Although Locke never ventured beyond the borders of Europe, he was profoundly captivated by accounts of distant lands—the Americas, the West Indies, and Canada on one side, the Near and Far East on the other. The narration of travel, after all, constitutes a heuristic endeavour in its own right. This fascination led Locke, as well as his colleagues at the Royal Society, to be not merely collectors of books but owners of a library shaped by deliberate intellectual intent. Indeed, during the very years in which Locke was deeply engaged in drafting the early sections of the Essay concerning Human Understanding—devoted to the nature and limits of human cognition and the formative role of experience—the first Latin edition of Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzān was published in Oxford, a city with a pronounced interest in the language and culture of the Near East.