The Totall Discourse, of the Rare Adventures, and Painefull Peregrinations of Long Nineteene Yeares Travailes from Scotland, to the Most Famous Kingdomes in Europe, Asia and Affrica... Together with the Grievous Tortures he Suffered by the Inquisition of Malaga in Spaine.

London for I. Oakes, 1640, 4to (180 x 135mm.),with woodcut frontispiece portrait of Lithgow in Ottoman dress, 8 woodcut illustrations in the text including a repeat of the frontispiece, an attractive copy in a later binding of full decorated green morocco.

William Lithgow (1852-1645?), born in Lanark, travelled from Shetland and Orkney to the Middle East, Malta, Ionian Islands, Athens, Smyrna, Rhodes, Cyprus, and Aleppo, and onwards with a caravan of Armenians and Turks, via Damascus to Galilee and Jerusalem. His spirited account of his journeys “is a book of uncommon value and interest, for its descriptions of men and manners even more than of places… it is probably the earliest authority for coffee-drinking in Europe, Turkish baths, a pigeon post between Aleppo and Bagdad… and the importation (since about 1550) of currants from Zante to England…

In his narrative about his nineteen years of travel, he claims to have walked thirty-six thousand miles more often than not found himself in frequent peril from storms to shipwrecks, robbers and pirates.

STC 15714; Blackmer 1021; Röhricht 93