Kitabı oku: «Touring in 1600», sayfa 15

As to the change of attitude, it is usually credited to Rousseau, but was in progress before his influence began to be felt;¹¹³ and if the subsequent development of the idea is considered, the credit must surely be shared by Napoleon, as to whose greatness there is no more conclusive evidence than that of his Alpine roads. Before these were carried out, men considered themselves at the mercy of the Alps; he first, and he alone, put the Alps at the service of men, and in so doing set free men's sense of beauty when in their midst.

But here, as always when writing about the prevalence or absence of a point of view, some reminder should be added as to the effect of literary conventions in exaggerating both the one and the other; that is to say, that in the former case it will frequently be expressed when it is little felt, and in the latter it will frequently be felt when not expressed. Even as to that binding of the faculties just alluded to, there is the very definite exception of the Infanta, who was not too preoccupied to ask questions, thereby learning that that peak had not been bare of snow for four hundred years and that this pinnacle was solid emerald; being considered inaccessible, cannon had not long before been brought up to shoot bits off, but without success.

Nevertheless, their turn of mind as regards Nature in general needs some other illustration than from negative evidence alone, or, among positive evidence, from so exceptional a feature as mountain scenery. This may be best taken from their use of the word "desert." A typical instance is in a sentence from Peter Mundy, "the way being faire and plaine, though desert and full of woods." Six times in "As You Like It" is the forest of Arden termed a desert: —

 
… this desert inaccessible
Under the shade of melancholy boughs.
 

"Desert" to them meant deserted by men, and through forests they passed, as often as not, sword in hand. To quote St. Amant's "Polonaise" again: —

 
Une taciturne horreur
En augmente le terreur,
Et la noire solitude
Qui dort en ces bois espais
Fait qu'avec inquiétude
On y voit leur triste paix.
 
 
Là le maistre et le valet
Roulent, main au pistolet;
On regarde si le glaive
S'offre à quitter le fourreau,
Et dès qu'un zephir se lève
On frémit sur le carreau.
 

And yet, if a journey was a "fragment of hell," it is comforting to meet some very merry devils by the way. Quevedo,¹¹⁴ for one, took his troubles lightly. Getting out of a bed in which his legs had been hanging over the end, he and three others left Linares for Condado in a conveyance drawn by ten mules. The road, he says, might have been the road to salvation, so narrow was it, so full of troubles, a purgatory in little. One hill seemed to be reserved for mule-hunting when the carriage had stuck in the mud.

It was February, too; February at its worst. On smaller provocation men have retired to madhouses. It seemed like sleeping in the coach; those who tried to walk pulled their legs out from where they had planted them without hose or shoes; one called out, "You down there, who's pulling off my boots?" After playing at dying for four hours, men arrived to release them from imprisonment, except one whose litter had given way and who was too full of bruises to move, and a clergyman who was missing altogether, the latest news of whom is that men were going round about the marshes calling out his name.

