Touring in 1600

Another sixteenth-century guide immortalised by another's pen is Jean Bouchet, "Traverseur de Voies Perilleuses" as he called himself. Not that Rabelais, to whom the pen belonged, names him, only he applies this nickname to the guide of Pantagruel and company, Xenomanes (i. e., "mad on foreigners"). No easy task to be an orthodox guide with Friar John at one's elbow; for guide-book etymologies Friar John had no taste; only asked, "What's that to do with me? I wasn't in the country when it was baptised!" A guide to suit Friar John would have been some disciple of Montaigne, who while agreeing with the others that travelling was one of the best forms of education thought that it was not "pour en rapporter seulement, à la mode de nostre noblesse françoise, combien de pas a 'Santa Rotonda,' ou la richesse des calessons de la signora Livia; ou, comme d'aultres, combien le visage de Neron, de quelque vieille ruyne de là, est plus long ou plus large que celuy de quelque pareille medaille, mais pour rapporter principalement les humeurs de ces nations et leur façons, et pour frotter et limer nostre cervelle contre celle d'aultruy."

Others, too, like Montaigne, without setting out to write guide-books, have guidance to offer as a result of experience of life and travel; sometimes in letters, sometimes in chance remarks. Letters of this kind which have survived are many, but so much alike are they as to suggest that the fathers shrunk from explaining to the sons how they themselves had made the most of their time and fell back on unacknowledged quotations from a Gruberus. Of the few frank ones the two best are by Sir Philip Sidney to his brother, and by the ninth Earl of Northumberland to his son Algernon.22 Although the latter is nearly as encyclopædic as Plotius, it is so merely in the way of suggestion, discussing only motives and ideas and insisting on his son's freedom of choice, in general as well as in detail; with one or two remarks added that would have scandalised the guide-book writer, but leaven the whole of the letter. It is especially interesting as showing how the idea of travel as a factor in life brought out the best of a man who was a failure at home from a day-by-day point of view.

As for chance remarks: one likens travelling to death in so far as it means separation from friends, letters, moreover, yielding as little satisfaction as prayers; and whereas the wise say that death is the entrance to a happier life, there is the opposite prospect with travel, so that it has all the disadvantages of hell as well as of death. And here may follow a few more remarks of theirs, chosen as suggestive of the characteristics of sixteenth-century travel in so far as it differs from our own, not neglecting proverbs: —

A traveller has need of a falcon's eye, an ass's ears, a monkey's face, a merchant's words, a camel's back, a hog's mouth, a deer's feet. And the traveller to Rome – the back of an ass, the belly of a hog, and a conscience as broad as the king's highway.

Line your doublet with taffetie; taffetie is lice-proof.

Never journey without something to eat in your pocket, if only to throw to dogs when attacked by them.

Carry a note-book and red crayon (i. e., lead pencils were not in regular use).

When going by coach, avoid women, especially old women; they always want the best places.

At sea, remove your spurs; sailors make a point of stealing them from those who are being sea-sick. Keep your distance from them in any case; they are covered with vermin.

In an inn-bedroom which contains big pictures, look behind the latter to see they do not conceal a secret door, or a window.

Women should not travel at all and married men not much.

CHAPTER III

ON THE WATER

Chi può venire per mare non è lontano.

Paolo Sarpi, 1608.23

Hentzner, in his preface, acknowledges that the troubles of a traveller are great and finds only two arguments to countervail them: that man is born unto trouble, and that Abraham had orders to travel direct from God. Abraham, however, did not have to cross the Channel. Otherwise, perhaps, the prospect of sacrificing himself as well as his only son Isaac, would have brought to light a flaw in his obedience. There was, it is true, the chance of crossing from Dover to Calais in four hours, but the experiences of Princess Cecilia, already related, were no less likely. In 1610 two Ambassadors waited at Calais fourteen days before they could make a start, and making a start by no means implied arriving – at least, not at Dover; one gentleman, after a most unhappy night, found himself at Nieuport next morning and had to wait three days before another try could be made. Yet another, who had already sailed from Boulogne after having waited six hours for the tide, accomplished two leagues, been becalmed for nine or ten hours, returned to Boulogne by rowing-boat, and posted to Calais, found no wind to take him across there and had to charter another rowing-boat at sunset on Friday, reaching Dover on Monday between four and five A. M. It was naturally a rare occurrence to go the whole distance by small boat, because of the risk. Lord Herbert of Cherbury was the most noteworthy exception; after he had made three attempts from Brill and covered distances which varied from just outside the harbour to half-way, arriving at Brill again, however, each time, he went by land to Calais, where the sea was so dangerous that no one would venture, no one except one old fisherman, whose boat, he himself owned, was one of the worst in the harbour, but, on the other hand, he did not mind whether he lived or died.

