ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with J. F. Usko’s account of the voyage that brought him from the Ottoman Empire to Britain in the summer of 1807. It looks at the ways in which Usko utilizes different traditions associated with travel. The chapter presents the voyages to the East as a series of peaceful encounters, meetings with “masters”, “learned men” or “ulemas”, who initiate the traveler to the languages and cultures of the East. The voyages to England are recitations of perilous journeys, which make implicit use of the religious trope of the ship tossed in stormy waters before reaching the safety of the Promised Land. The chapter argues that Usko’s account exemplifies a shift from the “multiethnic, multireligious, multicultural and multilingual Ottoman historical reality of the late eighteenth century”, to the more narrowly nationalistic focus of the early nineteenth. The overall structure of Usko’s account recalls the pattern of a successful Homeric nostos.
