Книга - Touring in 1600

Touring in 1600
Ernest Bates




Ernest Stuart Bates

Touring in 1600 / A Study in the Development of Travel as a Means of Education





CHAPTER I

SOME OF THE TOURISTS




But thus you see we maintain a trade, not for gold, silver, nor jewels; nor for silks; nor for spices; nor any other commodity of matter; but only for God's first creature, which was Light; to have Light (I say), of the growth of all parts of the world … we have twelve that sail into foreign countries, … who bring us the books, and abstracts and patterns of experiments of all other parts. These we call Merchants of Light.

    F. Bacon (1561-1626), New Atlantis.

First, M. de Montaigne. – When Montaigne found himself feeling old and ill, in 1580, he made up his mind to try the baths of Germany and Italy. So he set out; and returned in 1581. And sometimes the baths did him good and sometimes they made no difference; but the journeying never failed to do what the baths were meant for. He always, he says, found forgetfulness of his age and infirmities in travelling. However restless at night, he was alert in the morning, if the morning meant starting for somewhere fresh. Compared with Montaigne at home, Montaigne abroad never got tired or fretful; always in good spirits, always interested in everything, and ready for a talk with the first man he met. And when his companions suggested that they would like to get to the journey's end, and that the longest way round, which he preferred, had its disadvantages, especially when it was a bye-road leading back to the place they started from, he would say, that he never set out for anywhere particular; that he had not gone out of the way, because his way lay through unfamiliar places, and the only place he wished to avoid was where he had been before or where he had to stop. And that he felt as one who was reading some delightful tale and dreaded to come upon the last page.

So, no doubt, felt Fynes Moryson, for much of his life he spent either in travelling or in writing the record of it. Starting in 1591, when he was twenty-five, he passed through Germany, the Low Countries, Denmark, Poland, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy, spending his winters at Leipzig, Leyden, Padua, and Venice, learning the languages so thoroughly as to be able to disguise his nationality at will. Returning through France, he was robbed, and consequently reached home so disreputable-looking that the servant took him for a burglar. He found his brother planning a journey to Jerusalem. On the 29th of November, 1595, they set out, and on July 10, 1597, he was back in London, in appearance again so strange that the Dogberry of Aldersgate Street wrote him down for a Jesuit. But he returned alone: his brother Henry, twenty-six years old and not strong, fell ill at Aleppo, how ill no one knew till too late, and near Iskenderún he died in his brother's arms, while the Turks stood round, jeering and thieving. Fynes buried him there with stones above him to keep off the jackals, and an epitaph which a later traveller by chance has preserved.[1 - Purchas, viii, 258.]

To thee, deare Henry Morison,
Thy brother Phines, here left alone,
Hath left this fading memorie.
For monuments and all must die.

Fynes himself hurried home and never crossed the Channel again. But he extended his knowledge of Great Britain by a visit to Scotland, and by accompanying Sir Charles Blount during the latter's conquest of Ireland. Then he settled down to write all he knew and could get to know about the countries he had seen, and wrote at such length that no one till quite recently has had the courage to reprint his account, although what he printed was by no means all that he wrote. For this reason his work has remained practically unused, even by writers whom it specially concerns. It must form the basis of any description of the countries he saw, at any rate, as seen by a foreigner, going, as he does, more into detail than any one else, and being a thoroughly fair-minded, level-headed, and well-educated man, whose knowledge was the result of experience. His day was not the day of the 'Grand Tourist,' whose habit it was to disguise single facts as general statements, and others' general statements as his own experiences.

Yet however irreplaceable may be Montaigne's subjectivity and Moryson's objectivity, it is desirable to find some one who combines both. Such a one is Pietro della Valle, of Naples and Rome. He is the impersonation of contemporary Italy at its best; of, to use his own phrase, "quella civiltà di vivere e quello splendore all' italiana," and to read his letters is to realise, as in no other way can be so readily realised, the reason why Italy held the position she did in the ideas of sixteenth-century people. If you separate the various characteristics that account for much of the attractiveness of his writings; the interest in things small and great, without triviality or ponderousness; the ability to write, combined with entire freedom from affectation; the lovableness of his Italian and a charm of phrase apart from his Italian, which might even, perhaps, survive translation; learning without arrogance and hand in hand with observation; and refinement and virility living in him as a single quality – if you isolate these, there still remains something to distinguish him from contemporary travellers, the product of gifts and character, it is true, but only of gifts and character as moulded by contact from birth with the best of a splendid civilisation, of which all the gentlemen of Europe were students, but none but natives graduates.

Still, in one respect, contemporary travellers may claim he has taken an unfair advantage. Not one of them has a romantic love-story as a background to his journeyings; Della Valle has two. After a twelve years' courtship at home, his intended bride was given by her parents to some one else. This was the cause of his wanderings. At San Marcellino at Naples, a mass was sung and the nuns prayed, the little golden pilgrim's staff he wore round his neck was blessed, and a vow made by him never to take it off until he had visited the Holy Sepulchre.

Thus he became Pietro della Valle, "Il Pellegrino" (the Pilgrim); and started. Venice, Constantinople, Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, was his route; but his next letter thereafter is "from my tent in the desert": he has disappeared over the tourist horizon, and become a traveller on the grand scale. But he returns, and has much to say on the way back. Meanwhile, in Babylon, he has met another lady-love, Maani Gioerida, eighteen years old, daughter of an Assyrian father and an Armenian mother. Marriage with her was soon followed by her death; for the remaining four years of his wanderings he carried her body with him, laying it to rest in the end in his family tomb: and married again, this time the girl who had attended his first wife, alive and dead, Maria Tinatin di Ziba, a Georgian. And with her he lived happy ever after, and by her had fourteen sons.

Another type of traveller is the philosopher philosophizing. Sir Henry Blount set four particular aims before himself when he started for southeastern Europe with the intention of increasing his knowledge of things human, choosing the southeast because the west too closely resembled England. He went to note, first, the characteristics of "the religion, manners, and policy of the Turks" in so far as these threw light on the question whether they were, as reputed, barbarous, or possessed of a different variety of civilisation. Secondly, to satisfy the interest he felt in the subject-races, especially Jews; thirdly, to study the Turkish army about to set out for Poland; and fourthly, Cairo, which being the largest city existing, or on record, had problems of its own whose solutions he wished to note, much as foreigners might come to study London County Council doings now. This was in 1634.

But besides those who were born travellers and those who achieved travel, there were those who had travel thrust upon them; Thomas Dallam, for instance. Dallam was the master organ-builder of Elizabethan England. When, therefore, the Queen wished to send such a present to the Grand Turk as should assure her outshining all other sovereigns in his eyes and assist the Levant Company (who probably paid for it) in securing further privileges, an organ was the present, and Dallam had to make it and to take it. In 1599 he set out, and in 1600 praised God for his return. He, too, was an excellent Englishman: shrewd, interested, and interesting; and with an ability to express himself just abreast of his thinking faculty. His organ was a marvellous creation; played chimes, and song-tunes by itself, had two dummy-men on it who fanfared on silver trumpets, and, above, an imitation holly-bush filled with mechanical birds which sang and shook their wings. The Grand Turk sent for Dallam to play on it, which he did rather nervously, having been warned that it meant death to touch the Signor, and the latter sat so near behind him that "I touched his knee with my breeches… He sat so right behind me that he could not see what I did, therefore he stood up, but in his rising from his chair, he gave me a thrust forward, which he could not otherwise do, he sat so near me: but I thought he had been drawing his sword to cut off my head."

The organ was so great a success that Dallam became a favoured man. One attendant even let him look in at a grating through which he saw thirty of the girls of the harem playing ball, each wearing a chain of pearls round the neck, a ring of gold round the ankle, velvet slippers, a small cap of cloth of gold, breeches of the finest muslin, and a scarlet satin jacket.

Dallam was more in favour than he liked, for he was urged to settle there. "I answered them that I had a wife and children in England who did expect my return, though indeed I had neither wife nor children, yet to excuse myself I made them that answer."

Besides the business man who became a tourist without knowing it, there were the tourists who became so because home was too hot for them. Of their number was William Lithgow, whose "Rare Adventures" is the record of nineteen years' travel, ended in 1620 by the severity of the torture he endured in Spain through being taken for a spy. Although fifty years of age when he started writing his account, a fair sample of his style is, – "Here in Argos I had the ground to be a pillow, and the world-wide fields to be a chamber, the whirling windy skies to be a roof to my winter-blasted lodging, the humid vapours of cold Nocturna to accompany the unwished-for bed of my repose." And this was accompanied by so much second-hand history and doggerel that the printer rebelled and saved us from much more of it. The trustworthiness of his facts may be gauged by his stating as the result of his personal experience that Scotland is one hundred and twenty miles longer than England. On the other hand, he visited more places in Europe than any other one tourist, besides having some experience of Palestine and North Africa; and what he wrote he wrote after he had seen all that he did see. His comparisons are, therefore, worth attention, and these and the personal experiences which his verbiage has not crowded out of his book give it a permanent value and interest to those who have the patience to find them.

All this while we are forgetting the ladies; very few in number, but three at least possessing personality, – two princesses and an ambassador's wife. Princess number one was the eldest daughter of Philip II of Spain, the Infanta Doña Clara Eugenia, who crossed Europe with her husband, to take up the government of the Low Countries, in 1599, and wrote a long letter to her brother about the journey from Milan to Brussels, bright and pithy, one of the most readable and sensible letters that remain to us from the sixteenth century. Princess number two is the daughter of a king of Sweden, who had trouble in finding a husband for Princess Cecily, inasmuch as she would marry no one who would not promise to take her to England within a year from the wedding day; for the great desire of her life was to see Queen Elizabeth. A marquis of Baden accepted the condition, and on November 12, 1564, they started, by which time she had spent four years learning English and could speak it well. The voyage took ten months, the winter was a severe one, and much of their way lay through countries whose kings were hostile to her father and the inhabitants to every stranger. Leaving Stockholm while her relatives expressed their opinion about her journey by lamentations and fainting-fits, she crossed to Finland in a storm, in which the pilot lost heart to the extent of pointing out the rock on which they were going to be shipwrecked. Finland they left in four days, to escape starvation, during another storm; crossed to Lithuania; thence by land through Poland, North Germany, and Flanders, to Calais. Even from here it was not plain sailing, in any sense of the words; the sea was high when she started; all were sick ("with the cruel surges of the water and the rolling of the unsavoury ship"), except herself, standing on the hatches, looking towards England. But it proved impossible to get into Dover and they had to turn back. "'Alas!' quoth she, 'now must I needs be sick, both in body and in mind,' and therewith taking her cabin, waxed wonderful sick." A second time they tried; and again all were sick but herself; "she sitting always upon the hatches, passed the time in singing the English psalms of David after the English note and ditty." But again they had to turn back and again that made her sick, so sick that they thought she was going to be confined, for she had become pregnant about the time of her starting. A third attempt was successful; and on September 11, 1565, she arrived at Bedford House, Strand; on the 14th Queen Elizabeth arrived there, too, to see her; and on the 15th came the baby. This story ought to end like Della Valle's, that she lived happy ever after; but that cannot truthfully be said, because of what is recorded about Princess Cecily and certain unpaid London tradesmen. Much more would there be to say of her as a tourist, had she written an autobiography; for the rest of her life she continued travelling, spending all her own money on it and much of other people's.

The third, the ambassador's wife, is Ann, Lady Fanshawe. Her travels belong, strictly speaking, to dates just outside the limits (1542-1642) with which this book is concerned, but for all practical purposes may be referred to with little reserve. Her experience was great, for her journeys were even more numerous than her pregnancies, which numbered eighteen; and being cheerful, clear-headed, and sincere in no ordinary measure, her "Memoirs" are almost as excellent a record of travel as of character.