But finishing the crossing by rowing-boat was a very ordinary experience because of the state of the harbours. Calais was the better of the two, yet it sometimes happened that passengers had to be carried ashore one hundred yards or more because not even boats could approach. In 1576 an ambassador to France complains that Dover harbour is in such utter ruin that he will cross elsewhere in future; in 1580 Sir Walter Ralegh procured reform, which was perpetually in need of renewal. In time a stone pier was built, small, and dry at low water, as indeed the whole harbour was; the entrance was narrow and kept from being choked up only by means of a gate which let out the water with a rush at low tide. The ancient, quicker route to Wissant, more or less the route which "Channel-swimmers" make for now, had begun to be abandoned when the English obtained a port of their own on the opposite coast, and had been completely dropped by this time. Boulogne had no cross-channel passenger traffic worth mentioning. Dieppe, on the contrary, was as much used as Calais, the corresponding harbour being, not Newhaven, but Rye, which was also the objective on the rarer occasions when the starting-place was Havre. So unusual was the Havre-Southampton passage that among the suspicious circumstances alleged against a Genoese who landed in 1599, one was his choice of this way across.24

Going by the North Sea the usual havens were Gravesend, and Flushing or Brill, in spite of Brill's shallow harbour-bar, passed on one occasion with only two feet of water under the keel when "Mr. Thatcher, a merchant of London, who had goods therein, was so apprehensive that he changed colours and said he was undone, 'Oh Lord,' and such-like passionate expressions." Harwich was reputed so dangerous a harbour that when Charles I's mother-in-law came to visit her daughter in 1638 and put in there, she found no one to receive her; it not being thought within possibility to expect her to land there. The fact that she did was probably due to her having been seven days at sea in a storm; not that the courtier-chronicler of her voyage allows she was any the worse for it, although he owns of her ladies that "they touched the hearts of the beholders more with pity than with love." A forty-eight-hour passage was nothing to grumble at: Arthur Wilson, the historian of James I's reign, left Brill in an old twenty-five-ton mussel-boat, at the bottom of which he lay, sea-sick and expecting drowning, for three days and three nights until he came ashore at – the Hague.

Among many other experiences of the kind, that25 of John Chamberlain, the letter-writer, may be chosen. Setting out from Rotterdam, after twenty-four hours' sailing, he had been within sight of Ostend and was back again at Rotterdam. There he stayed a fortnight, putting to sea at intervals and coming back. Then the wind came fair for Calais, but veered round rather too soon and the first haven they could reach was that of Yarmouth, after two days' running before the storm. It was low tide; they went aground while entering, and for some time it looked like being lost with all hands, but getting off again, the waves took the ship against the piles at the head of the breakwater. Some thought it worth while trying to jump ashore, three of whom the others saw drowned and one crushed to death against the piles. But in the end the rest landed safely in boats, and buried the dead; and Chamberlain himself, after a winter evening spent wandering about Newmarket heath in the rain and wind through the guide losing his way, arrived in town at 11 P. M. on the twentieth day after first leaving Rotterdam.

On this route the ownership of the vessel might be guessed by the amount of swearing that went on. Dutch ships had no prayers said, rarely carried a chaplain even on the longest voyages, but swearers were fined, even if it was no more than naming the devil. Psalm-singing would go on on any vessel manned by Protestants on account of the popularity of the music written for the Reformers, but if a vessel had a garland of flowers hanging from its mainmast that again would show it a Dutchman; it meant that the captain was engaged to be married.