Dallam, too, has a tale to tell. His companions and himself, passing through Thrace, took a house to spend the night in, a two-roomed house, one room above the other. The lower was used as a cellar; a ladder outside led up to a balcony, the balcony to a door, the door to their sleeping room, which was lighted by one small hole. Now, that evening they had gone for a walk and seen "divers sorts of vermin of which we have not the like in England," and, remembering that they had nothing but boards to lie on, gathered plenty of a thick soft moss for pillows. But half an hour after laying their heads down, they discovered that these pillows harboured one more sort of vermin "the which did bite far worse than fleas," with the result that even when the pillows had been thrown away and the room swept, still they couldn't go to sleep. So Mr. Glover (afterwards Sir Thomas Glover), who had dwelt long in the country, told them stories about the native vermin, "snakes, adders, and sarpentes." Gradually some dropped off to sleep; the others ceased talking. But one Mr. Baylye had occasion to leave the room; the door was narrow, the wind strong; "so that when he came into the gallery, the wind blew the garter round about his leg; it was a great silk garter and by the force of the wind it fettered his legs both fast together. Our talk a little before of adders, snakes, and sarpentes was yet in his remembrance and the place near where much vermin was. He thought they swarmed about him, but about his legs he thought he was sure of a sarpente, so that, suddenly, he cried out with all the voice he had, 'A sarpente, a sarpente, a sarpente,' and was so frighted he could not find the door to get in, but made a great bustling and noise in the gallery. We that were in the house did think that he said, 'Assaulted, assaulted,' for before night we doubted that some treachery would happen unto us in that town. There was fifteen of us in the room – and it was but a little room. Every man took his sword in his hand, one ready to spoil another, not any one knowing the cause. One that could not find his sword, got to the chimney and trying to climb up, down fell a part of the chimney on his head; another that was suddenly awakened, struck about him with his sword and beat down the shelf and broke the pitchers and platters which stood thereon, the room being very dark, for it was about midnight. Our Janizary, who should have been our guard and have protected us from all dangers, took up a loose board whereon he lay, and slipped down into the vault. As we were all thus amazed, at the last Mr. Baylye found the way in at the door. When Mr. Glover saw him, he said, 'How now, man, what is the matter, who do you see?' Mr. Baylye was even breathless with fear, crying out and struggling to get in at the door; at last he said, 'A sarpente, a sarpente,' troubled him. When Mr. Glover heard him say so, he went to the door, and there he found Mr. Baylye's garter ready to be carried away with the wind."

Another who was more frightened than hurt was the Jesuit Possevino, on his way to Muscovy. Tired out with a day on the main road thither from Poland, spent handling the axe to clear the road of vegetation, dragging the waggons by hand, sometimes carrying them on their shoulders, he and his lay down to sleep (in the rain) and were kept awake by Cossacks in among the trees imitating the sounds of wild beasts to terrify them. Pleasanter was it for those in Hungary, where the custom was, when strangers came in sight, to bake some bread fresh in the cinders that served as ovens, and send it to their lodgings by the youngest and prettiest girls, who gathered themselves into a ring and danced round the visitors singing.

Yet another picture is of a Frenchman whose way lay through the Ardennes in time of war; he was journeying on business. Tales were plentiful of bands of peasants in the forests, killing passers-by without distinction. One evening he makes his escape from four men, takes a by-road where the highroad was in particularly bad repute; snow begins to fall, the wind is dead against him; his by-road leads him cross-country, which founders his horse; he sits down on a tree-trunk, back to the wind, and thinks how his brother and four sisters are providing him with nephews and nieces who will never give a guess at the troubles he has gone through in making a fortune, but will take it for granted that they are to have a share of it. The nephews, perhaps, would have told him that it was lucky for him he was in the Ardennes and not outside St. Malo at so late an hour, with the twelve or twenty-four, whichever it was,¹¹⁵ savage English dogs waiting for him, who were sent out every night with their keeper to guard the town, "killing and tearing any living creature they encounter withal." In 1627 a man did die so. Even without the dogs, at St. Malo or anywhere else, it was troublesome, or worse, to arrive late. Gates were closed, and kept closed, and this applied, of course, to seafarers as well; one tourist making for Monaco, another for Genoa, had for that reason to sleep out in an open boat. In towns where a strict "Reformed" sect had the upper hand, this waiting might have to be done in daytime also; gates as well as shops being shut during sermon-time. But even supposing he found means to enter at night, it might be wiser not to take the offer, seeing that he would find himself wandering about in a pitch-dark maze of dirty alleys during the hours when it was permissible for the inhabitants to throw "slops" out of window.

CHAPTER VIII
THE PURSE

A traveller! by my faith, you have great reason to be sad: I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men's.

As You Like It (about 1599).