It is a matter for regret that her husband, Sir Richard, has not left us an account of his own, but in this he resembles practically all his kind. There is Sir Robert Sherley, who went ambassador to two Emperors, two Popes, twice to Spain, twice to Poland, once to Russia, twice to Persia: yet of Sir Robert Sherley as tourist, we know next to nothing. So also of Sir Paul Pindar, who says in a letter that he has had eighteen years' experience of Italy; and De Foix, a man greatly gifted, who wished to serve his country as far as possible distant from its Valois Kings, and consequently chose a series of embassies as an honourable, useful form of self-exile. Yet of these last two and others there remains some record by means of men who accompanied them. Part of the travels of Peter Mundy, whose name will often recur, happened in the train of the former; and when De Thou, the historian, paid the visit to Italy which he recounts in his autobiography, it was with De Foix that he went.

Among the exceptions, most noticeable is Augier Ghiselin de Busbecq, a Fleming. After representing the Emperor in England at the wedding of Philip and Mary, he was sent to Constantinople (1556-1562), and afterwards to France. His letters from France that have been preserved are semi-official; of minor interest compared with those from Constantinople, which, not meant for publication but addressed to friends who were worthy of them, in time became printed. They belong to the literature of middle age, that which is written by men of fine character and fine education when successful issues out of many trials have made them wise and left them young. A many-sided man: the library at Vienna is the richer for his presents to the Emperor; many are the stories he tells of the wild animals he kept to while away the hours of the imprisonment which he, ambassador as he was, had to endure; the introducer into Europe of lilac, tulips, and syringa; a collector of coins when such an occupation was not usual as a hobby. His opportunities, indeed, were such as occur no more; in Asia Minor coins one thousand years old were in daily use as weights; and yet Busbecq missed one chance, for a brazier to whom he was referred regretted he had not met him a few days earlier, when he had had a vessel full of old coins which he had just melted down to make kettles.

Turning from the personalities to the causes of travel, we find that the class to which Busbecq belonged, that of resident ambassador, was of recent growth, and that it, and the tendencies of which it is one symptom, are responsible for creating the whole of the motives and the facilities for travel which characterise journeyings of this time as something different in kind from those which preceded them. The custom of maintaining resident representatives was developed in Italy during the fifteenth century, but it did not spread to the rest of civilised Europe till near the beginning of the next; German research, indeed, has even narrowed down the dates within which it established itself as an international system to 1494-1497.[2 - A. Schaube: "Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Ständigen Gesandtschaften," in vol. 10 of Mittheilungen des Instituts für oesterreichische Geschichtsforschung, 1889. What follows is mainly from "Les Commencements de la Diplomatie," three articles by Ernest Nys in Revue de Droit International, vols. 15 and 16, 1883-84. Cf. also V. E. Hrabar's De Legatis et Legationibus, 1906, a collection of treatises on the subject up to 1625, some unpublished ones printed in full, with summaries of those better known.] The change was partly due to the consolidation of sovereignties, which increased the distances to be traversed between neighbour-princes, partly to the insight of the three great rulers who achieved the consolidations, – Ferdinand of Aragon, Louis XI, and Henry VII, who abandoned the idea of force and isolation as the only possible policies, and attempted to gain the advantages, and avoid the disadvantages, of both by means of ambassadors. Henry VII regarded them as in no way differing from spies; the most efficient kind of spies, from the point of view of the sender; and unavoidable, from that of the receiver. The latter's only remedy, Henry VII thought, was to send two for every one received. This alone, regarded, as it must be, considering who the speaker was, as indicating what the practice of the future would be, suffices to explain, even to prove, a great increase in diplomatic movements. But what further compels the deduction is that the foregoing is reported by Comines, who was probably, next to Francesco Guicciardini, the most frequently read historian throughout the sixteenth century.

Side by side with these official spies was the secret service; bound to grow in proportion to the increase among the former, implying a certain cosmopolitanism in its members, which, again, implies touring. This class of tourists is naturally the least communicative of all, but so far as England alone is concerned, if the history of the growth of the English spy-system between Thomas and Oliver Cromwell ever comes to be written, it is bound to reveal an enormous number of men, continually on the move for such purposes, or qualifying themselves for secret service by previous travel. And while there is a certain amount of information concerning tourists and touring to be gathered, in scraps, among State Papers which concern spies as spies, there is a great deal available, often first-hand, from them during this period of probation. Many, also, would be termed spies by their enemies and news-writers by their friends; persons who are abroad for some other, more or less genuine, reason, whose information was very welcome to those at home in the absence of newspapers, and was often paid for by politicians who could acquire a greater hold on the attention of those in power by means of knowledge which was exclusive during a period when the Foreign Office of a government existed in a far less definitely organised form than at present. It was in the course of such a mission that Edmund Spenser saw most of Europe and gained that intimate knowledge of contemporary politics which gives his poems a value which would have been more generally recognised had not their value as poetry overshadowed other merits. The traveller, then, still fulfilled what had been his chief use to humanity in mediæval times, that of a "bearer of tydynges," as Chaucer insists often enough in his "House of Fame."

It is worth while turning back to Chaucer's time to see how far the classes of travellers then existing have their counterparts in 1600, and how far not. Omitting students and artizans, as not varying, the types to be met on the road then may be collected into those of commerce, pilgrimage, vagabondage, and knight-errantry.

With regard to commerce, it may safely be guessed that the absence of the modern inventions for communication at a distance implied, in 1600 as in Chaucer's day, a greater proportional number of journeys in person than at present: and the enormous extension of commerce involved in the discoveries of sea-routes must have involved an increase in commercial traffic within Europe. As for the particular forms of trade that were responsible for taking men away from their homes, within the limits of Europe, it would probably be found, if statistics were possible, that dried fish came first, with wine and corn bracketed second. The Roman Catholic fast-days had produced a habit of eating dried fish which was not to be shaken off, in the strictest Protestant quarters, directly; and it was largely used for provisioning armies.

The second class of mediæval traveller, the pilgrim, is often in evidence about 1600, usually indirect evidence; the pilgrim who is nothing but pilgrim leaves practically no detailed record of himself except when he goes to Jerusalem. Yet Evelyn was told at Rome that during the year of Jubilee, 1600, twenty-five thousand five hundred women visitors were registered at the pilgrims' hospice of the Holy Trinity there, and four hundred and forty thousand men. Also, one who was at Montserrat in 1599, was told that six hundred pilgrims dined there every day, and at high festivals between three thousand and four thousand; while another (1619) learnt that whereas the monks' income from their thirty-seven estates stood at nine thousand scudi (say, thirteen thousand pounds at to-day's values) annually, they spent seven times that amount, the balance being derived from the sale of sanctified articles or from gifts.[3 - Harleian MS. 3822, fol. 599. And Viaggi of Gian Vincenzo Imperiale, p. 149, vol. 29 of Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria, 1898.] On the whole, however, a decrease must be presupposed during this period on account of the cessation of pilgrimage among the Protestant half of Europe. Moreover, the kind of journeying which is specially characteristic of this period incidentally tended to further Protestant ideas and discredit pilgrimage. For pilgrimage was, of course, towards some relic. Now relics which mutually excluded each other's genuineness, such as two heads of one saint, were not likely to be met with on the same pilgrim route: the establishment of one such on a given route would hinder the establishment of a second for financial, as well as devotional, reasons. But when a believer travelled for diplomatic or educational purposes, his direction was quite as likely to lead across pilgrim routes, as along them. In which case he would be morally certain to come across these mutually exclusive relics, on one and the same journey, and the doubts thus started might be cumulative in their results.[4 - Cf. Antonio de Beatis, pp. 156, 157.] On the other hand the very fact of opposition stimulated pilgrim zeal among the orthodox, as, e. g., to the still flourishing shrine of Notre Dame des Ardilliers near Saumur, as a result of Saumur itself becoming a headquarters of the "Reformed" creed. There abided of course the permanent features of life which make pilgrimage as deep-rooted as the love of children, and one of the epidemics of pilgrimage that occur periodically burst out in France about 1585, so Busbecq writes. Whole villages of people clothed themselves in white linen, took crosses and went off to some shrine two or three days' journey away. The special cause of this epidemic may perhaps be sought in the pilgrimage to Our Lady of Chartres by their queen, in 1582, to beg for relief from her barrenness. One incident of this journey ought not to be left buried in the Calendar of Foreign State Papers, the only place where it has hitherto been printed. On being told why the queen was going thither, a countrywoman said, "Alas! Madame is too late; the good priest who used to make the children has just died."

An example of the pilgrim we have already met in Della Valle. Bartholomew Sastrow in his autobiography reveals a man travelling in search of work, a very unpleasant man, perhaps, but so strikingly true a picture of the every-day life and every-day thought of a lower middle-class man of the sixteenth century as not to be surpassed for any other century, past, present, or future, not even among autobiographies.

But for the man who is trying to avoid work, the third of the mediæval types, the vagabond, it would be out of place to select an individual to stand for the class in Renascence days, seeing that it became a stock literary type; vagabondage in general being epitomized for the time in the Spanish picaro. The picaro was one who saw much of the seamy side of life and remembered it with pleasure – it was all life and the true picaro was in love with life. The only enemy he had permanently was civilisation; yet he and it became reconciled in his old age: a picaro who grew old ceased to be a picaro. Meanwhile he was always forgiving civilisation, and being forgiven; both had equal need of forgiveness. Yet there is one picaro characteristic hard to overlook – his passion for being dull at great length when he drops into print: Lazarillo de Tormes and Gil Bias being the only ones of whom it may be said that from a reader's standpoint they were all that they should have been and nothing that they should not. The rest, when met between the covers of a book, resemble the parson whom one of themselves, Quevedo's Pablos, caught up on the way to Madrid and whom he hardly prevented from reciting his verses on St. Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins, fifty octavetts to each virgin; even then he could not escape a comedy containing more scenes than there were days in a Jerusalem pilgrimage, besides five quires concerning Noah's Ark. This same Pablos explains incidentally what his kind talked about to chance companions on the road, for meeting another making for Segovia they fell into "la conversacion propia de picaros." Whether the Turk was on the downhill and how strong was the king: how the Holy Land might be reconquered, and likewise Algiers: party politics were then discussed and afterwards the management of the rebellious Low Countries. There were, too, picaros of high degree, but these were all men of war, whereas nothing but hunger made an ordinary picaro fight. High and low, however, had this in common, that they preferred living at others' expense to working, and consequently shifted their lodgings as often as any other class of tourist, in deference to local opinion.

Of the fourth mediæval type, the knight-errant, it is hard to say whether it was extinct or not: all depends on the extent to which the knight-errant is idealised. It is certainly true in this degree, that contemporary fiction must be reckoned as a cause of travel. Don Quixote is not to be ignored as a traveller and he was not alone. The first Earl of Cork's eldest son was so affected by the romances that the "roving wildness of his thoughts" which they brought about was only partially cured by continual extraction of square and cube roots. But perhaps the knight-errant of this date is better identified with the picaro of high degree, and as such the class may be exemplified by Don Alonzo de Guzman, the first chapter of whose autobiography gives a better insight into the psychology, and life on the road, of the picaro than the whole flood of nineteenth-century comment on the subject. At the age of eighteen he found himself with no father, no money, and a mother pious but talkative; after having provided for his needs for a while by marriage, he left home with a horse, a mule, a bed, and sixty ducats. And though what follows belongs more to the history of lying than the history of the world, it throws side-lights. And at any rate, any excuse is good enough to turn to it, for Don Alonzo has much in common with Benvenuto Cellini.

Now we have passed beyond the mediæval types and come to such as are somewhat more prominent in this, than in the previous, centuries. Exiles, for instance. The economic changes that took place during the sixteenth century made it increasingly difficult for the equivalents for Chancellors of the Exchequer to meet the yearly deficits. The legal authorities were therefore called upon to assist, and a working arrangement was established in practically all European countries whereby the political ferment of the time was taken advantage of for the betterment of the finances. Instead of the slow process and meagre results of waiting for death-duties, a man of wealth suffered premature civil death, or was harried into civil suicide. He was exiled, or fled: he had become a tourist.

