Sixteenth-Century Tourists
A Journey is a Fragment of Hell.
舒 AWLIYAI EFENDI.
A SILESIAN gentleman, Hentzner by name, who acted as traveling tutor in the last year of the sixteenth century, acknowledges that the troubles of a traveler are great, and finds only two arguments to countervail them: first, that man is born unto trouble; and secondly, 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 three hundred years ago, but 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 waiting six hours for the tide, accomplished two leagues; and being 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 in the morning. 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. The noble lord made three attempts from Brill, and covered distances varying from a point just outside the harbor to halfway, but each time arrived at Brill again. Eventually, 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, as he himself acknowledged, was one of the worst in the harbor, but who, on the other hand, did not mind whether he lived or died.
Going by the North Sea, the usual havens were Gravesend, and Flushing or Brill, in spite of Brill’s shallow harbor-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 suchlike passionate expressions ’). 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 for three days and three nights, seasick and expecting drowning, until he came ashore at — The Hague.
Among many other experiences of the kind, that of John Chamberlain, the letter-writer, may be chosen. Setting out from Rotterdam, after twentyfour 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 always returning. Then the wind came fair for Calais, but veered round rather too soon, and the first haven the ship could reach was Yarmouth, after two days’ running before the storm. It was low tide; the ship went aground while entering, and for some time it looked like being lost with all hands; but the keel slipped off again, and the waves drove the ship against the piles at the head of the breakwater. Some thought it worth while trying to jump ashore; three of these the others saw drowned, and one was 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 in the rain and wind about Newmarket heath, when his guides had lost their way, arrived in town at eleven p. m. on the twentieth day after first leaving Rotterdam.
On this route the ownership of the vessel might fairly be guessed by the amount of swearing that went on. Dutch ships had no prayers said, and rarely carried a chaplain even on the longest voyages; but swearers were fined, though it were no more than naming theDevil. Psalm-singing would go on aboard 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 to be a Dutchman, and meant moreover 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. They 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 a single ship is two thousand, but that was between Constant inopleand Cairo, the vessels employed on official business exclusively between those two places being the largest in the sixteenth-century world. Apart from these, the maximum tonnage was about twelve hundred, and a five-hundred-ton ship was reckoned a large one. An average Venetian merchantman measured about ninety feet by twenty by sixteen, a tonnage, that is, of about one hundred and sixty-six, according to English sixteenth-century reckoning.
As for accommodation in the larger boats, two Englishmen, writing separately, say that they neither changed their clothes nor slept in a bed while at sea, and there is no reason to suppose that any one else did who traveled 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, which served as the captain’s dining-room, accommodating thirty-nine persons at mealtimes, all of whom, it is clear enough, slept in cabins above or belowe.
The chief exception to ordinary conditions was the pilgrim-ship for Jerusalem in the days (which ceased during the sixteenth century) 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 primarily passenger-boats. 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 traveler 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 fryingpan, dishes, big and little, of earthenware or wood, a stew-pot, and a twig-basket to carry when the traveler landed and went shopping; likewise a lantern, 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, but all of these would be bought back at the end of the voyage at half-price. Medicines the pilgrim 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 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 night, 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 daytime 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 “Parafo,” 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 was 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. . . . Bugs, etc., crept about over everything.’
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 to say that he passes over the more unpleasant features so as not to discourage intending pilgrims.
In reckoning the length of voyages it would not be sufficient to multiply the delay from bad weather 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 too must not be minimized; 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.’
To return to difficulty number two, that of obtaining any ship, instances of it were continually occurring. Consider the complaint that one Greenhalgh writes to his friend: 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 which 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 Italybound, nor at Gravelines, nor at Calais; so came back: seven weeks wasted.
But, it may reasonably be asked, why did n’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.
In the same way, the journey from Rome to Barcelona was usually made by sea, although the sailors coasted instead of going direct. All voyages in fact were coasting voyages whenever possible; no landsman was more afraid of the open sea than was 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 colonized. The fear was based on the sailor’s accurate knowledge of his own incapacity, revealed to us by one or two travelers 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, but trusted to his eye for his knowledge, and as a result coasted along Galicia under the impression it was Asturias. So with the master of a certain Venetian ship that a Scot sailed in and tells us of: he had no compass, cast anchor at night and guessed his whereabouts in the daytime by the hills he recognized. On the way back from Alexandria a storm drove them off their course, and the sailors spent hours identifying headlands, only to find themselves mistaken.
But for the most part travelers seem to have trusted to luck with regard to piracy, knowing pirates to be as inevitable as storms. The two chief centres were Dunkirk and Algiers, and as Dunkirkers and Algerines met in the Atlantic, the Baltic was the only European sea free from them. In 1573 the Earl of Worcester crossed the Channel 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 about the Dunkirkers, ' scarce one bark in five escapeth these cormorants.’ 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 in person, 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 those Italian states that had previously been favorably 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: ‘Halfway 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.
