political situation in the Near East was another cause for concern. The region Whaley planned to visit was part of the Ottoman Empire, the greatest power in the Muslim world and a place of ‘mystery, anxiety and fantasy’.48 Following its emergence in Turkey in the fourteenth century, the Empire had grown to become one of the largest and most formidable on earth, comprising Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Syria, Palestine and large parts of Arabia and northern Africa. The Ottoman sovereign, the Sultan (also known as the ‘Grand Seignior’ or ‘Grand Seigneur’), was based in Constantinople as was the central government, the Porte. In the late eighteenth century, just as European imperial ambitions were increasing, the Ottoman Empire was in decline. Riven by internal turmoil, the Porte was losing control of some of the outlying regions, where local governors had become almost like autonomous rulers.49 Simultaneously, ongoing wars with the great powers of Europe threatened to result in the loss of other territories. For years Russia and Austria had been aggressively pursuing plans to carve up the European part of the Ottoman Empire between them, and in 1787–8 their belligerence lured the Sultan into the latest of a series of costly wars. On the eve of Whaley’s departure news was filtering through of clashes between Ottoman and Austrian armies on the Danube. Meanwhile the Russians were besieging the Ottoman-controlled city of Ochakov near the Crimea, a protracted engagement in which the Turks would ultimately come off the worst. The land war between the Ottomans and the Austrians was unlikely to hinder Whaley, but he risked being caught up in the hostilities with the Russians if they spread further south. In previous conflicts, much of the fighting had taken place in the Aegean, for instance at Çeşme near Smyrna (now Izmir), where Russian ships had destroyed an Ottoman fleet in 1770.
Whaley would be sailing directly through these seas. Commenting on his planned route, one newspaper referred ominously to ‘the disturbance which affects the scenes thro’ which he is to pass’.50 Also, those in authority would have to be dealt with and perhaps placated. Worryingly, the road to Jerusalem led through the Ottoman province of Sidon, the domain of a ruthless governor known as al-Jazzar, ‘the Butcher’. In addition, the cultural differences between the West and the Ottoman world had to be taken into account. As a European Christian travelling in lands that were predominantly Muslim, Whaley would inevitably attract curiosity, if not hostility. If he could find ways to blend in with the locals, or at least make himself less conspicuous, so much the better. Whaley did take the time to apprise himself of many of these realities by reading the accounts of Europeans who had recently travelled in the Ottoman lands, among them Francois Baron de Tott’s Memoirs … Containing the State of the Turkish Empire and the Crimea (1785) and Constantin de Volney’s Travels Through Syria and Egypt in the Years 1783, 1784, and 1785, an edition of which was published in Dublin in 1788. Volney’s work was full of useful information on the places, people and dignitaries Whaley expected to encounter.51
Yet there was one final, unpredictable force that threatened the success of his expedition: an epidemic disease whose very name inspired terror. The plague had killed millions in Europe before being all but eliminated there through improved sanitation, healthcare and the use of quarantines. But it remained rampant in the Near East and visited Constantinople almost every year. A particularly virulent outbreak in 1778 may have wiped out a third of the city’s population.52 These facts were not unknown to Whaley and while the other dangers of the journey and the ongoing wars and disturbances did not concern him much as he prepared to embark, he was terrified of falling victim to the plague.
By the summer of 1788 almost everything was ready for Whaley to begin his great undertaking, but shortly before his date of embarkation he stumbled once more on his Achilles heel. Early in August he took a trip to Brighton and predictably found himself seated once more at the gaming tables. This time he would prove more alert to the wiles of sharpers and cheats and even help expose one of them. Yet the affair would have serious consequences for his pocket, and as a result of these ‘accidental circumstances’53 he would face imprisonment. Those who had anticipated that Whaley’s much vaunted journey to the Holy Land would come to nothing looked to have been proven correct. The Jerusalem expedition, it seemed, was over before it had even begun.
PART TWO
THE JERUSALEM PILGRIM
5
LIGHTNING AND THE MOON RISING
Towards midnight on 10 August 1788 Thomas Whaley found himself in an all too familiar setting. The scene: a private room in the Castle Inn, Brighton. The company: Whaley, a friend identified only as Mr Cr—r, and various gamblers and chancers, among whom was a Major Gardner, ‘a man of good breeding, fortune, and apparent honour’.1 The game: hazard, a dice game, here being played for very high stakes. As the dice rattled the flickering candlelight illuminated the players’ flushed and sweaty faces. Playing with the same company the night before, Whaley and Cr—r had both lost heavily and they were keen to make good their losses, but there seemed little chance of this as they looked to be roaring drunk. When it came to Gardner’s turn to throw, Whaley and Cr—r immediately staked large sums, which the Major eagerly accepted. Just as he was about to roll the dice Cr—r seized his hand and attempted to force the fingers open. Turning to the shocked company, Whaley shouted that Gardner was concealing false dice and that he and his friend were ‘ready to stake our lives upon the issue of a strict examination’. (W, 273) The Major, however, had no intention of opening his hand and the three men struggled violently, crashing to the ground near a laden sideboard. Grabbing a knife, Whaley warned Gardner that if he did not unclench his fist he would cut it open. This, the Major realised, was no idle threat and with great reluctance he succumbed. When the two dice in his hand were examined it was found that one had two fours, two fives, and two threes, while the other had two sixes, two fives, and two ones.2 Such are the rules of hazard that rolls resulting from such dice will always hand victory to the caster. Major Gardner had been fleecing the company.
Whaley and Cr—r were now as hard pressed to protect the cheat from the gamblers’ fury as they had been to unmask him. Most of those present wanted to defenestrate him, a not-uncommon punishment for gambling cheats. The Major himself was petrified. Expecting ‘instant destruction’ (W, 274), he begged for mercy. Whaley managed to secure him permission to depart unharmed, though his reputation was in tatters. Whaley and Cr—r then had the dice sealed inside a piece of paper and sent for examination by the Jockey Club, the body that superintended horseracing and, by extension, tried to ensure that gambling took place fairly and above board. As the disgraced fraudster prepared to flee the country, the Jockey Club commended ‘the merit of the gentlemen to whose spirit the world is so much indebted’.3
Whaley and his friend had resolved to expose Gardner the previous night after Cr—r confided that he believed him to be cheating. The pair had then feigned drunkenness in order to take their adversary off guard.4 Incidents like this give a sense of the crookery and double-dealing that went on in gaming houses across Britain and Ireland. In fact Gardner’s false dice were so common that they had a nickname, ‘The Dispatches’,5 presumably because by using them a gambler could easily ‘dispatch’ his opponents. With such widespread trickery at play it is little surprise that Whaley lost heavily so many times while gambling. Even though he managed on this occasion to uncover the deception, it did not save him from another bruising loss. The large sum he had staked to expose the Major had vanished from the table in the course of the uproar, and when this was added to his other losses in Brighton he found himself all but penniless. Ordinarily this would have been bad enough, but the timing of this particular setback, just before his planned departure for Jerusalem, made it particularly serious. To be clapped on the back by the Jockey Club was all well and good but it did not save him from the fervent attentions of his creditors, one of whom had him arrested in London soon afterwards for non-payment of £1,500. The possibility of incarceration in a debtors’ prison now loomed large. In London the most notorious such institution was the Marshalsea, later vividly described by Charles Dickens in Little Dorrit. The Marshalsea’s inmates faced starvation and even torture if they could not support themselves. As many as fifty could be crammed into a single room, sanitation was non-existent and disease was rife. There was now a very real possibility that Whaley would end up in this hellish place.