This volume pairs two English diaries separated by seventy years, both written by men attached to the Levant Company. Thomas Dallam, a mechanical engineer, recounts his 1599-1600 journey to deliver a specially built organ to Sultan Mehmed III; his narrative moves briskly through sea voyages, audiences at the Topkapi Palace, and the instrument's installation. John Covel, a chaplain and later a naturalist, offers a far more granular record of his 1670-1679 residence in Constantinople, dwelling on Orthodox liturgy, social hierarchy, and the material culture of the city. The editor, J. Theodore Bent, frames these texts as complementary evidence of early English engagement with the Ottoman world, though the diarists' voices remain strikingly distinct.

Dallam's Organ and the Pace of Narrative

Dallam writes in a forward-driven style, matching the urgency of his mission. His diary opens with the organ's construction and loading, then follows the voyage through storms and stops at Zante and Chios. The pace slows only when he describes the palace audience: the sultan's silence, the organ's performance, and the gifts exchanged. Bent notes that Dallam's account is 'the only detailed narrative of the presentation of an organ to a Turkish sultan,' but the diary's value lies equally in its tempo—quick during travel, deliberate at moments of ceremony. The engineer's eye for mechanical detail surfaces in passing, as when he records the organ's dimensions or the number of bellows, but he never lingers on explanation.

Covel's Ethnographic Eye

Covel's diary, by contrast, moves at a meditative pace. He devotes pages to a single Holy Week ritual, noting the patriarch's hand gesture—'the thumb of his right hand crosse the ring finger, the fore finger streight, the middle finger bending'—and interpreting it as a cipher for I.C. X.C. He records the scramble for foot-washing water, the hierarchy of Moldavian and Wallachian princes, and the economics of church debt. His sentences are long, packed with parenthetical Greek terms and monetary conversions. Where Dallam reports events, Covel dissects them. The editor's extracts preserve this density, though Bent warns that Covel's original manuscripts 'contain a vast amount of matter not suitable for publication'—a hint at the chaplain's unfiltered curiosity.

Shifts in Voice Across the Volume

The juxtaposition of the two diaries creates a deliberate change in register. Dallam's prose is plain and episodic, often beginning entries with 'The 5th day we sailed' or 'This morning we came to anchor.' Covel's is analytical, sometimes weary: he notes that the two princes 'never meet together, but dispute their superiority, and therefore alwayes one or both are absent.' Bent's editorial apparatus—footnotes identifying people, places, and Greek terms—further modulates the reading experience, bridging the gap between seventeenth-century observation and nineteenth-century scholarship. Readers moving from Dallam to Covel will feel the shift from adventure to anthropology, from the shipboard present to the settled observer's chronicle.

Because the excerpts are incomplete, any assessment of the diaries' full arc must remain tentative. Dallam's narrative likely concludes with his return voyage; Covel's may extend to his departure from Constantinople. What emerges clearly is the contrast between two Englishmen encountering the Levant: one focused on a single commission, the other on a culture in its complexity. Readers interested in the texture of daily encounter—what was seen, recorded, and puzzled over—will find Covel's sections especially rewarding, while those drawn to the drama of a singular event may prefer Dallam's brisk account.