The passage-boats were about sixty feet long, which then meant a tonnage of about the same figure, and had a single deck, beneath which the passengers might find shelter if the merchandise left them room. The complement of passengers may be taken as seventy. The highest total of passengers I have found mentioned for one ship is two thousand, of whom Della Valle was one, but that was when he sailed from Constantinople to Cairo, the vessels employed on official business between those two places exclusively being the largest in the world at that date. Apart from these, the maximum tonnage was about twelve hundred, and a 500-ton ship was reckoned a large one; an average Venetian merchantman measured about 90 feet × 20 × 16, a tonnage, that is, of about 166, according to English sixteenth-century reckoning.26 The French traveller Villamont says the ship in which he left Venice in 1589 and which he was told cost fifty thousand crowns (say eighty-five thousand pounds of our money) to build and equip, had for its greatest length 188 feet and greatest breadth 59 feet.

As for accommodation in the larger boats, neither Dallam nor Moryson changed their clothes or slept in a bed while at sea, and there is no reason to suppose that any one else did who travelled under ordinary conditions. Cabins were to be had in the high-built sterns; even in Villamont's moderate-sized ship there were eight decks astern, the fourth from the keel, the captain's dining-room, accommodating thirty-nine persons at meal-times, all of whom, it is clear enough, slept in cabins above or below. Moryson, however, refused a cabin, preferring to sleep in a place where there was cover overhead but none at the sides.

The chief exception to ordinary conditions was the pilgrim-ship for Jerusalem in the days, which ceased during this period, when special galleys ran from Venice to Jaffa and back, in the summer. Here alone could the passenger have the upper hand, since these galleys alone were passenger-boats primarily. The captain would be willing, if asked, to bind himself in writing before the authorities at Venice, to take the pilgrim to Jaffa, wait there and bring him back, call at certain places to take in fresh water, meat, and bread, carry live hens, a barber-surgeon, and a physician, avoid unhealthy ports such as Famagosta, stay nowhere longer than three days without the consent of the pilgrim, receive no merchandise which might inconvenience or delay him, provide two hot meals a day and good wine, and guarantee the safety of any belongings he might leave in the galley during his absence at Jerusalem. No agreements, however, seem to have insured the pilgrim against starvation diet, and therefore it was prudent to store a chest with victuals, especially delicacies, and lay in wine; for, Venice once left behind, wine might be dearer or even unobtainable. Taking victuals implied buying a frying-pan, dishes, big and little, of earthenware or wood, a stew-pot, and a twig-basket to carry when he landed and went shopping. Likewise a lantern and candles and bedding, which might be purchased near St. Mark's; a feather-bed, mattress, two pillows, two pairs of sheets, a small quilt, for three ducats; and all of these will be bought back at the end of the voyage at half price. Medicines he must on no account forget. Care had to be taken, too, in choosing a position, not below deck, which is "smouldering hot and stinking," but above, where both shelter, light, and air were to be had; this, of course, for the benefit of such as were unable to secure a place in the stern-cabins.

If the passenger did not find himself in a position to get these counsels of perfection carried out, this is what he would experience: "In the galley all sorts of discomfort are met with: to each of us was allotted a space three spans broad, and so we lay one upon another, suffering greatly from the heat in summer and much troubled by vermin. Huge rats came running over our faces at nights, and a sharp eye had to be kept on the torches, for some people go about carelessly and there's no putting them out in case of fire, being, as they are, all pitch. And when it is time to go to sleep and one has great desire thereto, others near him talk or sing or yell and generally please themselves, so that one's rest is broken. Those near us who fell ill mostly died. God have mercy on them! In day-time too when we were all in our places busy eating and the galley bore down on the side to which the sail shifted, all the sailors called out 'pando,' that is, 'to the other side,' and over we must go; and if the sea was rough and the galley lurched, our heads turned all giddy and some toppled over and the rest on top of them, falling about like so many drunken yokels. The meals the captain gave us were not exactly inviting; the meat had been hanging in the sun, the bread hard as a stone with many weevils in it, the water at times stank, the wine warm, or hot enough for the steam to rise, with a beastly taste to it; and at times, too, we had to do our eating under a blazing sun…27 Bugs, etc., crept about over everything."28 Another, after many similar complaints, of cold food and warm drink, and of sailors who walked about on top of him when he wanted to sleep, and so on, adds a fresh one, quite unmentionable, and then goes on that he passes over the more disgusting features so as not to discourage intending pilgrims.

