Supplementing and completing Whaley’s

The second additional MS. has an interest and importance of quite another kind, being an independent account of the Journey to Jerusalem written by Capt. Hugh Moore, Buck Whaley’s travelling companion from Gibraltar to the Holy City, and from thence back to Dublin. This MS. was written on board ship, as the writer mentions, and it has been preserved in the author’s family ever since. Mr. H. Armytage Moore, of Rowal lane, co. Down, the grandson of the writer, has generously lent it to me for the purpose of supplementing and completing Whaley’s own account of this portion of the Memoirs.

A peculiar value is given to this MS. by the fact that in it there is no attempt to conceal the names of the persons with whom the travellers came in contact ; and with its assistance I have been enabled to fill up a large number of blanks which occur in Whaley’s narrative, or to confirm conjectural additions which I had already made from other sources of information. Some extracts from the original will be found in the Appendix. It commences at Gibraltar on the 6th November, 1788, and covers much the same ground as Whaley’s journal as far as St. Jean d’Acre on the return journey from Jerusalem. Here it comes to an end somewhat abruptly. That it is incomplete is shown by the interesting Itinerary which is found on one of its last pages, and which contains a resume of the entire journey, with dates and distances, from Gibraltar to Jerusalem and from thence to Dublin.

Quite different from Whaley’s

The language used in this journal of Capt. Moore is quite different from Whaley’s ; but now and again there are passages which show that one of the writers must have copied from the other, or that both had incorporated material derived from a common source. Moore’s account of Constantinople, its public buildings, antiquities, and other objects of interest, occupying some forty pages of the MS., is all in French, transcribed, as he says himself, from “ an Itineraire ” made by Mons. Grand, “ a young Frenchman of observation ” to whom he had been introduced by Sir Robert Ainslie, the British Ambassador at the time.

By way of explanation for its insertion, he states that he had himself been prevented from getting more than a cursory view of the Turkish capital owing to his constant attendance upon his comrade Whaley, who was an invalid during most of the time they spent there. Whaley’s own description of much that he saw in Constantinople must necessarily have been derived largely from second-hand information, as he was obviously less able to go about the city than Capt. Moore.