Note on a Nineteenth Century Painting of the Sacred Precinct in Mecca

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Tom Goodrich published the results of valuable research in early Ottoman cartography, showing how some Turks imagined the New World in the sixteenth century. In what follows I hope to throw faint light onto another terra incognita: how some New Englanders in the nineteenth century might have imagined a distant corner of the Old World. My maternal grandparents spent their summers in a house in Chatham, Massachusetts, at the “elbow” of Cape Cod. I have many fond memories of vacations there: I tested my ability to swim, took long walks on two very different beaches and learned to row a boat (an old fashioned Cape dory). Their summer home was only a few blocks from the water and a second story balcony afforded a view across a broad inlet out to what was known as “North (or Outer) Beach.” Beyond that was the open Atlantic where at least two of my forebears had sailed a century or more earlier.

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The Journal Of Ottoman Studies

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The Journal Of Ottoman Studies