Touring in 1600: A Study in the Development of Travel as a Means of Education. E. S. Bates
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.
LOCK BETWEEN BOLOGNA AND FERRARA
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] 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] 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] 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] 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] 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