Inseparable from political is religious self-exile. What happened very often in England was this. A youngster is seized with that belief in the likelihood of an ideal life elsewhere and that desire for a change, which are characteristic of the age of twenty. The theological cast of the age gives the former a religious bias. He escapes. After a time it seems to him that human characteristics have the upper hand of the apostolic, even in Roman Catholics, to a greater extent than he once believed, and that he would like to go home. He lands, is questioned by the Mayor, reported on to the Privy Council, in which report his experiences are to be found summarised.

One class of men, however, which might be expected to provide many examples, is for the most part absent, – missionaries, – occupied at home converting each other at this date, or re-converting themselves. The chief, in fact, the Jesuits, were confined each one to his nation by order, and only in respect of their early training days do they appear as foreigners abroad. Acknowledgements are due, on the other hand, for information received, to captives set free, soldiers, artists, herbalists, antiquaries, and even to those who, so far as we know, only looked on, like Shakespeare; and to many others led abroad by special reasons, such as the Italian Marquis who felt it necessary for him to have a long holiday after the privations of Lent.

But with all these varieties of tourist, we still have not come to the Average Tourist. The type is extinct, killed by reference-books, telegraphy, and democracy. For the Average Tourist left his fatherland to get information which he could not get at home, and he wanted this information because he was a junior member of the aristocracy, at that time the governing class more exclusively than at present. In feudal days isolation was, comparatively, taken for granted, and the fact of that voluntary isolation implied many hindrances to touring. The need of acquiring information of every kind that affected political action had been therefore less realised and the difficulty of acquiring it greater. These years near 1600 are the years of transition, transition to a custom for travellers to

… seek their place through storms,
In passing many seas for many forms
Of foreign government, endure the pain
Of many faces seeing, and the gain
That strangers make of their strange-loving humours:
Learn tongues; keep note-books; all to feed the tumours
Of vain discourse at home, or serve the course
Of state employment…[5 - George Chapman, Tears of Peace.]

Herein lies the unity of subject of this book; not in its concern with a given class of experiences during a given period. Roughly speaking, in the two half-centuries preceding and succeeding the year 1600, the practice of the upper classes of sending sons abroad as part of their education became successively an experiment, a custom, and, finally, a system. By the middle of the seventeenth century this system had become a thoroughly set system, and the "Grand Tour" a topic for hack-writers. Of the latter, James Howell was the first. His "Instructions for Foreign Travel" (1642) may serve to date the beginning of "Grand Touring" in the modern sense of the phrase, while the publication of Andrew Boorde's "Introduction of Knowledge" a century earlier, does the same for this preceding period, that of the development of travel as a means of education.

Delimiting the movement by means of English books suggests that it was a merely English movement, but it was in fact European, though true of the different countries in varying degrees. The increase of diplomatic journeys,[6 - Cf. especially the beginning of Jacopo Soranzo's narrative in Albéri's Relazioni Venete, Series III, ii, 212.], already mentioned, the core of this development and its chief instrument, was common to all divisions of Europe in proportion to the degree of the civilisation attained. In the Empire and Poland the custom grew up less suddenly; it had begun earlier. In Italy, it began later, since it was not till later that there was much for an Italian to learn that he could not learn better at home. Sir Henry Wotton[7 - Life and Letters, i, 319.] noted in 1603 that travelling was coming into fashion among the young nobles of Venice. In France, an early beginning was broken off by the civil wars, not to start afresh till Henry IV's sovereignty was established. As for Spaniards and Portuguese, they alone had dominions over-sea to attend to.

In England, on the other hand, political reversals being at once frequent, thorough, and peaceable, migrations were very common and usually short. That touring would result from migration was certain, because it familiarised English people with the attractions and the affairs of the continent and with the uses of that familiarity, and established communications. Other special causes existed, too, truisms concerning which are so plentiful that there is no need to repeat them here.

But the certainty of the change did not prevent it being slow. Andrew Boorde, who knew Europe thoroughly, found hardly any of his countrymen abroad except students and merchants, and for the following half century it is the tendency rather than the fact that may be noted, as indicated, for example, by Sir Philip Sidney, who started in 1572, writing later to his brother that "a great number of us never thought in ourselves why we went, but a certain tickling humour to do as other men had done." In 1578 Florio could still write in one of his Italian-English dialogues published in London:[8 - First Fruits, p. 18.] "'Englishmen, go they through the world?' 'Yea some, but few.'" Yet in 1592 and again in 1595 the Pope complained about the number of English heretics allowed at Venice,[9 - Calendars of State Papers, Ven., v, 109 and 382.] and in 1615 an Englishman, George Sandys, leaves out of his travel-book everything relating to places north of Venice, such being, he says, "daily surveyed and exactly related." Three years earlier James I's Ambassador at Venice writes[10 - Hist. MSS. Com., 1899, vol. 46 (Duke of Buccleugh's Winwood Papers, i), 120, 121.] to the Doge that there are more than seventy English in Venice whereas "formerly" there had been four or five; and when he adds that there are not more than ten in the rest of Italy it must be remembered that he is making out a case and even then refers to Protestants only: between 1579 and 1603, three hundred and fifty Englishmen had been received into the English College at Rome.[11 - Einstein, p. 380.]

The development, then, of the English tourist may be synchronised with the rise of the English Drama and the expansion of English Commerce. In other words, the preparation for it came before the failure of the Spanish Armada; the actuality directly afterwards. But it could not have followed the course it did except in conjunction with wider causes, which emphasise its place as but part of a European movement. These may be sought in (1) the slight, but definite, advance in civilisation which made people more accessible to the ideas which peace fosters; (2) the greater area over which peace prevailed round about the year 1600: (3) the increase in centralisation in government, which decreased the obstacles in the way of the traveller, and increased the attractiveness of particular points, i. e., where the courts were held.

At the same time the increase in touring which really took place would be greatly over-estimated if one considered the evidence of bibliography as all-sufficient. Almost all that the latter proves is an increase in writing about it, due to the greatly increased demand for the written word which was the outcome of printing. Morelli, in his essay[12 - Operette, ii, 24.] on little-known Venetian travellers, quotes Giosaffate Barbaro as writing in 1487, "I have experienced and seen much that would probably be accounted rubbish by those who have, so to speak, never been outside Venice, by reason that such things are not customary there. And this has been the chief reason for my never having cared to write of what I have seen, nor even to speak much thereof." Yet by 1600 there were probably few countries in Europe in which recent accounts of the regions visited by Barbaro could not be read in the vernacular, accounts out of which some one expected to see a profit. Indications, on the contrary, of enormous numbers leaving home may be found in this one fact; that the names are known of twelve hundred Germans who passed beyond the limits of civilised Christendom during the sixteenth century.[13 - Hantzsch, Deutsche Reisende, p. 2.] What must then be the number of Europeans, ascertainable and otherwise, who were going about Europe then?

As regards the Average Tourist, however, we are not left to our imagination. He is often to be found in person, young, rich, abroad to learn. Yet – why should he, rather than his contemporaries of the lower classes, need teaching? The answer will come of its own accord if we stop to consider the similarities and divergences existent between the Jesuits and the Salvation Army. Both are the outcome of the same form of human energy, that of Christianity militant against present-day evils; it is circumstances that have caused the divergence. The Jesuits were as keen at first for social reform as the Salvation Army have become; the Salvation Army used to be as much preoccupied with theology as the Jesuits. In details the resemblance is more picturesque without being any more accidental. The Salvation Army describe themselves after the fashion of the Papal title of "servus servorum Dei," as the "servants of all"; and the first thing that Loyola did when his associates insisted on his adopting the same title that "General" Booth has assumed, was to go downstairs and do the cooking. The two societies with one and the same root-idea essentially, have been drawn into ministering to the lower class in the nineteenth century and the upper class three hundred years earlier: the identity of spirit consisting in the class that was ministered to being that which possessed the greatest potentialities and the greatest needs.[14 - Cf. Stählin's Sir Francis Walsingham und seine Zeit, i, 79-84.] And in all the prescribed occupations of the Average Tourist we shall find this implied, that the future of his country depended on the use he made of his tour.

Let us take two specimens; one in the rough, the other in the finished, state: No. 1 shall be John Lauder of Fountainhall; No. 2, the Duc de Rohan. The former's diary is not to be equalled for the insight it gives into the development of the mind of the fledgling-dignitary abroad; not a pleasant picture always, not the evolution of a mother's treasure into an omniscient angel, but of a male Scot of nineteen into the early stages of a man of this wicked world; but – it happened. We note his language becoming decidedly coarser and an introduction to Rabelais' works not improving matters. Still, the former would have happened at home, only in a narrower circle; and for Rabelais, who that has read him does not know the other side? Then, he did not always work as a good boy should: he was studying law at Poictiers, and a German who was there twenty years earlier tells us that at Poictiers there were so many students that those who wanted to work retired to the neighbouring St. Jean d'Angely. Lauder stopped at Poictiers and writes, "I was beginning to make many acquaintances at Poictiers, to go in and drink with them, as," – then follow several names, then a note by the editor that twenty-seven lines have been erased in the MS. It continues: "I was beginning to fall very idle." Later on: "I took up to drink with me M. de la Porte, de Gruché, de Gey, de Gaule, Baranton's brother, etc."; [twenty-two lines erased] "on my wakening in the morning I found my head sore with the wine I had drunk." Even if one was wrong-headed enough to agree with what the minister at Fountainhall would feel obliged to remark about such occurrences, nothing could counterbalance the advantage to a Scot of learning that the Scottish opinion of Scots was not universally accepted. Lauder is surprised, genuinely humiliated, to find his countrymen despised abroad for the iconoclasm that accompanied their "conversion."

Lauder wrote a diary: the Duc de Rohan a "letter" to his mother, summarising the valuable information acquired in a virtuous perambulation through Italy, Hungary, Bohemia, Germany, the Low Countries, England, including a flying visit to Scotland; an harangue of flat mediocrity, imitative in character, thoughtful only in so far as, and in the way, he had been taught to be thoughtful. But, read between the lines, it is most interesting; better representing the Average Tourist in his nominal every-day state of mind than any other book. He embodies the sayings and doings of hundreds of others whose only memorials are on tombstones or in genealogies; he endures the inns in silence; never ate nor drank nor saw a coin or a poor man, for aught he says; passed the country in haste, ignoring the scenery except where "classical" authors had praised it, considered the Alps a nuisance, and democratic governments a degraded, albeit successful, eccentricity; and hastened past the Lago di Garda, in spite of the new fortress in building there, to Brescia, the latter being "better worth seeing." It was just 1600 when he travelled, and the ideas of the year are reflected in his opening lines with an exactitude possible only to one who has the mind of his contemporaries and none of his own. "Peace having been made, I saw I could not be any use in France." So he employed his idleness in attempting to learn something, in noting the differences in countries and peoples. Yet he would not be the Average Tourist made perfect that he is if there was not some idea of the future hovering in him – he is the only traveller, except Sir Henry Blount, the philosopher, who notes, or even seems to note, that the chief factor of differences between human being and human being is geography.

Yet underneath all the special characteristics which distinguish everyone of these tourists from every other, there remains one that all share with each other and with us, that expressed with the crude controversial Elizabethan vigour in some lines which Thomas Nashe wrote towards the close of the sixteenth century – "'Countryman, tell me what is the occasion of thy straying so far … to visit this strange nation?' … 'That which was the Israelites' curse we … count our chief blessedness: he is nobody that hath not travelled'" – the sense of the inexhaustible pleasure of travel. Had it been otherwise they would not have cared to write down their experiences; nor we to read them. And if at times it is hard to find a reflection of their pleasure in what they have written, it is certainly there, if only between the lines, manifesting how this continual variety of human beings is brought into touch, even if unconsciously, with the infinite change and range of the ideas and efforts of millions of persons over millions upon millions of acres, each person and each acre with its own history, life, fate, and influence. If, too, in the course of summarising what they experienced, the more trivial details seem to occupy a larger proportion of the space than is their due, it may be suggested that that is the proportion in which they appear in the tourists' reminiscences.

