Talk:sight unseen

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The etymology says the earliest instance the phrase can be dated to is 1892. But I have read a passage in Defoe's Captain Singleton that seems to use the "dated" form of it, where William Walters the Quaker says: "I will not trade with thee unsight and unseen; neither do I know whether the master of the sloop may not have sold his loading already to some merchants of Salsat; but if he has not when I come to him, I think to bring him up to thee."