Early voyages and travels in the Levant

by John Covel; Thomas Dallam

Dr. Covel was not fortunate with his voluminous writings; he got into another scrape with the Court in a book entitled The Interpreter of Words and Terms; it was ordered to be destroyed, being, as it was supposed, “in some points very derogatory to the supreme power of this Crown”. He also wrote on gardening and fruit-trees; but his magnum opus was a work on the Greek Church, which he published shortly before his death, which remained for long the standard work on the subject. It is entitled: Some Account of the present Greek Church, with Reflections on their present Doctrine and Discipline, particularly on the Eucharist and the rest of their seven Pretended Sacraments. In his Preface he apologises for the long delay, owing to his “itinerant life”, and having been “chained to a perpetual college bursar’s place”. It is evident from his diary that, when at Constantinople, Dr. Covel gave himself up to this study very closely, in fact, he was deputed to do so, for the controversy was then at its height which was started by M. Arnold, Doctor of the Sorbonne, as to whether the Greeks held the doctrine of transubstantiation or not, and a union between the Eastern and Western Churches was much feared by the Protestants. The eccentric Marquis de Nointel, who was the French ambassador to the Porte at that time, was most eager to bring this about, and as he was on very friendly terms with Sir John Finch, it was suspected that he used his influence to win over the English ambassador; hence Dr. Covel had an important task to perform, and no wonder he writes so bitterly on the ignorance and corruption of the Greek clergy. To show his zeal, the Marquis de Nointel celebrated Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, 1673, in the cave of Antiparos, with a broken-off stalactite as his communion-table, on which may still be read the words he carved:—

“Hic ipse Christus adfuit
Ejus natali die mediâ nocte celebrato
MDCLXXIII.”

The ambassador was accompanied by five hundred people—his domestics, merchants, Greeks, and Turks—and he was so impressed by it, that he repeated the experiment on two subsequent occasions. The proposed union of the Churches, however, never came to anything, and by the time Dr. Covel’s book came out the controversy was at an end and forgotten.

Dr. Covel was appointed Master of Christ’s College in 1688, and retained this position until his death in 1722, at the ripe age of eighty-four.

The good work that Sir John Finch did for the Company in getting the capitulation of 1676, as Dr. Covel relates, in the teeth of the plague at Adrianople, did much for the security of trading and property in the Levant. Attached to these capitulations is the following clause: “That two ships’ loads of figs and currants should be allowed to be annually exported from Smyrna for the use of the King’s kitchen.” Sir John Finch was the son of the Speaker of the House of Commons, and was brought up as a physician, together with his bosom companion Thomas Baines; they studied together in England, and in Padua, and when Sir John was appointed as Minister to Tuscany, he got Charles II to attach his friend as physician to the legation, and also to bestow on him the honour of knighthood. When Sir John Finch was moved to Constantinople Sir Thomas Baines accompanied him in the same capacity; they were together with Covel during the trying time of the plague at Adrianople, and frequent allusion is made to them both in the diary. They were known in Constantinople as the ambassador and the chevalier, the two inseparable friends, whose attachment to one another was as romantic as that of Damon and Pythias. Sir Thomas Baines died in Constantinople in 1680, and, in great grief, his friend had his body embalmed and sent home to be buried in Christ’s College. Two years later, immediately on his return to England, Sir John Finch himself died, and, by special request, was buried in the same tomb as his friend, with the same marble slab over them, on which Henry More wrote a touching epitaph. Jointly, they endowed two scholarships and two fellowships for Christ’s College, and are still jointly thanked as benefactors of that very College over which their friend and companion in adversity, Dr. Covel, ruled for forty years after their deaths.

§ 5.—Of the subsequent History of the Levant Company.

From the life of Dudley North, afterwards Sir Dudley, son of Lord North, and ambassador for the Company to the Porte, which life was written by his son, we get an interesting insight into the life and times of those Merchant Adventurers in the seventeenth century, who were undoubtedly the founders of our national fortunes and national pre-eminence.

Dudley North was born in 1641, and went out to Smyrna as supercargo, and was apprenticed to a Turkey merchant when eighteen years of age, with a capital of £400. For many years he lived a most frugal life, making himself master of the Turkish language, and keeping himself aloof from the extravagant and luxurious lives which the English merchants in the Smyrniote factories lived in those days. When they “procured a pack of hounds, and hunted in the country, after the English way”, young North resisted the temptation to buy a horse, and went out hunting on an ass. He was a young man sure of eventual success. On his subsequent removal to Constantinople, and employment in the factory of Messrs. Hedges and Palmer, he lived in the building itself, and looked after the bookkeeping, and gained his first credit by getting in the outstanding debts of the firm. He made himself master of the “rules of Turkish justice”, and at once set about to institute five hundred claims in the law courts. These claims he conducted himself in the Turkish Courts in the Turkish language, and won a great many of those which his employers had hitherto looked upon as hopeless.