The permanent undercurrent I have tried to suggest where circumstances bring it to the surface in some one of its more definite forms.




CHAPTER II

GUIDE-BOOKS AND GUIDES




Now resteth in my memory but this point, which indeed is the chief to you of all others; which is, the choice of what men you are to direct yourself to; for it is certain no vessel can leave a worse taste in the liquor it contains, than a wrong teacher infects an unskilful hearer with that which will hardly ever out.

    Sir Philip Sidney's advice to his brother
    (about 1578).

From what has been said already, two conclusions may be drawn: first, that the Average Tourist was given much advice; secondly, that he did not take it. Let us too, then, see the theory for one chapter only; and, in all chapters after, the practice.

It must have amused many a youngster to hear the down-trodden old gentleman, whom his father had hired, setting forth how the said youngster must behave in wicked Italy if he was to grow up in favour with God and man; all the more so if the old gentleman, whose name, perhaps, was the local equivalent for John Smith, published his advice in Latin under a Latin pseudonym, say, Gruberus or Plotius. Gruberus and Plotius suggest themselves because they are the very guidiest of guide-book writers. They, like all the orthodox of their kind, begin by a solemn argument for and against travelling. They bring up to support them a most miscellaneous host: the Prophets, the Apostles, Daedalus, Ulysses, the Queen of Sheba, Theseus, Anacharsis, the "Church of Christ," Pythagoras, Plato, Abraham, Aristotle, Apollonius of Tyana, Euclid, Zamolxis, Lycurgus, Naomi, Cicero, Galen, Dioscorides, him who travelled from farthest Spain to see Livy ("and immediately," as some one most unkindly says, "immediately he saw him, went away"); Solon also and St. Paul, and Mithridates, the Roman Decemviri, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Pausanias, Cluverius, Moses, Orpheus, Draco, Minos, Rhadamanthus, Æsculapius, Hippocrates, Avicenna, the physicians of Egypt and the gods of Greece. But there is not a word about Jonah; perhaps his luck and experiences were considered abnormal; or perhaps because, as Howell says, "he travelled much, but saw little."

Then there are those who have to be refuted or explained away: Socrates, Seneca, the Lacedaemonians, Athenians, Chinese, Muscovites, Psophidius, Elianus, and Pompeius Laetus. Cain, also, the first traveller, creates a prejudice. Likewise, the argument from experience has to be met. Some return from travel, they say, using phrases without meaning, pale, lean, scabby and worm-eaten, burdens on their consciences, astounding garments on their backs, with the manners of an actor and superciliously stupid. Yet is this not due to the thing itself, but to the abuse thereof; peradventure he shall be corrupted more quickly at home than abroad, and there is less to be feared from universities and strange lands than from the indulgent mother. Moreover "non nobiliora quam mobiliora"; the heavens rejoice in motion, and transplantation yieldeth new life to plants. And shall the little sparrow travel as he pleases and man, lord of the animals, be confined to a farm or a hamlet?

Reason, erudition and emotion having thus conquered, instruction begins. The forethought necessary is as great as if he were choosing a wife. For tutors and horses, it seems, the most that can be expected from them is that they shall not imperil his soul and body respectively. First among requisites is a book of prayers and hymns effective for salvation without being so pugnacious, doctrinally, as to cause suspicion. Next, a note-book, a watch, or a pocket sun-dial; if a watch, not a striker, for that warns the wicked you have cash; a broad-brimmed hat, gaiters, boots, breeches (as if his friends would let him start without any!), gloves, shoes, shirts, handkerchiefs, "which come in useful when you perspire"; and if he cannot take many shirts, let those he takes be washed, he will find it more comfortable. Also, a linen overall, to put over his clothes when he gets into bed, in case the bed is dirty. Let him get to know something of medicine and, "like Achilles," learn to cook before he leaves home. Travel not at night, and, in daytime, be guarded by the official guards which German and Belgian towns provide; or travel in company.

Now, the aim of travelling is the acquisition of knowledge; stay, therefore, in the more famous places rather than keep on the move. Enquire, concerning the district, its names, past and present; its language; its situation; measurements; number of towns, or villages; its climate, fertility; whether maritime or not, and possessing forests, mountains, barren or wooded; wild beasts, profitable mines; animal or vegetable life peculiar to itself; navigable or fish-yielding rivers; medicinal baths; efficient fortresses. And concerning towns: the founder, "sights," free or otherwise; what the town has undergone, famines, plagues, floods, fires, sieges, revolutions, sackings; whether it has been the scene of councils, conferences, synods, assemblies, gatherings, or tournaments.

It should be mentioned that in this last paragraph I am paraphrasing Gruberus only, and presume he is confining himself to what the young tourist should discover before breakfast; otherwise he is but a superficial instructor compared to Plotius. The latter draws up a series of questions, which include enquiries about weights and measures; about the clergy, how many and what salaries; religion, is it "reformed"? if so, what has happened to monks and nuns; how often Communion is administered; and whether strangers are received thereat; arrangements for burial. This last question would seem more in place at the end, but it is only number thirty-six, and there are one hundred and seventeen questions altogether. Then, is there a University? and, if so, may the rector whack the students? and concerning the professors, what they teach and what they are paid. As for local government, the enquiries exhaust possibilities. Also, how many houses; and what about night-watchmen; legal procedure; "ancient lights," the right to use water, executors' duties, grounds for divorce, dress, military training? Furthermore: are the roads clean, and can children marry without their parents' consent? concerning methods of cookery, and antiquity of the town; whether the position of an officer of justice is a respected one or not; concerning notaries public; and whether the water used in cooking comes from river, fountain, well, or rain; how many varieties of grain are used in bread-making; and what means have they for dealing with fires; their sanitary arrangements and public holidays, with the reasons for the latter; care of paupers, orphans, and lepers; what punishments for what crimes.

It must not be imagined that Gruberus and Plotius thought of all this by themselves: they copied others, being but two among many. Where the copying reached its most uncritical extreme was in the origins ascribed to towns: Paris, the guide-books say, was founded by a Gaul of that name who lived two hundred years before his namesake of Troy; Haarlem is also named after its founder "Herr (i. e., Mr.) Lem"; Toulouse dated from the time of the prophetess Deborah; and so on.

But to consider the foregoing instructions, and even these three "facts," on their humorous side only, is to miss much of their interest. Two, for instance, of these etymologies are but examples of what is not only continually coming into notice in books of this date, but is especially noticeable in guide-books and tourists' notes, in which latter the habit of mind of the time is more exactly mirrored in its daily attitude than in any other class of books. They exemplify the two sources of knowledge of antiquity, the two standards of comparison, then available: classical and biblical; of more nearly equal authority than they were before or have been since; and they were the only ones. So with the objects of enquiry: they are implied by that lack of reference books from which not only the tourist, but governments also, suffered; it is clear, for example, that in 1592 much elementary information was not at hand, even in manuscript, in England.[15 - See Faunt's "Discourses touching the office of Principal Secretary of State," in Eng. Hist. Rev., July, 1905.] The Tsar, moreover, about this time addressed a letter to the "Governor of the High Signiory of Venice," his advisers thinking that Venice was governed by a nominee of the Pope; and Rivadeneyra, who was very well-informed about affairs English, says in his "Cisma de Inglaterra," written thirty years after the reform of the English currency under Elizabeth: "The gold and silver currency is not so pure nor so fine as it was before heresy entered into the kingdom, for in the time of Henry VIII and his children Edward and Elizabeth, it has been falsified and alloyed with other metals, and so the money is worth much less than it used to be." Camden again, who wrote his Annals of Elizabeth's Reign early in the next century to correct misconceptions to which foreign scholars were liable, thought it necessary, when he mentioned Dublin, to explain that it was the chief city of Ireland; and very reasonably, too, considering that one of Henry VIII's officials in Ireland wrote home: "Because the country called Leinster and the situation thereof is unknown to the King and his Council, it is to be understood that Leinster is the fifth part of Ireland."[16 - Falkiner, p. 117.] And there was a certain gentleman at the court of King James I, supposed to be an authority on things Continental, who answered, when asked for information about Venice, that he could not give much because he had ridden post through it – and it was not till the questioner got there that he became aware that Venice was surrounded by water; just as the secretary of a Spanish duke in England writes that his master took ship from "Calais, because, England being an island, it cannot be approached by land."

It may perhaps seem that the absence of knowledge which is ordinary now, indicated by the above illustrations, was extraordinary rather than ordinary even then. But the fact was that, besides the available books being practically always too much behind the times for any but antiquaries' purposes, the writers themselves had so little information at hand that it was only here and there their writings were anything but hopelessly superficial, even when obtained; and to obtain them was no easy matter. There were at least three men who published practical handbooks in English for Continental travelling later than Andrew Boorde and earlier than Howell; yet they, and Howell also, each claim that theirs is the first book of its kind in English. Whether the statement is made in good faith, or for business purposes, it proves equally well that even if a book was written, it was not easy to find.

Or again, take a book which was so often republished as to be easy to obtain, the "Viaggio da Venetia al Santo Sepolcro," for instance, the authorship of the later editions of which is ascribed to one Father Noë, a Franciscan. The first edition seems to be that of 1500, and it continued to be reprinted down to 1781; at least thirty-four editions came out before 1640, when the period under consideration ends. It was not, however, an Italian book originally, having been translated from a German source which was in existence as early as 1465, if not earlier.[17 - Röhricht, "Bibliotheca geographica Palaestinæ," 118. In the London Library is a copy of an edition printed at Ronciglione, 1615, which seems to have escaped the notice of all bibliographers.] Since, therefore, its information was never thoroughly revised, at any rate, not before 1640, sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century pilgrims went on buying mid-fifteenth-century information. They were recommended, for instance, to go by the pilgrim galley, which ceased to run about 1586; and also to take part in a festival held yearly on the banks of the Jordan at Epiphany, which must have been abandoned far earlier even than that.

Still, books about what there was to notice in given places did exist just as there were treatises of the Gruberus and Plotius kind unfolding what should be noticed in general, and why. Best known of the earlier kind was Münster's gigantic "Cosmography," which Montaigne regretted he had not brought with him; and by the middle of the seventeenth century several other first-rate geographers, besides minor men, had compiled books of the kind. But the bearing of such books on our subject is only in so far as they reflect the thoughts, and ministered to the needs, of the tourist; and they may therefore be best considered in the works of those who wrote "Itineraries," which not only recorded journeys but were meant to serve as examples of how a journey might be made the most of. Such a book was Hentzner's, a sort of link between Gruberus and Fynes Moryson. Hentzner was a Silesian who acted as guide and tutor to a young nobleman from 1596 to 1600. They began, and ended, their journey at Breslau, and toured through Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, and England; the "Itineraria" being based on notes made by the way. His account of England does him rather more than justice, for there is some first-hand experience there, which is just what is lacking in the rest of his book. Practically everything he says is second-hand, and the fact of his being at a place is merely a peg to hang quotations on. When he is not quoting from books he seems to be quoting from people; and half of what we expect from a guide-book is absent: means of conveyance, for instance. This is an omission, however, which can be explained: he was only concerned with the most respectable form of travelling, and that meant, on horseback. And the rest of his omissions, taken all together, throw into relief the academic character of the book, due, not to himself individually so much as to the period. His preface cannot, naturally, differ much from Plotius, nor add much, except in recommending Psalms 91, 126, 127, and 139 as suitable for use by those about to travel, forgetting, it would seem, the one beginning, "When Israel went forth out of Egypt," which Pantagruel had sung by his crew before they set out to find the "Holy Bottle"; and being a Protestant he cannot recommend the invocation of St. Joseph and St. Anthony of Padua, the patron saints of travellers; all he can do is to pray at the beginning for good angels to guard his footsteps, and, at the end, to acknowledge assistance from one, although it does not appear that he ever went to the length of Uhland's traveller: —

Take, O boatman, thrice thy fee, —
Take, I give it willingly;
For, invisible to thee,
Spirits twain have crossed with me,

and paid a fare for the good angel. On the way, having reached, say Rome, he does not, in Baedeker's merciful fashion, tell you the hotels first, in order of merit, but begins straightway: "Rome. Mistress and Queen of Cities, in times past the head of well-nigh all the world, which she had subjected to her rule by virtue of the sublime deeds of the most stout-hearted of men. Concerning the first founders thereof there are as many opinions, and as different, as there are writers. Some there are who think that Evander, in his flight from Arcadia," etc. Yet no one could write over six hundred pages about a four years' tour in sixteenth-century Europe without being valuable at times; partly in relation to ideas, partly to experiences into which those ideas led him and his pupils.

