In 1598 merchants of the City of London paid for a Present to be
given by Queen Elizabeth to Sultan Mehmet III of Turkey. In return
the merchants hoped to secure trading concessions, and the Virgin
Queen to turn the Sultan's military might on her Spanish enemies.
The Present was a carved, painted and gilded cabinet about sixteen
feet high, six feetwideand five feet deep. It contained a chiming
clock with jewel-encrusted moving figures combined with an
automatic organ, which could play tunes on its own for six hours -
or by hand to the point of exhaustion. The Present was dismantled
and dispatched on a merchant ship early in 1599. It took six months
to get from London to Constantinople. With it went four craftsmen.
They were Thomas Dallam the organ builder, John Harvey the
engineer, Michael Watson the carpenter and Rowland Buckett the
painter. Dallam was just twenty four years old. On their odyssey
they encountered storms, volcanoes, exotic animals, foreign food,
good wine, pirates, brigands, Moors, Turks, Greeks, Jews, beautiful
women, barbarous men, kings and pashas, armies on the march,
janissaries, eunuchs, slaves, dwarves and finally the most powerful
man in the known world, the Great Turk himself. Faithfully
translated into modern prose, unembellished and unedited, this
illuminating historical source reads as if its Elizabethan author
were alive today.
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