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11 UN DEBAT : LES MENTALITES OOLLECTIVES 601

-as he is botli pleasant and well informed.” ⁴⁷ The party left Constanti-nople on 1 September 1794, taking with them Gaetano Mercati as their artist.⁴⁸

Frorn the referenees cited in their diaries and correspondence, the travellers were all conversant with the study of J. B. Le Chevalier, Des-<ription of the Plain of Troy ... (Edinburgh and London, 1791). Le Che-valier’s thesis regarding the location of ancient Troy was to be challenged by Jacob Bryant (1715—1804), a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge,⁴⁹ and it was to this contemporary debate that Dallaway and Morritt were to make a contribution with their publications based on the eyidence col-lected during their tonr.⁶⁰ The fact that they had “been and seen for themselves” the places they were writing about gave them an authority few of their eontemporaries could deny. The famę and succm which they achieved in the polemical debate of the 1790sdidnot withstand the morę scientifie, archaeologieal investigations earried out by Heinrich Schliemann and Wilhelm Dorpfeld ncarly a century later.⁵¹ Many of the intel-ligent deductions born of simple observation in the field were to be prov-•ed wrong, but at least for their life time, the reputations of Dallaway -and Morritt were Secure.

Whilst at Constanl inople, Stockdale and his friends had met two otlier Englishmen : the Sherardian professor of Botany at Oxford, John Sibthorp, (1758—1796),⁵² and the Cornish geologist, John Hawkins (1761—1841).⁵³ Together with Dallaway and the ambassador’s secretary, John Spencer Smith, (younger brother of Sir William Sidney Smith),⁶⁴ they instituted the Ottoman Club in August 1794.⁶⁶ ‘Clubability’ was