The cost of travelling divides itself into two kinds; direct and indirect: that is, into the outlay which the traveller must reckon on and that which he has to reckon with. The first kind, the necessities, consists of fares, food, lodging, passports, tolls, etc., together with loss by exchange of money or by charges on remittances. The second kind, the possibilities, includes loss by robbery, by war, by disease, lack of legal privileges, ignorance of local custom, and such like eventualities in so far as any one was liable to suffer from them through being a stranger in a strange land.

But before considering the most elementary necessaries, some working arrangement must be established about translating payments into terms of English money of the present day. In the first place, between 1542 and 1642 money fell from about nine times its present value to about five times. Dates must therefore be found within which the multiplication figure must become successively nine, eight, seven, six. Suppose the first figure be taken up to 1556, when the States General met at Brussels to deal with Philip II's debt; the second figure thence to 1589, the year when the failure of the Spanish Armada began to tell on economics; seven from 1589 to 1612, at which date the bankruptcy of the Welser firm affected all Europe; and six thenceforward. If these are reasonable fictions, it is the utmost that can be achieved; in so far as they are not, the definiteness of the system makes correction of it easier. Amounts arrived at by these reckonings are given in square brackets. Usually, however, the original amounts have first to be translated out of continental coinage into contemporary English, a process which involves a series of comparisons too long to be tabulated here, and often, even then, needing modification as a result of the context in which the particular statement occurs. This is mentioned only as indicating a fresh source of uncertainty, and possibly of error. A third factor in these amounts as here given is as reliable as the two former factors are unreliable; every original amount represents an actual transaction by a traveller between 1542 and 1642, except where otherwise stated.

Necessities and possibilities are sometimes found considered jointly in general estimates. Sir Philip Sidney considered his brother should have two hundred pounds a year allowed him for travelling. This was in 1578, and he would be reckoning according to the highest standard that a young Englishman would have a use for.

Dallington, a guide-book writer, speaking for Englishmen in France in 1598, estimates eighty pounds a year; if one servant is taken and riding-lessons required, one hundred and fifty pounds; over two hundred pounds is excessive; while another, Cleland, in his "Institution of a Young Nobleman" (1607) considers two hundred pounds a year enough for four persons. Howell (1642) says three hundred pounds for the youngster at Paris, with fifty pounds each in addition for a cook, a valet, and a page; but then Howell had acted as tutor and no doubt hoped to do so again as soon as he could get free from the Fleet Prison, where he lay when his pamphlet was published. Under these circumstances he was likely to be considering his own pocket rather than the father's. Nevertheless, two of the brothers Coligny [Henri II's courtiers], when planning a year's tour through Italy in 1546, were said to have put aside fourteen thousand scudi [£30,000] for expenses; which annoyed their uncle.¹¹⁶ But within a year or two of this estimate, Evelyn was travelling farther afield than Paris, – he stayed seven months in Rome alone, – keeping one servant throughout, sometimes two, learning under several masters, and making costly and extensive purchases, on less than three hundred pounds annually. Of Sir Richard Fanshawe, again, his wife records that "during some years of travel" (less than seven, for certain) "he had spent a considerable part of his stock"; this stock consisted of what his parents had bequeathed him, fifteen hundred pounds, and fifty pounds a year: his travel lay mainly in France and Spain previous to 1630.

Fynes Moryson, too, gives his expenditure as from fifty to sixty pounds a year, which included the cost of two journeys, one in spring, one in autumn. He was accustomed to the best standard of living at home, but his income was hardly adequate to his social position and by temperament he was a temperate and adaptable man; more so, to say the least, than the son of Davison, the Secretary of State whom Queen Elizabeth made the scapegoat for the death of Queen Mary Stewart.

Father Davison had been told that one hundred marks would suffice for his boy abroad each year, and, consequently, in sending the latter to Italy in 1595 with a tutor, and a servant, allowed him treble that amount, one hundred pounds. The tutor writes, "I never endured such slavery in my life to save money"; if Mr. Davison does not see his way to changing his mind about the one hundred pounds a year, will he kindly find another tutor? As to the "frugal travellers" whose travelling costs them no more than the one hundred marks a year, he does not wish to deny it; in fact, he knows such men; and very sorry he is for those who have lent them the rest they have spent.

