.First published in 1603, this is a popular and entertaining account of travel from Cairo to the Holy Land by the Merchant Adventurer Henry Timberlake (1570-1625), who journeys to Jerusalem in the company of fellow English travellers but unable to pass as a Greek and, in any case, refusing patriotically to deny his Englishness is imprisoned by the Ottomans. His Moorish acquaintance helps to secure his release, after which they travel around the Holy Land and Palestine before returning to Alexandria, where he is beaten and almost killed by some Turkish janissaries, but is saved by the janissary appointed to guide him. The text begins with a lengthy disquisition on hatching eggs using artificial heat generated in camel dung in ovens; Timberlake describes personally witnessing the egg baker receiving some thirty-five or forty thousand eggs in a single day. Much of the narrative is concerned with visiting holy sites in Jerusalem, including the monastery of the Guardians of the Holy Sepulchre, where Timberlake describes seeing twelve fat-fed friars , and where the abbot upbraids Elizabeth I for not contributing to the Sepulchre s expenses. In the Holy Sepulchre itself he finds three hundred Christians in permanent residence, comprising Romans, Greeks, Armenians, Nestorians, Abyssinians (Ethiopians) and Jacobins, who are circumcised Christians and Turkish slaves. This copy is from the library of the bibliographer of travel literature in the Renaissance, Boies Penrose, and appears in the catalogue of his library sale, Sotheby s, 9 Nov 1971, lot 254, where it is listed as the Leconfield copy, sold by Sotheby s, 24 April 1928, lot 147, and since rebound. .
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