It was less than twenty years after Hentzner that another German published a record of travel which was also meant as a guide. But time had worked wonders; it was not only a personal difference between the former and Zinzerling that accounts for the difference in their books; it was the increase in the number of tourists. The latter sketches out a plan by means of which all France can be seen at the most convenient times and most thoroughly without waste of time, with excursions to England, the Low Countries, and Spain. Routes are his first consideration; other hints abound. At St. Nicholas is a host who is a terror to strangers; and remember that at Saint-Savin, thirty leagues from Bourges, is the shanty of "Philemon and Baucis" where you can live for next to nothing; and that outside the gate at Poictiers is a chemist who speaks German, and so on. Frequently, indeed, he notes where you may find your German understood; and also where you should learn, and where avoid learning, French.

Advice of this last-mentioned kind calls to mind a third class of guide-books, intended to assist those who, without them, would realise how vain is the help of man when he can't understand what you say. The need for such became more and more evident as time went on and Latin became less and less the living and international language it had been but recently. The use of vernaculars was everywhere coming to the front as nationalities developed further, and in many districts where it had been best known its disuse in Church hastened its disuse outside.

The extent to which Latin was current about 1600 varied in almost every country. Poland and Ireland came first, Germany second, where many of all classes spoke it fluently, and less corruptly than in Poland. Yet an Englishman[18 - Bargrave. See under Bodleian MSS. in Bibliography (Rawlinson, C. 799).] passing through Germany in 1655 found but one innkeeper who could speak it. The date suggests that the Thirty Years' War was responsible for the change. It is certainly true that France in the previous half century was far behind Germany in the matter of speaking Latin, as a result of the civil wars there. Possibly the characters of its rulers had something to do with this too, just as in England, where Latin was ordinarily spoken by the upper classes, according to Moryson, with ease and correctness, the accomplishments of Queen Elizabeth as a linguist had doubtless set a fashion. This much, at least, is certain: that in 1597 when an ambassador from Poland was unexpectedly insolent in his oration, the Queen dumbfounded him by replying on the spot with as excellent Latinity as spirit, whereas at Paris once, when a Latin oration was expected from another ambassador, not only could not the King reply, but not even any one at court. With Montaigne the case was certainly different, but then his father had had him taught Latin before French, and consequently, on his travels, so soon as he reached a stopping-place, he introduced himself to the local priest, and though neither knew the other's native language, they passed their evening conversing without difficulty.

Very many were the interesting interviews that many a tourist had which he owed to a knowledge of Latin; the extent to which knowledge was acquired orally having led to its being an ordinary incident in the life of the tourist to pay a call on the learned man of the district; a duty with the Average Tourist, a pleasure for the others. And Latin was the invariable medium, part of the respectability of the occasion. At least, not quite invariable: when the historian De Thou visited the great Sigonius, they talked Italian, because the latter, in spite of a lifetime spent in becoming the chief authority on Roman Italy, spoke Latin with difficulty.

It seems curious that Latin should have been less generally understood south, than north, of the Alps, but such was the fact. Italy was, however, ahead of Spain, where even an acquaintance with Latin was rare. In the first quarter of the sixteenth century Navagero found Alcalá the only university where lectures were delivered in Latin, and, according to the best of the guide-book writers on Spain, Zeiler, the doctorate at Salamanca could be obtained, early in the seventeenth century, without any knowledge of Latin at all; while it has been shown by M. Cirot, the biographer of Mariana, that the latter's great history of Spain, published in Latin at this time, and as successful as a book of the kind ever is in its own day, was unsaleable until translated into Spanish.

Among those, too, who did know Latin there was the barrier of differing pronunciation. Lauder of Fountainhall was very much at sea to begin with, in spite of his Scotch pronunciation being much nearer to the French than an Englishman's would have been, and there is an anecdote in Vicente Espinel's "Marcos de Obregon" which is to the point here. The latter is a novel, it is true, but the tradition that it is semi-autobiographical is borne out by many of its tales reading as if they were actual experiences, of which the following is one. One day, the hero, a Spaniard, found himself in a boat on the river Po, with a German, an Italian, and a Frenchman, and to pass the time they tried to talk Latin so that all could understand each one; but they soon abandoned the plan, as the pronunciations varied too greatly.

Nevertheless, the passing of Latin out of European conversation is to be attributed rather to the growth of Italian, and later of French, as international tongues. Gaspar Ens, who wrote a series of guides to nearly every part of Europe, says in his preface to the volume on France, "At this day their language is so much used in almost every part of the world that whosoever is unskilled therein is deemed a yokel." This was in 1609, at which date, or soon after, it was as true as a general statement can be expected to be; just as much so as the assertion in the preface to an English book in 1578: "Once every one knew Latin … now the Italian is as widely spread."[19 - Quoted by Einstein, p. 101.]

It was only in the north that French came to rival Italian during this period, for the "lingua franca," also known as "franco piccolo," the hybrid tongue in which commerce was conducted along the shores of the Mediterranean, was so largely Italian that to the average Britisher, from whom Hakluyt drew his narratives, the two were indistinguishable; but an Italian would notice, as Della Valle did, that no form of a verb but the infinitive was used. If any one was met who knew more than two languages, he would oftenest be a Jew, who usually knew Spanish and Portuguese; the latter because the tribe of Judah, from which their deliverer was to come, was supposed to be domiciled in Portugal.

Another hybrid language, as well established in its own area as the "lingua franca," was Scot-French, so constantly in use as to have an existence as a literary dialect as well as in French burlesque. These mixed languages have no place in the ordinary book-guide to languages, but were left to personal tuition; yet in the lists of the most common phrases which Andrew Boorde appends to each of his descriptions of countries may be noted a curious instance from this borderland of philology. In both the Italian and the Spanish lists he renders "How do you fare?" by "Quo modo stat cum vostro corps?"

While we are on this subject we may stop to sympathise with awkward misunderstandings like that of the Jesuit Possevino at Moscow, when invited to (Orthodox) Mass ("obednia") with intent to compromise him; he went, thinking it was dinner ("obed") to which he had been asked. Then there are those, too, whose efforts were hopelessly below even this standard, such as Alonzo de Guzman, who suffered hunger in Germany because he only knew Spanish, and was put on the road to Bologna when he wanted to get to Cologne; or the Englishman who was trying to find that same road and went along staggering the peasantry with the question, "Her ist das der raight stroze auf balnea?" the peasantry replying by signs that he interpreted as directions, but the road led him further than ever from Baden. To which class belonged a certain friend of Josias Bodley, younger brother of the founder of the Bodleian library and author of by far the liveliest account of a tour at this period,[20 - Printed by Falkiner. See Bibliography.] will never be known, but that is no reason why the tale should not be re-told. "Not long ago I was in company with some boon companions who were drinking healths in usquebagh, when one was present who wished to appear more abstemious than the rest and would not drink with them, to whom one of them, who could not speak Latin as well as I do, said these words, 'Si tu es plus sapientis quam nos sumus, tu es plus beholden to God Almighty quam nos sumus.'" And finally there are those who find themselves reduced to sign-language, such as the Roman Catholics who found a sumptuous dinner awaiting them at a Protestant inn on a fast-day, when, to add to the trial of refusing it, was the apparent impossibility of making their wants understood, until one of their number, a priest, by the way, imitated a hen's cackle and "laid" a piece of white paper the shape and size of an egg!

While conversation-dictionaries existed which claimed to be useful their claim has no other basis than that of their own prefaces; the tourists do not own to indebtedness to them. But taking it for granted that primary needs must be served by persons, not books, for further acquirements Moryson recommends the romance of "Amadis de Gaule" which was being read by every one in his own tongue. Probably the conversation-books are of more use now than at the time of their publication, from the light they occasionally throw on customs, and, through their phoneticism, on pronunciation. Yet the tourists' own evidence as to this is more valuable, as being more authentic, when an Englishman writes "Landtaye" for "Landtage" and "Bawre" for "Bauer." As for sixteenth-century maps, they seem meant for gifts rather to an enemy than to a friend. In every department, then, the tourist had recourse to persons.

The qualifications for a first-rate guide, then and now, differ in one respect only, – that a "religious test" should be applied was taken for granted on both sides. In fact, in Scotland in 1609 an edict was issued forbidding young noblemen to leave the country without a Protestant tutor: the reason being that the great danger of a tour abroad lay in a possible change in the youngster's religion, or inclinations towards tolerance developing, with the result that his political career on his return might be dangerous to his country and himself through his being more than the just one step ahead of his fellow-countrymen which is necessary to political salvation.

The prevailing state of mind may be illustrated by one or two anecdotes. The following one Lauder tells of himself is characteristic of his kind. He had entered a church where all were on their knees: "a woman observing that I neither had gone to the font for holy water, neither kneeled, in a great heat of zeal she told me 'ne venez icy pour prophaner ce sainct lieu.' I suddenly replied: 'Vous estez bien devotieuse, madame, mais peut estre vostre ignorance prophane ce sainct lieu d'avantage que ma présence.'" William Lithgow is proud to say he quarrelled with companions simply because they were Papists, and had often seized opportunities to tear in pieces the rich garments on images rather than "with indifferent forbearance wink at the wickedness of idolaters." And an Englishman of good education and breeding and character, says that being at Malaga cathedral during High Mass "so long as we were bare-headed and behaved ourselves civilly and gravely, we might walk up and down and see everything without the least molestation." One extreme was naturally accompanied by another extreme. Sometimes the tourist's return never took place. This was the more likely when the Papacy was in a militant mood, at which times the Inquisition developed a taste for tutors; whose arrest served a double purpose, a hot antagonist was secured, unimportant enough to create no serious trouble, and the young nobleman was left undefended on his sectarian side, probably a vulnerable one. One case of many is that of John Mole,[21 - See Cal. S. P. Ven., vol. ii (under "Mole," in the index).] who died in the prison of the Inquisition at Rome in 1638 at the age of eighty, after thirty years' imprisonment; his ward, Lord Roos, having been credited with no particular desire to get him out.

A visit to Rome, however, and to other places, such as St. Omer, where "seminaries" existed for English Roman Catholics, was usually forbidden in the licence to go abroad which every Englishman had to obtain unless he was a merchant, and which was not granted without good reason shown. This contained ordinarily a time limit also, one year's leave, or three; and prohibition of communication with disloyal countrymen or entry into a State at war with England: supervision of a kind which was exercised by practically every European ruler. A Roman Catholic, for instance, incurred excommunication if he passed into a country at war with the Pope.

