Nicolas de NICOLAY (1517-1583). The Navigations, Peregrinations and Voyages, made into Turkie ... translated out of the French by T. Washington the younger. London: Thomas Dawson, 1585. Small quarto. Title within an elaborate border of type ornaments, woodcut initials and headpieces, full-page woodcut illustrations. (Title cut to the edge of the border and laid down, H4 and H5 with neat old repairs to the outer margins, Q1 with a paperfault hole with a little loss, the final leaf laid down, in general the margins are close-shaved with some loss to marginal notes and borders to the illustrations). 19th-century green straight-grained morocco, covers elaborately tooled in blind, spine lettered in gilt and tooled in blind (re-backed with original spine laid-down). Provenance; William Curtis (armorial bookplate); King Lawrence Parker (bookplate). First Edition in English of a work which was first published in French by Guillaume Roville in Lyon 1568. The work is frequently cited as a source for Shakespeare's ‘The Merchant of Venice'. The author, Nicolas de Nicolay, was the French royal geographer sent by Henri II to Constantinople to join Gabriel D'Aramon's embassy to the Ottoman Empire in 1551. The 60 woodcuts in the present edition were copied from the Antwerp versions. The ‘CT' monogram appears in at least two cuts and may refer to a Dutchman called Charles Tressell. The woodcuts include the earliest western depictions of inhabitants of Algiers, Tripoli, Turkey, Greece, Persia and Armennia. Jewish occupational costumes are represented by a physician, a Jewess and a merchant. 1567. STC 18574; Blackmer 1197.