It may safely be said that control of the weather by sorcerers was altogether disbelieved in by very few persons at that time; but if the belief was held more strongly along one coast-line than another, it was along the Baltic rather than elsewhere. As late as 1670 a traveler 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 woolen rag to the mast, with three knots in it. Untying the first knot produces just the wind they want, southwest. That slackening, untying knot number two revives it for a time; but knot number three brings up a fearful northeaster, which nearly sinks them. ‘ Qui nescit orare, discat navigare,’ was a much-quoted phrase; true enough of one traveler, it would appear, seeing that 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 labor. Cardinal de Retz gives a vivid picture of what happened when the one he was in ran aground. The whole tank of galley-slaves rose in fear, or hoping to escape by swimming, or to master the vessel amid the confusion. The commander and the 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 newcomer 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 especial seatroubles of pirates and Greek sailors and small boats in high seas, how much more certain was seasickness and the length of its enduring! One remembered leaving Dover at two 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 Doctor Rabelais, who says that Pantagruel and company departed with full stomachs, and for that reason were not seasick; a better precaution, he continues, 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 seasick when the storm came. As a picture of seasickness, Rabelais’ account of Panurge seasick is probably unsurpassed, and it loses nothing in Mr. W. F. Smith’s translation. ‘ 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. Boos, boos, boos; paisch; hu, hu, hu, ha, ha, ha, I drown . . . eighteen 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, could n’t you throw me ashore?"'
Seasickness was presumably more common then than now, because the discomforts were so much further from being minimized; one Englishman recommends passengers to take roseleaves, lemons or oranges, or the roots or 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 traveling as compared with horseback; and because the contact with one another was close.
It is not without significance that practically all district-maps of this date mark the courses of rivers, but not of roads. In fact, few records, probably, could be found of any tour of three hundred years, worth calling a tour, which was not partly conducted by river. One advantage of river-travel was that the 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 traveling in a sixteenth-century wagon produced something like seasickness in those unaccustomed to it. On the other hand, to get the benefit of the cheapness of river-traveling, as compared with riding, one had to wait, at times, for fellow travelers 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 upstream 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 a lady who tried it, from Nantes to Orléans, 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.
When rowing was to be done, the tourist found himself expected, practically compelled, to take his share on the Elbe and the Rhone, and often on other rivers too. The diarist Evelyn reckoned that he rowed twenty leagues between Roanne and Orleans, and no doubt Edmund Waller, the poet, did the same, as he was of the party. If any exemptions were made, it was himself whom the boatman exempted.
An exciting passage was that of an imperial ambassador on his way to Constantinople, down the Danube, in a boat roped to a twenty-four-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 from the Turkish rowers no further answer to his remonstrances than ‘God will help.’ The Danube was mainly a Turkish river then.
On the rivers there were two further disadvantages to be met: delay from running aground, and danger in shooting the bridges. The latter was very great: the bridge from which PontSaint-Esprit on the Rhone takes its name was as notorious a place for shipwrecks as any headland; and no doubt it happened then, as later, at Beaugency, on the Loire, that ale-drinking, card-playing, and talking ceased from the moment the boatmen began to prepare for the passage underneath till the passage was safely over.
Both these drawbacks were present, 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’s explaining in detail in his journal (without the use of any specialized terms) the working of one on the Reno, between Bologna and Ferrara. Considering that he must have had much experience of France, and had by that time (1575) 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.
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 twenty thousand pounds, 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 usual complaint 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.
Nevertheless, everything considered, for 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 traveler 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.
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 a part 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-colored by the fact that they broke the monotony of a longer voyage than was otherwise necessary; 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 the opinion of the Italian pilgrim, Della Valle, who calls it ' the pleasure-place of the Archipelago and the garden of Greece’: there was 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. The costume, he says, was the only thing in Chios that could have been improved; and this stricture seemed to refer to the style only, for another refers to their being so sumptuously appareled that workmen’s wives went in satin and taffety, and cloth of gold and silver, with jeweled rings and bracelets. And when he goes on to say that they were the most beautiful women he ever saw, it is worth recording that he was William Lithgow, who not only covered more ground in Europe, but visited a greater number of the islands of the Mediterranean, than any other traveler at this time. Besides, there are 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 in 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 he wore a steel cap, a long sword, a bow, dagger, and target-shield. In Zante, too, laborers went to the fields armed ; but 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, the island was under Venetian rule, — a double evil: first, because the people had no other object than that of benefiting Venetians, and secondly, because the situation 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; here were also his descendants, however much the latter denied their ancestry; and near Lesbos was 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 laudanum ‘ 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.
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 firebrand was 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!