The precautions of Protestant sovereigns were against Roman Catholicism inasmuch as there lay political dangers, but so far as religion was concerned, as much precaution might reasonably have been taken against Mohammedanism. In no European country did ability bring a man to the top so readily as in Turkey, and being a foreigner was in a man's favour; not even at Venice was there such a mixture of nations as at Constantinople; the majority of the Grand Signor's eminent subjects were renegade foreigners. Dallam might refuse the invitation; many accepted it; and a Turk considered it only humane to give an unbeliever at least one definite invitation to salvation. An occasion which many would make use of to turn Turk was during the fortnight preceding the circumcision of the Sultan's heir. One traveller saw two hundred circumcised at such a time, many of them adult, one said to be as old as fifty-three. As a particular instance of an English "Turk" there is the case of the English Consul at Cairo in 1601. He was "taking care" of much belonging to English merchants at the time, in the possession of which the Turks no doubt confirmed him. At the same time there was an exactly similar case of a Venetian, for the same purpose. But besides the causes of the chance to rise in the world, or the attractions of others' property, there was another reason for apostacy, the chief one – mitigating the sufferings of captivity.

But the renegades came mostly from the lower or the commercial class, and did not come home, so that the fact that a guide was required to be a sectarian, in contradistinction to a Christian, is another comment on the characteristics of the Average Tourist. Sir Walter Ralegh, however, did not make that a qualification, for he chose Ben Jonson to chaperon his son. There is only one anecdote about Ben Jonson in that capacity, the one he told Drummond himself. "This youth" [i. e., Ralegh's son] "being knavishly inclined, caused him to be drunken, and dead drunk, so that he knew not where he was; thereafter laid him on a car, which he made to be drawn through the streets, at every corner showing his governor stretched out and telling them that was a more lively image of the Crucifix than any they had: at which young Ralegh's mother delighted much (saying his father when young was so inclined), though the father abhorred it."

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 - Grose and Astle's Antiquarian Repertory, 1805, iv, 374-380.] 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 - M. Ritter, Die Union und Heinrich IV, Munich, 1874, p. 87.]

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 - Hatfield MSS., ix, 127 (Hist. MSS. Com.).]

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, that[25 - Birch, Court and Times of James I, i, 139.] 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 - See contemporary drawing to scale, reproduced in vol. 5 of Hakluyt's Voyages.] 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 - Hans von Morgenthal (1476) in Röhricht, pp. 14-15.] Bugs, etc., crept about over everything."[28 - Zuallardo's Il Devotissimo Viaggio di Gierusalemme, Rome, 1595, p. 18.] 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 friend[29 - Sir Henry Ellis, Original Letters, Series III, ii, 277-293.]– 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 - Fahie, Life of Galileo, pp. 173-177.] 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 - Hatfield MSS., x, 43.] 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.

It may safely be said that control of the weather by sorcerers was altogether disbelieved in by very few persons then, but if the belief was held more strongly along one coast-line than another, it was round the Baltic rather than elsewhere. As late as 1670[32 - Harris, Navigantium … Bibliotheca, ii, 461.] a traveller tells us how being becalmed off Finland, the captain sent ashore to buy a wind from a wizard; the fee was ten kroner (say thirty-six shillings) and a pound of tobacco. The wizard tied a woollen rag to the mast, with three knots in it. Untying the first knot produces just the wind they want; S. W.; that slackening, untying knot number two revives it for a time; but knot number three brings up a fearful northeaster which nearly sank them. "Qui nescit orare, discat navigare" was a much-quoted phrase; truly enough of one traveller, it would appear, seeing he is reported to have prayed during a storm; "O Lord, I am no common beggar; I do not trouble thee every day; for I never prayed to thee before; and if it please thee to deliver me this once, I will never pray to thee again as long as I live."

Shipwreck had an additional danger when it happened to a galley rowed by forced labour. Cardinal De Retz gives a vivid picture of what happened when the one he was in ran aground. The whole bank of galley-slaves rose; in fear, or to escape by swimming, or to master the vessel amidst the confusion. The commander and other officers took double-edged swords and struck down all whom they found standing. Even a mere landing was not without risk, for the custom in force almost universally of asking every new-comer officially his business, home, destination, was still more the rule at the coast; this same cardinal, when a fugitive landing in shabby clothes at St. Sebastian, was told by the soldiers he would probably be hanged in the morning, inasmuch as the ship's captain had mislaid his "charte-partie," in the absence of which every one in the ship could legally be hanged without trial.

And if they had their special sea-troubles of pirates and Greek sailors and small boats in high seas, how much more certain was sea-sickness and the length of its enduring. Lauder remembered leaving Dover at 2 A. M. – "What a distressed broker I was upon the sea needs not here be told since it's not to be feared that I'll forget it, yet I cannot but tell how Mr. John Kincead and I had a bucket betwixt us and strove who should have the bucket first, both equally ready; and how at every vomit and gasp he gave he cried 'God's mercy' as if he had been about to expire immediately." For preventives nobody has anything to suggest except, appropriately enough, one Father Noah, a Franciscan, who prescribes pomegranates and mint; and Rabelais, who says that Pantagruel and company departed with full stomachs and for that reason were not sea-sick; a better precaution, he goes on, than drinking water some days beforehand, salt or fresh, with wine or meat, or than taking pulp of quinces, or lemon-peel, or pomegranate juice; or fasting previously, or covering their stomachs with paper.

Yet Panurge, who was always full or filling, became sea-sick when the storm came. As a picture of sea-sickness, Rabelais' account of Panurge sea-sick is probably unsurpassed. "He remained all of a heap on Deck, utterly cast down and metagrobolised. 'What ho, Steward, my Friend, my Father, my Uncle; … O, three and four times happy are those who plant Cabbages … they have always one Foot on Land and the other is not far from it… This Wave will sweep us away, blessed Saviour. O my Friend, a little Vinegar; I sweat again with sheer Agony… I am drowning, I am drowning, I am dying. Good people, I drown… Ah, my Father, my Uncle, my All, the water has got into my Shoes, by my Shirt-collar. Bous, bous, bous; paisch; hu, hu, hu, ha, ha, ha, I drown … eighteen hundred thousand Crowns a year to the man who will put me ashore… Holos, good People, I drown, I die. Consummatum est; it is all over with me… My good man, couldn't you throw me ashore?'"[33 - W. F. Smith's translation, to which, with Heulhard's Rabelais, ses voyages en Italie, 1891, I am indebted for all references to Rabelais.]

Sea-sickness was probably more common then than now because the discomforts were so much farther from being minimised. Moryson recommends passengers to take rose leaves, lemons or oranges, or the roots or the leaves of angelica, cloves, or rosemary, to counteract the evil smells of the boat; he might have added, of the company too, more particularly with reference to river traffic, because there the company was specially liable to be mixed by reason of the cheapness of that way of travelling as compared with horseback; and because the contact with each other was close.

It is not without signification that practically all district-maps of this date mark the courses of rivers, but not of roads. Probably few records could be found of any touring of this period worth calling a tour which was not partly conducted by river. One advantage of river travel was that that way was more regularly practicable than the roads, which bad weather soon rendered barely passable. Moreover, it was the pleasantest mode of journeying, especially if the boat was towed; for travelling in a sixteenth-century waggon produced something like sea-sickness in those unaccustomed to it. On the other hand, to get the benefit of the cheapness of river travelling, as compared with riding, one had to wait, at times, for fellow-travellers to fill the boat; also, the choice of route was, of course, more limited; and on the swifter rivers it was not usual, or worth while, to attempt an up-stream journey.

On the Loire, for instance, at Roanne, where it began to be navigable, boats were all built for sale, not for hire, as they were not expected to come back; and the same practice was in use elsewhere. But this must be taken as a rule with many exceptions. On the lower Loire towing was in regular use and Lady Fanshawe, who tried it, right from Nantes to Orleans, says, "of all my travels none were, for travel sake, as I may call it, so pleasant as this." They went on shore to sleep, but kept to the boat all daytime, for it possessed a "hearth," a charcoal fire on which they did the cooking. Where towing was most frequently used was probably Russia, all by hand; sometimes as many as three hundred men were being employed at once by Charles II's ambassador for the six barges and one boat between Archangel and Vologda.

When rowing was to be done, the tourist found himself expected, practically compelled, to take his share on the Elbe and the Rhine, and often on other rivers too. The diarist Evelyn reckoned that he rowed twenty leagues of the distance between Roanne and Orleans, and no doubt Edmund Waller, the poet, did the same, as he was one of the party. If any exemptions were made, it was the boatman who exempted himself.

Another poet, or, at least, verse-writer, was deserted altogether by his boatman. This was John Taylor, on his way back from Prague. He had taken to the river at Leitmeritz, with his two companions and some one else's widow and her four small children, they having jointly bought a boat forty-eight feet by three. It was at the Saxony boundary that the man ran away, whence there were six hundred miles to cover, past one thousand "shelves and sands," eight hundred islands, and numberless tree-stumps and rocks, two hundred and forty of the islands having a mill on one side, but which side was not visible beforehand. His figures, however, need not be taken too literally as he went "gathering," to use his own words, "like a busy bee, all these honied observations; some by sight, some by hearing, some by both, some by neither, and some by bare supposition."

Equally exciting was Busbecq's passage down the Danube in a boat roped to a 24-oar pinnace. He was behind time, so they rowed night and day, pulling hard against a violent wind. The bed of the river was uncared for, and collisions with tree-stumps were frequent; once it was with the bank, so hard that a few planks came away. But the ambassador got no further answer to his remonstrances than "God will help" from the Turkish rowers. The Danube was mainly a Turkish river then.

On the lakes there were, of course, storms to contend with, two of which nearly drowned two of the most gifted men of the century, De Thou the historian, and the artist Cellini. It is fairly clear, too, that their almost identical experiences took place on the same lake; that of Wallenstadt, although neither of them gives the name. The boat De Thou crossed in was made of fir-trunks, neither sound, nor tarred, nor nailed; a German was in it, too, with his horse, which fell about; the helmsman left his post, called out to all to save themselves if they could; nothing was to be seen but rain and lake and perpendicular rock, until a cave was sighted towards which all joined in an effort to row. A way up the rock was found, at the top, an inn, just where Cellini had found one nearly half a century earlier.

On the rivers themselves there were two further disadvantages to meet; delay through running aground and danger in shooting the bridges. The latter was very great: the bridge which gave its name to Pont-St. – Esprit on the Rhone was as notorious a place for shipwrecks as any headland, and no doubt it happened then, as it used to happen later, at Beaugency, on the Loire, that all card-playing and talking ceased from the moment the boatmen began to prepare for the passage underneath till the passage was safely over. As for running aground, it did not happen so often as might have been expected, to judge by what is left unsaid by the travellers: one must not strike any average from Peter Mundy's feat of doing it forty times in two days.

Both these drawbacks were present, nevertheless, to a serious extent, and for the same reason; the total absence of regulation of the flow of water. Locks, or "sluices" as they were termed then, were being introduced exceedingly slowly; how slowly is evident from a Frenchman explaining[34 - Brit. Mus. MS. Lansdown, 720.] the working in detail in his journal (without the use of any specialised terms) of one on the Reno, between Bologna and Ferrara. Considering that he must have had much experience of France and had by that time traversed all the waterways generally used for passenger traffic in Italy, it may be concluded that locks were at least very rare in both countries. Some such deduction may also be made for England and France from an Englishman doing the same when at Montargis on the Loire, nearly seventy years later.[35 - R. Symonds (Brit. Mus. MS. Harleian, 943).] Even in Holland, the nursery of the lock-system, its development was slow. In 1605 a Venetian ambassador mentions that the lock-gates between Brussels and Antwerp were only opened once a week, when the weekly trade-barge went along; at other times every one had to change boats at every lock; just as was done on the series of canals formed out of the marshes between the Reno and the Po, according to the Frenchman just quoted. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the same arrangement was in force between Antwerp and Brussels, so Evelyn says, whereas, he implies that between Bologna and Ferrara a lock system was fully in use.

