ABSTRACT
Lithgow was now able to revert to his preferred solitary mode of travel. He quotes the Italian saying ‘si meglior a star solo come mala accompaniato: It is better for a man to be alone, then in ill company’; perhaps he had found looking after À rst Bruce and then Browne rather too much of a responsibility. He journeyed through southern Sicily as far as Trapani on the western tip of the island in the hope of À nding a ship to North Africa, without success, hence travelled back across the island. He was discreditably involved in an incident on his way from ‘Saramutza’ (?) to nearby ‘Castel Franco’ (?). He came across the corpses of two young barons who had just killed each other in a duel, he hid their purses and rings in the ground, gave the alarm, and later retrieved the money and ornaments for himself, a gain, so he says, of ‘three hunded and odde double Pistols’ and rings set with diamonds and valued at ‘a hundred chickens of Malta, eight shillings the peece’. This was plain theft, and if he had been detected, he would have received, and have deserved, condign punishment, perhaps even execution. Having travelled some thirty miles further, two days later, he reached ‘Terra Nova’ and took a ship from there to Malta. While he was on Malta, a ship from London bound for Istanbul, the Matthew, came in, and Lithgow had a merry, alcoholic three days with members of its crew, ‘and especially with one George Clarke their Burser, who striving to plant in my braines a Maltezan Vineyard, had almost perished his owne life’. The Matthew departed, but within eight days Lithgow found a French ship of Toulon returning from the Levant but going home via Tunis. After three days he landed at Tunis, where he sold the rings which he had stolen in Sicily but kept the gold for his travelling expenses, ‘like Homers Iliades under Alexanders pillow … my continuall vade Mecum’.17
