PBEFACE. 
belonging to one who wishes to be profoundly anony¬ 
mous.” In this view, should there be any thing that 
strikes the reader as very good in the volume, he can 
not do better than to look at the title-page, and give 
credit accordingly; but where it appears to him that 
there is any thing very bad in it, he will greatly oblige 
me by regarding it as the production of the gentleman 
who figures in the conversations with Yusef. 
Written without any other purpose than that of de¬ 
scribing faithfully what fell under my own observation, 
it may be that the design is not sufficiently apparent; 
yet if, on the whole, from the general tenor, a more 
liberal feeling should be encouraged respecting the 
customs and prejudices of the uncivilized world, and 
a clearer sense of our own weaknesses, the book will 
not have been written in vain. There may be a moral 
also in the circumstances under which the journey was 
performed. 
Ten years ago, after having rambled all over the 
United States—six hundred miles of the distance on 
foot, and sixteen hundred in a flat-boat—I set out 
from Washington with fifteen dollars, to make a tour 
of the East. I got as far east as New York, where 
the last dollar and the prospect of reaching Jerusalem 
came to a conclusion at the same time. Sooner than 
return home, after having made so good a beginning, 
I shipped before the mast in a whaler, and did some 
service, during a voyage to the Indian Ocean, in the 
way of scrubbing decks and catching whales. A 
mutiny occurred at the island of Zanzibar, where I 
sold myself out of the vessel for thirty dollars and a 
chest of old clothes ; and spent three months very 
pleasantly at the consular residence, in the vicinity of 