In canals, the great achievement of the period was the cutting of one for nine miles between Amsterdam and Haarlem in six months at a cost of £20,000, finished not long before Sir W. Brereton passed through it in 1634; the previous route had been by a canal in the direction of Haarlem Meer, the boat having to be lugged by hand past the dam which separated the canal from the Meer. Here, in Holland, too, was by far the best passenger service in Europe; in many cases boats were towed, or sailed, between town and town every hour with fares fixed by the local authorities, and the only complaint that is to be heard concerns the drunkenness of the boatmen, who frequently landed the passengers in the water. But there is an isolated complaint, by an Italian chaplain, which shows what the others accepted as no more than reasonable. Nearing Amsterdam, he and his passed the night in the open barge, unable to sit up, much less stand, because of the lowness of the bridges, but forced to lie, in pouring rain, on foul straw, as if they were "gentlemen from Reggio," a phrase that is still used in Venice as a synonym for pigs.

Practicability, comfort, cheapness, and speed – for all these qualities the water could more than hold its own against the land under even conditions; and a traveller from Italy to Munich finishes his journey by raft down the Iser and reckons himself a gainer in time by using that means in preference to horseback.

It is in France, however, that the importance of waterways reaches its maximum. Almost every tourist's way from Paris, except that by Picardy, lay along a line which a river traversed; the windings of the Seine did not prevent it being quite as convenient as the road; while the Loire and the Rhone were far more so; and for approaching Paris, the Garonne was very frequently part of one route, even up to its mouth; the upper Loire of another. An even clearer idea of the importance and amount of usage of riverways in France is gained by considering how Lyons has maintained a high and steady degree of prosperity before, during, and since the rise and fall of Venice and of Amsterdam, and how at this period the only neglected parts of France were those which lay between the chief rivers, which have, in fact, so far dictated the course to be followed by the main road routes that the neglected parts of France are the same now as then. To Lyons the Rhone gave access to Italy, Spain, and Africa; twelve leagues away the Loire becomes navigable, and from Gien on the Loire was one day's journey to a tributary of the Seine, the Loing: which three rivers put Lyons in touch with North Spain, most of France and all northern Europe. Neither was Lyons very far from the Rhine and the Danube.

In Spain alone were the rivers unused by the traveller. In southern Italy they were less used than in Roman times, when passenger traffic was customary on the Tiber and smaller rivers,[36 - C. A. J. Skeel, Travels in the First Century after Christ, p. 114.] which certainly was not the case three hundred years ago; the disuse of the lower reaches of the Tiber is accounted for by the fear of the Turks, to prevent an attack on Rome by whom the mouth of the river was closed. In North Italy on the other hand, the Adige, Brenta, and Po are frequently mentioned; the Po, indeed, from Turin must have been as constantly in use as any river in Europe in proportion to its length. From Mantua to Ferrara in 1574[37 - Brit. Mus. MS. Lansdown, 720, and Villamont's Voyages give more details than any others concerning Italian waterways; but cf. Tasso's letter to Ercole de' Contrari comparing France and Italy. All these are ignored by] a boat sailed every night as a matter of course; between Mantua and Venice communication by water was regular in 1591, and even from Milan to Venice it was quite an ordinary thing to travel by the Po, finishing the journey along the Adige to Chioggia by means of a canal which linked up the two rivers. As for the Brenta, it had its own proverb, that the passenger boat (between Padua and Venice) would sink when it contained neither monk, student, nor courtesan, which is as much as to say that the tourist would always find company, as well as a boat, ready.

It is in connection with the waterways of North Italy that one of the debated questions of Shakespeare's life has arisen: as to how much, or how little, he knew of Italy first hand. But hitherto the commentators have been contented with so little evidence that his references to them have been misinterpreted and the accuracy of the impression that they give, and would give still more distinctly had his editors done him justice, has been denied. A recent writer[38 - Sir E. Sullivan in The Nineteenth Century, August, 1908.] has set out the facts and some evidence so clearly that there is no need to add to the latter further than has already been done by the few instances just mentioned: a few out of an almost indefinite number which are to be found in the writings of these tourists contemporary with Shakespeare, who are surely the most satisfactory witnesses in a case like this, wholly concerned with what he, if a tourist, would have seen. What they show is that in practically every North Italian town passenger traffic by water formed part of the daily life, and that is the impression clearly shared by Shakespeare. When he represents the passenger traffic in an Italian river being dependent on the tide, it must be remembered that he lived near old London Bridge, where the tidal rush was tremendous; and that for his purpose in writing accuracy did not matter in the very least. Neither is any mistake of his over routes to be compared with one of the careful Villamont, who asserts that he reached Este from Padua by the Brenta and that the Brenta is navigable no farther than Este. Now Este is southwest of Padua and the Brenta reaches the latter from northwest and never gets within seventeen miles of Este; but what is more particularly to be noted is that Villamont's "Voyages" was the book of European travel most frequently reprinted in Shakespeare's lifetime and that the error was never corrected. At the same time, it is, perhaps, worth while laying stress on the fact that no deduction can be made from all this as to whether Shakespeare ever left England or the reverse, because his capacity for using second-hand knowledge was so unique that it may be said of him as can be said of probably no other writer, that it is impossible to make a reasonable guess as to when his knowledge is first-hand and when it is not.

Another subject which needs to be treated here, although at first sight it also seems out of place, is that of the characteristics of the islands of Europe as seen by foreigners; for among the advantages of choosing the sea must be reckoned acquaintance with those places which one would never get a glimpse of without a voyage; that is, those which ships touched at but which did not form parts of the tourist's objective. Far and away the chief of these were the islands of the Levant. The opinion that the tourists have of them is probably rose-coloured by the fact that these broke the monotony of a longer voyage than they had need of otherwise; but the fact remains that all agree in depicting them as the spots where human life was at its pleasantest. Of Chios, in particular, might be used the childlike phrase which the Italians used to express the height of happiness, – it was like touching heaven with one's fingers. Nowhere was there greater freedom or greater pleasure. Such was Della Valle's opinion, who calls it "the pleasure-place of the Archipelago and the garden of Greece"; nothing but singing, dancing, and talking with the ladies of the isle, not only in daytime but up to four or five in the morning. Their costume was the only thing in Chios that could have been improved and this seems to refer to the style only, for Lithgow says that they were so sumptuously apparelled that workmen's wives went in satin and taffety, and cloth of gold, and silver, with jewelled rings and bracelets; and when he goes on to say that they were the most beautiful women he ever saw, it is worth remembering that he not only covered more ground in Europe, but visited a greater number of the islands of the Mediterranean than any of the others. Besides, there are so many to confirm it; and although three hundred years ago there was little of what we call appreciation of nature, or rather, of the modern custom of definitely expressing such appreciation, there was no lack of appreciation, and expression of appreciation, of nature when taking a human and feminine form. Singing, too, seems to have been part of living hereabouts: in Crete, for instance, the men, women, and children of a household would usually sing together for an hour after dinner. When there was a seamy side to their life it was associated with politics; in this same Crete Lithgow stayed for fifty-eight days and never saw a Greek leave his house unarmed: generally it was with a steel cap, a long sword, a bow, dagger, and target-shield. In Zante, too, labourers went to the fields armed; but then it must be taken into account that the men of Zante were peculiarly murderous; if a merchant refused to buy from them his life would be in danger: and also, it was under Venetian rule, a double evil; first, because it had no other object than that of benefitting Venetians, and secondly, it implied opposition to the Turks, which was worse, much worse, than the rule of the Turks. Chios was under Turkish rule; so was Coos, the next happiest place, very rarely visited, but well worth it, partly for what Della Valle calls the "Amorevolezza" of that generation, partly because there were still to be seen the houses of Hippocrates, Hercules, and Peleus, Achilles' father. At Corfu was the house of Judas; also his descendants, however much the latter denied their ancestry; and near Lesbos, the islet called Monte Sancto because it was thither that the Devil had borne Christ to show him all the kingdoms of the earth. Then there were all the natural curiosities which the tourist might see in the Levant and nowhere else; asbestos at Cyprus, likewise ladanum "generated by the dew," and at Lemnos the "terra sigillata" famed throughout Europe for its healing properties, an interesting example of an ancient superstition taken over by Christianity; for the priestess of Artemis who had the charge of the sacred earth in Pliny's time had been succeeded by the Christian priest whom the Turkish officials watched at work without interfering, in case there might be some rite which they did not know of and on the use of which the efficacy of the earth depended.

So also, with volcanoes; it was only he who went by sea who saw any other than Vesuvius; and in addition to their scientific, they had also a theological, attraction, being generally considered as mouths of hell, Stromboli, in particular, more continually active than the rest. Concerning Stromboli there is a curious tale which is worth borrowing from Sandys, how one Gresham, a London merchant, ascended the volcano one day, at noon, when the flames were wont to slacken, and heard a voice call out that the rich Antonio was coming. On returning to Palermo where there was a rich Antonio, well known, he learnt that the latter had died at the hour the voice had been heard, and the fact and hour were confirmed by the sailors who had accompanied Gresham, to Henry VIII, who questioned them. Gresham himself retired from business and gave away his property.

Another Levant incident, characteristic, mysterious, and one of Sandys' telling, moreover, is this. He was at Malta one day, alone on the seashore, and what he saw seemed like a part of a masque. A boat arrived; in it, two old women. Out they stepped with grotesque gestures, and spread a Turkey carpet, on that a table-cloth, and on that victuals of the best. Then came another boat which set "a Gallant ashore with his two Amorosaes, attired like nymphs, with Lutes in their hands." But the "gallant" turned out to be a French captain and the nymphs far from spiritual.

Or again; once, on the way to Constantinople, they were near land and he made a day's excursion. Returning at evening, he found the captain lying dripping wet, struggling, it seemed, with death. The crew were all quarrelling, some on board, some on shore. "Amongst the rest there was a blind man who had married a young wife that would not let him lie with her and thereupon had undertaken this journey to complain unto the Patriarch. He, hearing his brother cry out at the receipt of a blow, guided to the place by the noise and thinking with his staff to have struck the striker, laid it on with such force that, meeting with nothing but air, he fell into the sea, and was with difficulty preserved from drowning. The clamour increased; and anon the captain, starting up as if of a sudden restored to life, like a madman skips into the boat, and drawing a Turkish scimitar, beginneth to lay about him (thinking that his vessel had been surprised by pirates): whereupon they all leaped into the sea, and diving under the water ascended outside the reach of his fury. Leaping ashore, he pursues my Greek guide, whom fear made too nimble for him, mounting a steep cliff which at another time he could have hardly ascended. Then turning upon me (who was only armed with stones) as God would have it, he stumbled, and there lay like a stone for two hours, that which had made them so quarrelsome being now the peace-maker. For it being proclaimed death to bring wine into Constantinople and they loath to pour such good liquor into the sea, had made their bellies their overcharged vessels."

But it would be doing the Levant injustice to let the last word on it be an explained miracle, and therefore you may be informed on the testimony of John Newberie, citizen and merchant of London, who, "being desirous to see the world," has become enrolled in the band of Purchas, His Pilgrims, that there was a small isle near Melos, to wit, the Isola de' Diavoli, uninhabited but by devils; and if any vessels are moored thereto, as may be done, the water being deep by the shore, the ropes loose their hold unless the sailors make a cross with every two cables. And once upon a time, when a Florentine galley was moored there without a cross, a loud voice was heard warning the sailors to row away.

And lastly, this is what happened when a funeral had to take place at sea; an inventory of the deceased's goods was made, the ship's bell was rung twice, a fire-brand thrown into the sea, and the announcement made: "Gentlemen mariners, pray for the soul of poor – whereby, through God's mercy, he may rest with the souls of the faithful." But it is pleasant to say that on the only occasion this form of burial is recorded the deceased was alive, if not kicking; he was at his post, the "look out," curled up asleep, as he had been for forty-eight hours previously, sleeping off the effects of Greek wine.