The disappearance of the pilgrim galley was more gain than loss, but it had the advantage of more variety in the company and the voyage, and probably, of a bigger ship; Moryson's ship was 900-tons and Della Valle's Gran Delfino was a great war galleon, with forty-five cannon and five hundred passengers, – too many, it proved; in the end twenty or thirty fell ill every day and some died. And the mixture that there was! Men and women, soldiers, traders, Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Persians, Jews, Italians from almost every state, French, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Germans, Flemings. In Moryson's boat there were Indian sun-worshippers as well. In another, Moors and Muscovites. Every day in the Gran Delfino a bell was rung for prayer, when each man prayed in his own way; prayer over, the sailors, all Greeks, turned bareheaded to the East and cried three times, "Buon' Viaggio!!!" and the captain preached a non-sectarian sermon. With the Gran Delfino, moreover, the start was an impressive function; the vessel, belonging as it did to the State, being towed beyond the lagoons by thirty-three eight-oared boats, directed by a venerable signor deputed by the authorities. Once outside, however, and left to itself, it was less impressive, at the mercy of a wind so uncertain that it crossed the Adriatic from shore to shore twenty-five times.

In reckoning the length of voyages it would not be sufficient to multiply the delay by bad weather that took place in the Channel crossings by the extra mileage of a given distance; there was the additional delay due to the difficulty of obtaining a ship at all, even in the best of weathers, a difficulty proportionate to the length of the voyage. The first-mentioned difficulty must not be minimised; it was reasonable caricature for Sir John Harington, Queen Elizabeth's godson, to represent his Rabelaisian hero as returning from "Japana near China" in a "24-hours sail with some two or three odd years beside." And by way of illustration it may be added that one and the same voyage – from Messina to Smyrna – took one man thirteen weeks and another thirty-five days; and that whereas the usual length of the pilgrim voyage from Jaffa to Venice was under five weeks, one band of pilgrims whose return journey was delayed till the winter storms caught them, were continuously at sea, or continuously trying to be at sea, from September 19th till January 25th. Yet another cause of delay, in the Mediterranean, at least, was the Italian custom of paying the sailors by the day; English ships, payment on which was at so much a voyage, were by far the quicker.

To return to difficulty number two, that of obtaining any ship, instances of it are continually occurring. Consider the complaint that one Greenhalgh writes to his friend29– how he wished to go by sea to Naples or elsewhere in Italy, went to the Exchange at London almost daily for a month to read the ships' bills hanging there; could find none to take him; took passage at Blackwall on one that was bound for Dunkirk, but which the wind carried along the coast of Norfolk; reached Dunkirk in four days and four nights; no ship to be found there Italy-bound; nor at Gravelines; nor at Calais; so came back: seven weeks wasted.

But it may reasonably be asked, why didn't he go by land? Well, that is a question without an answer; but for any journey where the mileage by sea was near the mileage by land, men of experience of these days reckoned it safer and quicker and consequently cheaper to go by sea. Once when Sir Henry Wotton, who exhaled sixteenth-century wisdom whenever he spoke, was at his favourite occupation of holding forth to the Venetian Signory on things in general, we find him taking it for granted that Poland and Hungary were far from Venice as compared with England and Holland; an exaggeration, no doubt; but an exaggeration that stood no chance of being believed would not have served his purpose. And it would be just plain fact to say, with regard to Danzig and Paris, and every other similar journey, the sea for choice; even from Genoa to Rome, amid all the danger of captivity for life by Barbary pirates, there was a daily service of boats in 1588 according to Villamont; it was the more usual route. Howell, indeed, leaving Paris for Spain, went to St. Malo to find a ship, but the ordinary route was to go down the Loire to Nantes, and by sea thence.

