr. Harrie Cavendish. 12. Yerasimos, Les Voyageurs, p. 11; for a catalogue of the various translations into German, French, Dutch, Italian, Polish, English, Serbo-Croatian and Czech, see pp. 159–63. The first English translation, The Offspring of the House of Ottomanno by Hugh Goughe, appeared in 1570. 13. See Parker, Books to Build an Empire, for a useful survey of the professionalization of travel writing in early seventeenth-century England. 14. In Religion and Empire, Louis B. Wright provides what is still one of the best critical introductions to the ideological efforts of Hakluyt and Purchas. 15. The purchase date is marked in a ms note on the false title-page of the manuscript, BL Add. Ms 17480. First notice may have appeared two years earlier when the British Library acquired a Catalogue of the Collection of Works of Art and Vertue, comprising pictures, books, prints, sculpture . formed by Henry Rhodes (1846), but this work is now marked ‘destroyed’. 16. Personal letter from Dr M.C. Breay of the Deparment of Manuscripts, British Library, 5 July 1999. 17. Anon., ‘Relics of the Past’, p. 380. 18. Rimbault, Early English Organ Builders, pp. 45–50. 19. Thomas’s son Robert (1602–65) entered the business and, with his father, constructed an organ for Durham Cathedral between 1624 and 1627, and later for both Jesus College, Cambridge and New College, Oxford. 20. Abbott, Turkey, Greece, p. 85 n. 1. 228 Notes 2 On First Setting Out 1. See Phelps Brown and Hopkins, A Perspective of Wages and Prices, p. 11. 2. Normally, a Venetian gold coin, the zecchino Dallam encountered may have been a Turkish variation. Three decades later, Henry Blount writes of ‘a Zeccheen Turkish [which] I value nine shillings sterlin’, Voyage, p. 98. 3. Sanderson to Thomas Simonds, 21 September 1599, in Foster, p. 181. Subsequent page references to this edition are given as ‘in Foster’, except when I have quoted directly from Sanderson’s manuscript, BL MS Lansdowne 241. 4. See, for example, the letter from Richard Staper and Edward Homden to Robert Cecil trying to get him to intercede on their behalf with the Queen to send a present to the new Sultan; 6 December 1595, CSPD, 1590–98, p. 486. The officers of the Levant Company repeated the request a year later with greater urgency. 5. See ‘The Travailes of John Mildenhall’, in Purchas, 2: 297–304. 6. John Mildenhall names the captain as Richard Parsons, who had previously made the trip as captain of the Great Susan, see in Purchas, 2: 297; and see Foster, ed., Early Travels in India, p. 52. The Hector was next commissioned as part of the fleet sent to the East Indies, on which voyage her purser was one George Parsons, with John Middleton captain; see Stevens, ed., Dawn of British Trade, pp. 33, 94, 100, 121, 154. 7. While in Istanbul, Buckett was commissioned by Henry Lello to paint a portrait of Queen Elizabeth for a gift to the Sultan’s mother. On return to England, he was employed by Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, on decorations to Salisbury House and Hatfield House between 1608 and 1612, becoming one of the most notable painter- stainers of his generation; see Croft-Murray, Decorative Painting, 1: 32–3, 194. 8. For Conisby, see DNB entry for his son, Sir Thomas (d. 1625). 9. Sir Dudley North, ‘Relations of some voyages and forrein Transactions And Avianas in Turky. Extracted from the papers of an honorable person deceased, with A Proposall Intended to be made in parliament in order to Regulate the Coyne, in 1683’, BL Add. Ms 32522, f. 34v–35. 10. Drabling: Bent glosses the term ‘drabler, or a piece of canvas laced on the bonnet of a sail to give it more drop’, p. 9, n. 2, anticipating the OED, which gives ‘an additional piece of canvas, laced to the bottom of the bonnet of a sail, to give it greater depth’, citing Greene and Lodge, 1592. 3 Mediterranean Encounters 1. Sandys, Relation, p. 8. 2. Lithgow, Totall Discourse, pp. 58–9. Begun in 1533, the English trade in Zante currants was, according to Lithgow, worth ‘160000 Chickins . every Chickin of gold being nine shillings English’ at the time of his visit, ibid.; and see Epstein, Early History, p. 6. 3. News that the Hector had arrived in Iskenderun must have reached the English community in Aleppo by 18 May, the date several letters thence were addressed to Sanderson; BL Lansdowne 241, ff. 308–308v. 4. The inventory for the Hector compiled for her second voyage can be found in Stevens, ed., Dawn of British Trade, pp. 15–16. On 23 August 1633, Richard Dike wrote to his brother Edward Nicholas: ‘Two English ships, the Hector and the William and Ralph . were met with by 60 galleys of the Turks and were both fired and sunk,’ but this might not have been the same Hector; CSPD, 1633–34, p. 190. Notes 229 5. The role of the Hector on her return in the action against two Spanish galleons of much greater size remains unclear.