130 - Adolphe Slade: Records of Travels in Turkey, Greece, etc., and of a Cruise in the Black Sea, with the Capitan Pasha, in the Years 1829, 1830, and 1831. Philadelphia-Baltimore, 1833

Adolphe Slade: Records of Travels in Turkey, Greece, etc., and of a Cruise in the Black Sea, with the Capitan Pasha, in the Years 1829, 1830, and 1831. Philadelphia-Baltimore, 1833 First American edition, in 8vo, complete in two volumes, contemporary leather over boards, spine faded with some leather cover gone, text clean with very few sporadic spotting in some pages, overall in almost very good condition. Slade was a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy who traveled to the East during a critical period, he was granted the rare privilege of cruising with the Capitan Pasha, the Admiral of the Ottoman Fleet, he provides one of the few Western eyewitness accounts of the Ottoman Navy's operations in the Black Sea,he was also a sharp critic of Sultan Mahmud II’s reforms. He argued that by destroying the Janissaries, the Sultan had destroyed the elite military unit of the Empire without effectively replacing them with a modern military. Slade visited Greece during its transition to independence. He offers a gritty, often cynical view of the chaos in the Peloponnese and the influence of the Great Powers on the young Greek state. Slade s work was written from what was very much a pro-Ottoman point of view.