The amount of attention given to the other islands of the Mediterranean, Sicily, which may be considered part of Italy, excepted, might well be represented by saying nothing about them, but Cardinal de Retz's remark about Port Mahon, Minorca, is too characteristic of his age to be passed over; he praises it as the most beautiful haven of the Mediterranean, so beautiful that its scenery surpassed even that employed at Paris for the opera!




CHAPTER IV

CHRISTIAN EUROPE





PART I

EUROPEAN EUROPE




From the report of divers curious and experienced persons I had been assured there was little more to be seen in the rest of the civil world after Italy, France and the Low Countries, but plain and prodigious barbarism.

    Evelyn, Diary (1645).

The route of the Average Tourist being determined by the considerations above-mentioned, he was naturally directed to those countries whose situation enabled them to influence the course of events in his fatherland, whose development and conditions contained the most pertinent lessons for him as a man and as a statesman, and whose climate, accessibility, and inhabitants were such as hindered travellers least. These countries were: Italy, France, the United Provinces (i. e., Holland), the Empire, the Spanish Netherlands (corresponding to Belgium), England, Poland. This order is that in which they would probably have appeared to arrange themselves according to their importance for the purposes under consideration. The omission of England in the chapter heading is due, of course, to Evelyn having started thence; of the Empire and Poland, to the date at which he is writing, near the close of the Thirty Years' War; a date which, while within the period with which this book has to deal, is later by nearly half a century than the central date, 1600, to which all its undated statements should be taken as referring.

Whatever criticism might have been passed on this order of importance by this or that adviser, not one would have been found to dispute the preëminence of Italy. Whereas now there is no form of human effort in which the inhabitants of Italy have not been equalled or surpassed, it seemed then as if there had never been any in which they had been surpassed and very few in which they had been equalled. So far as Art and antiquities go, there will be no need to persuade anybody of the likelihood of that; nor probably, with regard to venerableness of religion or romance of history. But the very easiness of imagining the supremacy which would have been conceded Italy on these points tends to close the enquiry into the causes of its hold on men in times gone by, and consequently to obscure the fact that Italy then not only stood for all that Italy stands for now, but also in the place, or rather, places, now occupied by the most advanced States in their most advanced aspects; for everything, in fact, that made for progress on the lines considered most feasible or probable at the moment; for progress, not only in culture, but in commerce and commercial methods, in politics, in the science of war, in up-to-date handicraft, and, especially, in worldly wisdom. Even a baby-food was assured of greater respect if made from an Italian recipe, such as the paste made of bread-crumbs, wheat-meal, and olive-oil, of which De Thou nearly died. In short, if the value of Italy as the colonizer of Europe in regard to mental development belonged by this time to the past rather than to the present, its reputation as such must not be ante-dated, as is generally done, and ascribed to the age when it most thoroughly deserved that reputation. Here, on the contrary, as usually, merit and credit are not contemporary.

And there was plenty to deceive those who did not look far below the surface. In discussing politics the newest set-phrases would be those brought into use by Italian writers; "balance of power," "reason of state," etc.; the word "status" itself, as a substitute for "Respublica," was both a sign of the times and of Italian influence.[39 - J. N. Figgis, From Gerson to Grotius, 1907, p. 241.] So with commercial terms, we find, for instance, the word "provvisione" (commission) being used as late as 1648,[40 - Brit. Mus. MS. Harleian, 943, fol. 33.] by an Englishman who had never been to Italy, while the control of Italy over one of the later forms of the Renascence, that of the art of gardening, is indicated by the introduction of the word "florist" from the Italian during the seventeenth century. The only modern author, moreover, whose acquaintance a European schoolboy was certain to make, was the Italian versifier whom Shakespeare calls "good old Mantuan," and even if we look at things from to-day's standpoint the most remarkable professorship of the period would surely be accounted that of Galileo at Padua, 1592-1610. In another respect, too, connected with education, the relative maturity and crudeness of civilisation south and north of the Alps is even more apparent to-day than it was then. The "Trans-alpine" shared more or less Erasmus' belief in the power of words as a means of education, whereas in Italy, and in Italy alone, was it insisted that the influence of environment, personal and physical, is the factor compared to which all else is of but little account. The first theory is abandoned now by all who can afford to do so, the second is that of the best effort of to-day.[41 - W. H. Woodward, Studies in Education, passim, especially p. 172.]

As for the technique of war, more than half-way through the seventeenth century, when Louis XIV wanted the very best available talent to design the completion of the Louvre, it was to Rome that he sent, and the artist, Bernini, is recorded[42 - Gazette des Beaux Arts, IIe période, v, 198.] as saying, to allay jealousy, that there was no need for Frenchmen to be ashamed of an Italian being called in for this purpose, seeing that in the kind of knowledge in which they excelled all Europe, that of war, their teachers were still Italians. And the modernity of the latter's reputation for supremacy in military knowledge is thrown into relief by a remark of Bertrandon de la Brocquière, writing in 1433, taken in conjunction with the above. The latter was a clear-headed Fleming of wide experience who, when drawing up a plan for the right composition of an army which should suffice to drive the Turks back, only mentions French, English, and German soldiers.

As regards applied science, again, we find Evelyn writing of the harbour-works at Genoa, "of all the wonders of Italy, for the art and nature of the design, nothing parallels this." Now Evelyn was certainly not a man to underrate the rest of the wonders of Italy. As for comparisons outside of Italy, all Europe had by his time settled down to compete in the application of science to every-day life. And as to the products of the soil, is it not probable that if, nowadays, Europeans left the soil to take care of itself, and the day-labourer to take care of the seed and the preparation of the product, Italy would regain the first place as a producer of luxuries?

Such points as these, just a few that have chanced to suggest themselves in the course of reading for other purposes, are merely put forward as typical of the relations existing between Italy and the rest of Europe; the Italians themselves admitted their own superiority by the slightly contemptuous meaning that attached itself to their word "Transalpini," and very rare is it to find one of these "Transalpini" taking the view that Sir Philip Sidney and Fynes Moryson did, that the first characteristic of Italy was pretentiousness. On the contrary, it was assumed that little but experience could be so easily, or so satisfactorily, acquired elsewhere. Diverse forms of government, at least, could not be met with elsewhere in the same variety within such narrow limits. The south was what they termed a "province," i. e., a dependency held down by force, belonging to Spain; so, too, was Milan, with its surroundings. In the centre was a monarch, the Pope, who was both elected and "absolute," a term which had a specialised meaning, that of power unlimited except by the extent to which the holder made himself disliked. Further north were free cities, Lucca, Genoa; six hereditary principalities, Tuscany, Mantua, Urbino, Savoy, Modena, Parma; and lastly, the Republic of Venice with its miniature empire in Lombardy. And concerning Venice, there is this to be noted, that it was exhibiting solidity combined with elasticity to a degree all the more astonishing in "an impossible city in an impossible place"; which gave it a position not unlike that of England to-day, namely, that peculiarities of its "constitution" received an even greater degree of respect than they were entitled to and tended to be imitated by constitution-formulators of the period who expected to reproduce what had been achieved by geography and a national temperament, by means of reproducing some of the formulas that the latter had adopted. All of which was of great interest to the Average Tourist; and in consequence, if you happen to be reading one of his accounts of a tour, at the first mention of the word "Doge," skip twelve pages.

What remains to be seen concerning Italy is – what were the details that mainly occupied the foreigner as student there. In which connection the chief fact to be noted is that his stopping-places were invariably towns; and this not in Italy only, but throughout Europe. As regards the Average Tourist, this is fully accounted for by the objects he set before himself, but it is equally true of all. Bathing-places excepted, the only holiday resorts lay in the very last places where we should think of looking for them – in the suburbs. The Riviera, for instance, was no spot to delay in when Mohammedan pirates were forever coasting along in search of Christian slaves; and so on. But the essential explanation is to be sought in a census of Europe. The population of London exceeds that of most sixteenth-century States, and there are London suburbs which house more than any but the biggest sixteenth-century cities. Many villages consisted of no more than three or four houses; and even near Paris, of six or seven or eight; in Spain one might journey eight leagues without seeing a house at all. Whereas, therefore, the difficulty, and the pleasure, of a modern tour consists in escaping from people, the difficulty, and the safety, of all tourists in 1600 lay in reaching them.





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notes



1


Purchas, viii, 258.




2


A. Schaube: "Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Ständigen Gesandtschaften," in vol. 10 of Mittheilungen des Instituts für oesterreichische Geschichtsforschung, 1889. What follows is mainly from "Les Commencements de la Diplomatie," three articles by Ernest Nys in Revue de Droit International, vols. 15 and 16, 1883-84. Cf. also V. E. Hrabar's De Legatis et Legationibus, 1906, a collection of treatises on the subject up to 1625, some unpublished ones printed in full, with summaries of those better known.




3


Harleian MS. 3822, fol. 599. And Viaggi of Gian Vincenzo Imperiale, p. 149, vol. 29 of Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria, 1898.




4


Cf. Antonio de Beatis, pp. 156, 157.




5


George Chapman, Tears of Peace.




6


Cf. especially the beginning of Jacopo Soranzo's narrative in Albéri's Relazioni Venete, Series III, ii, 212.




7


Life and Letters, i, 319.




8


First Fruits, p. 18.




9


Calendars of State Papers, Ven., v, 109 and 382.




10


Hist. MSS. Com., 1899, vol. 46 (Duke of Buccleugh's Winwood Papers, i), 120, 121.




11


Einstein, p. 380.




12


Operette, ii, 24.




13


Hantzsch, Deutsche Reisende, p. 2.




14


Cf. Stählin's Sir Francis Walsingham und seine Zeit, i, 79-84.




15


See Faunt's "Discourses touching the office of Principal Secretary of State," in Eng. Hist. Rev., July, 1905.




16


Falkiner, p. 117.




17


Röhricht, "Bibliotheca geographica Palaestinæ," 118. In the London Library is a copy of an edition printed at Ronciglione, 1615, which seems to have escaped the notice of all bibliographers.




18


Bargrave. See under Bodleian MSS. in Bibliography (Rawlinson, C. 799).




19


Quoted by Einstein, p. 101.




20


Printed by Falkiner. See Bibliography.




21


See Cal. S. P. Ven., vol. ii (under "Mole," in the index).




22


Grose and Astle's Antiquarian Repertory, 1805, iv, 374-380.




23


M. Ritter, Die Union und Heinrich IV, Munich, 1874, p. 87.




24


Hatfield MSS., ix, 127 (Hist. MSS. Com.).




25


Birch, Court and Times of James I, i, 139.




26


See contemporary drawing to scale, reproduced in vol. 5 of Hakluyt's Voyages.




27


Hans von Morgenthal (1476) in Röhricht, pp. 14-15.




28


Zuallardo's Il Devotissimo Viaggio di Gierusalemme, Rome, 1595, p. 18.




29


Sir Henry Ellis, Original Letters, Series III, ii, 277-293.




30


Fahie, Life of Galileo, pp. 173-177.




31


Hatfield MSS., x, 43.




32


Harris, Navigantium … Bibliotheca, ii, 461.




33


W. F. Smith's translation, to which, with Heulhard's Rabelais, ses voyages en Italie, 1891, I am indebted for all references to Rabelais.




34


Brit. Mus. MS. Lansdown, 720.




35


R. Symonds (Brit. Mus. MS. Harleian, 943).




36


C. A. J. Skeel, Travels in the First Century after Christ, p. 114.




37


Brit. Mus. MS. Lansdown, 720, and Villamont's Voyages give more details than any others concerning Italian waterways; but cf. Tasso's letter to Ercole de' Contrari comparing France and Italy. All these are ignored by




38


Sir E. Sullivan in The Nineteenth Century, August, 1908.




39


J. N. Figgis, From Gerson to Grotius, 1907, p. 241.




40


Brit. Mus. MS. Harleian, 943, fol. 33.




41


W. H. Woodward, Studies in Education, passim, especially p. 172.




42


Gazette des Beaux Arts, IIe période, v, 198.