In the same way, from Rome to Barcelona was usually made a sea-trip, although the sailors coasted instead of going direct. All voyages in fact were coasting voyages whenever possible; no landsman was more scared of the open sea than the average sailor during this period, the greatest for the exploration of oceans that the world has ever seen, except, perhaps, that unknown age when the islands of the Pacific were colonised. The fear was based on an accurate knowledge of their own incapacity, revealed to us by one or two travellers who were interested in the science of navigation. A certain Frenchman embarked at Vannes for Portugal; no bearings were taken, and the pilot had no chart; trusted to his eye for his knowledge; which resulted in his coasting along Galicia under the impression it was Asturias. So with the master of the Venetian ship that Lithgow sailed in; he had no compass, cast anchor at night and guessed his whereabouts in daytime by the hills he recognised; on his way back from Alexandria a storm drove them out of their course and he describes, in his doggrel verse, the sailors spending hours identifying headlands, only to find themselves mistaken. Indeed, there was no satisfactory method of ascertaining longitude at sea; although European rulers were offering rewards to the inventor of a method, no one was successful in trying to solve the problem, not even Galileo.30 So habitual a practice was coasting that if a ship was intent on avoiding a pirate the surest plan was to keep to the open sea.

But for the most part they seem to have trusted to luck with regard to piracy, knowing pirates to be as likely to be met with as storms. The two chief centres were Dunkirk and Algiers, and as the Dunkirkers and Algerines met in the Atlantic, the Baltic was the only European sea free from them, during the latter half of this period at least. In the earlier, war was so continual as to provide employment, or pretext, for the bulk of the scoundrels and unfortunates of the continent whom the comparative peace that succeeded turned loose on commerce, and consequently on tourists.

It was bad enough in the Channel before this. In 1573 the Earl of Worcester crossed with a gold salver as a christening present for Charles IX's daughter; the ship was attacked by pirates; eleven of his suite were killed or wounded and property worth five hundred pounds stolen. In 1584, Mr. Oppenheim states, the French ambassador complained that in the two preceding years English pirates had plundered Frenchmen of merchandise to the value of two hundred thousand crowns: the answer was that the English had lost more than that through French pirates. So in 1600 we find the Mayor of Exeter writing up about the Dunkirkers, "scarce one bark in five escapeth these cormorants."31 Repression that was exercised by the governments on both sides of the Channel had the effect of making the Mediterranean worse than it had been, for the pirates, especially English, not only followed their occupation there themselves but taught the Turks and Algerines far more about navigation than the latter would have discovered by themselves. Which, by the way, had a further result adverse to English tourists, for the Italian states that had previously been favourably inclined to England, Venice and Tuscany, both of European importance, grew unfriendly; Tuscany becoming definitely hostile.

But the state of the Mediterranean for men of all nationalities was such that it would probably be difficult to find a detailed account of a voyage during the first half of the seventeenth century which does not mention meeting an enemy. What might happen then is best illustrated in the experience of a Russian monk of rather earlier date: "half-way, a ship full of pirates attacked us. When their cannon had shattered our boat, they leapt on board like savage beasts and cut the ship's master to pieces and threw him into the sea, and took all they found. As for me, they gave me a blow in the stomach with the butt-end of a lance, saying 'Monk, give us a ducat or a gold piece.' I swore by the living God, by God Almighty, that I had none such. They bereft me of my all, leaving me nought but my frock and took to running all about the ship like wild beasts waving glittering lances, swords and axes…"

Storms also were accompanied by incidents out of a present-day tourist's experience, to a greater extent than would readily be imagined; and this especially in the Mediterranean, where a large proportion of the sailors were Greeks with vivid superstitions, and courage but one day a year, that of St. Catherine, the patroness of sailors, when nobody ever got drowned. Other days it required very little danger to make them abandon themselves to despair and to all the signs of it which were most likely to distract and demoralise the more level-headed; one by one their relics would go overboard in attempted propitiation, and the tourist was in danger of following in person if he was suspected of being no good Christian and therefore the probable cause of the storm. Such is the recorded experience of more than one; and a priest who had been in the habit of reading a Bible was threatened with ejection as a sorcerer, and his books with him; fortunately the storm abated when the sailors had reached that point.