Touring in 1600: A Study in the Development of Travel as a Means of Education. E. S. Bates
feather-bed, mattress, two pillows, two pairs of sheets, a small quilt, for three ducats; and all of these will be bought back at the end of the voyage at half price. Medicines he must on no account forget. Care had to be taken, too, in choosing a position, not below deck, which is "smouldering hot and stinking," but above, where both shelter, light, and air were to be had; this, of course, for the benefit of such as were unable to secure a place in the stern-cabins.
If the passenger did not find himself in a position to get these counsels of perfection carried out, this is what he would experience: "In the galley all sorts of discomfort are met with: to each of us was allotted a space three spans broad, and so we lay one upon another, suffering greatly from the heat in summer and much troubled by vermin. Huge rats came running over our faces at nights, and a sharp eye had to be kept on the torches, for some people go about carelessly and there's no putting them out in case of fire, being, as they are, all pitch. And when it is time to go to sleep and one has great desire thereto, others near him talk or sing or yell and generally please themselves, so that one's rest is broken. Those near us who fell ill mostly died. God have mercy on them! In day-time too when we were all in our places busy eating and the galley bore down on the side to which the sail shifted, all the sailors called out 'pando,' that is, 'to the other side,' and over we must go; and if the sea was rough and the galley lurched, our heads turned all giddy and some toppled over and the rest on top of them, falling about like so many drunken yokels. The meals the captain gave us were not exactly inviting; the meat had been hanging in the sun, the bread hard as a stone with many weevils in it, the water at times stank, the wine warm, or hot enough for the steam to rise, with a beastly taste to it; and at times, too, we had to do our eating under a blazing sun. … [27] Bugs, etc., crept about over everything."[28] Another, after many similar complaints, of cold food and warm drink, and of sailors who walked about on top of him when he wanted to sleep, and so on, adds a fresh one, quite unmentionable, and then goes on that he passes over the more disgusting features so as not to discourage intending pilgrims.
The disappearance of the pilgrim galley was more gain than loss, but it had the advantage of more variety in the company and the voyage, and probably, of a bigger ship; Moryson's ship was 900-tons and Della Valle's Gran Delfino was a great war galleon, with forty-five cannon and five hundred passengers—too many, it proved; in the end twenty or thirty fell ill every day and some died. And the mixture that there was! Men and women, soldiers, traders, Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Persians, Jews, Italians from almost every state, French, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Germans, Flemings. In Moryson's boat there were Indian sun-worshippers as well. In another, Moors and Muscovites. Every day in the Gran Delfino a bell was rung for prayer, when each man prayed in his own way; prayer over, the sailors, all Greeks, turned bareheaded to the East and cried three times, "Buon' Viaggio!!!" and the captain preached a non-sectarian sermon. With the Gran Delfino, moreover, the start was an impressive function; the vessel, belonging as it did to the State, being towed beyond the lagoons by thirty-three eight-oared boats, directed by a venerable signor deputed by the authorities. Once outside, however, and left to itself, it was less impressive, at the mercy of a wind so uncertain that it crossed the Adriatic from shore to shore twenty-five times.
In reckoning the length of voyages it would not be sufficient to multiply the delay by bad weather that took place in the Channel crossings by the extra mileage of a given distance; there was the additional delay due to the difficulty of obtaining a ship at all, even in the best of weathers, a difficulty proportionate to the length of the voyage. The first-mentioned difficulty must not be minimised; it was reasonable caricature for Sir John Harington, Queen Elizabeth's godson, to represent his Rabelaisian hero as returning from "Japana near China" in a "24-hours sail with some two or three odd years beside." And by way of illustration it may be added that one and the same voyage—from Messina to Smyrna—took one man thirteen weeks and another thirty-five days; and that whereas the usual length of the pilgrim voyage from Jaffa to Venice was under five weeks, one band of pilgrims whose return journey was delayed till the winter storms caught them, were continuously at sea, or continuously trying to be at sea, from September 19th till January 25th. Yet another cause of delay, in the Mediterranean, at least, was the Italian custom of paying the sailors by the day; English ships, payment on which was at so much a voyage, were by far the quicker.
To return to difficulty number two, that of obtaining any ship, instances of it are continually occurring. Consider the complaint that one Greenhalgh writes to his friend[29]—how he wished to go by sea to Naples or elsewhere in Italy, went to the Exchange at London almost daily for a month to read the ships' bills hanging there; could find none to take him; took passage at Blackwall on one that was bound for Dunkirk, but which the wind carried along the coast of Norfolk; reached Dunkirk in four days and four nights; no ship to be found there Italy-bound; nor at Gravelines; nor at Calais; so came back: seven weeks wasted.
But it may reasonably be asked, why didn't he go by land? Well, that is a question without an answer; but for any journey where the mileage by sea was near the mileage by land, men of experience of these days reckoned it safer and quicker and consequently cheaper to go by sea. Once when Sir Henry Wotton, who exhaled sixteenth-century wisdom whenever he spoke, was at his favourite occupation of holding forth to the Venetian Signory on things in general, we find him taking it for granted that Poland and Hungary were far from Venice as compared with England and Holland; an exaggeration, no doubt; but an exaggeration that stood no chance of being believed would not have served his purpose. And it would be just plain fact to say, with regard to Danzig and Paris, and every other similar journey, the sea for choice; even from Genoa to Rome, amid all the danger of captivity for life by Barbary pirates, there was a daily service of boats in 1588 according to Villamont; it was the more usual route. Howell, indeed, leaving Paris for Spain, went to St. Malo to find a ship, but the ordinary route was to go down the Loire to Nantes, and by sea thence.
In the same way, from Rome to Barcelona was usually made a sea-trip, although the sailors coasted instead of going direct. All voyages in fact were coasting voyages whenever possible; no landsman was more scared of the open sea than the average sailor during this period, the greatest for the exploration of oceans that the world has ever seen, except, perhaps, that unknown age when the islands of the Pacific were colonised. The fear was based on an accurate knowledge of their own incapacity, revealed to us by one or two travellers who were interested in the science of navigation. A certain Frenchman embarked at Vannes for Portugal; no bearings were taken, and the pilot had no chart; trusted to his eye for his knowledge; which resulted in his coasting along Galicia under the impression it was Asturias. So with the master of the Venetian ship that Lithgow sailed in; he had no compass, cast anchor at night and guessed his whereabouts in daytime by the hills he recognised; on his way back from Alexandria a storm drove them out of their course and he describes, in his doggrel verse, the sailors spending hours identifying headlands, only to find themselves mistaken. Indeed, there was no satisfactory method of ascertaining longitude at sea; although European rulers were offering rewards to the inventor of a method, no one was successful in trying to solve the problem, not even Galileo.[30] So habitual a practice was coasting that if a ship was intent on avoiding a pirate the surest plan was to keep to the open sea.
SHIP FOR A LONG-DISTANCE VOYAGE
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