From all this one may conclude that the equivalent of four hundred pounds a year was the minimum for respectable travelling and that the Average Tourist would certainly need at least half as much again. But this is assuming that all who were respectable, or above the need to be so, paid all their own expenses, which was far from being the case. There were plenty of rich travellers who defrayed all charges for a large following. Landgraf Ludwig II of Hessen-Darmstadt¹¹⁷ even paid a certain knight to accompany him, six hundred florins [£600] down and fifty florins a month, besides expenses and clothes. So when Cardinal Luigi d'Aragona toured Europe, starting May 9, 1517, and arriving home March 16, 1518, and spent about fifteen thousand ducats [£35,000] meantime, in which "eating and drinking were the least costly items," we may conclude that the thirty-five persons he took with him, and the forty-five he brought back, received at least expenses. Another churchman, Johann Gottfried von Aschhausen, bishop of Würzburg, left Strassburg in 1612 with a retinue of one hundred and thirty, twenty-one of whom were young men of high birth. Before he passed out of Germany this number was increased by fifty more. He was away a year in Italy, which cost him thirty-two thousand seven hundred and fifty-four scudi [£40,000].¹¹⁸

But since he went as the Emperor's ambassador, this is rather a fresh example of how travelling was facilitated by embassies. For among the advantages of various kinds that rendered accompanying the journeyings of diplomatists the best means of seeing the world, the economical advantages were as important as any. It by no means followed, however, that anything but board and lodging were provided by him; in the detailed accounts of Sir G. Chaworth regarding his special embassy to Brussels is no mention of outlay on anything but necessaries. On the other hand, we find another English ambassador giving one hundred pounds apiece to the gentlemen who were to accompany him, to provide their outfit.¹¹⁹ In any case, this expedient extended only as far as the ambassador went, a specially important limitation for Englishmen of Queen Elizabeth's day, since she had no ambassador at Venice throughout her reign; and even when James I sent one thither he was, during his first term of office, the only English ambassador in Italy. Bearing this in mind, and turning to other methods whereby the Average Tourist from England might reduce his expenditure, we come upon what is, perhaps, the most remarkable fact of the time in regard to the kind, and the extent, of the usefulness with which travel was credited, namely, that Queen Elizabeth subsidised it. It is obvious from the life-stories of all those who served her that they were treated with extreme stinginess and that employment by the government meant heavy expense instead of salaries; and yet, as to travel, these are the words of Bacon, who had excellent means of knowing the facts: "There was a constant course held, that by the advice of the secretaries, or some principal councillor, there was always sent forth into the parts beyond the seas some young men of whom good hopes were conceived of their towardliness, to be trained up and made fit for such public employments and to learn the languages. This was at the charge of the Queen, which was not much, for they travelled but as private gentlemen."¹²⁰

Ecclesiastics, it goes almost without saying, received special terms, mainly in the shape of free lodging at religious houses, although the opinion of one abbé ought not to go unrecorded, – "avoid monasteries," because the charities expected amounted to more than inn-charges. This certainly did not apply to Muscovy, where, if a monastery could be found, it undoubtedly did mean free board and lodging for the three days, the usual limit of time, universally, for claimers of charity. But what with monasteries and special foundations there must have been far more really free accommodation than is apparent from tourist-books, written as the latter almost entirely are by the class that paid its way. Even apart from the above there were incidents such as one recorded in 1650, of eight thousand pilgrims to Rome from Spain being fed and housed for three days at Naples at the expense of the Spanish viceroy there. At Compostella, too, for two reals [7s. 6d.] could be obtained a parchment document with a cardinal's seal attached, recommending the bearer for alms as one who was on his way to other places of pilgrimage; and in Italy not even that much was needed, inasmuch as the natives were then so averse to begging that foreigners who had no such scruples found little difficulty in traversing it at next to no cost.

Where a begging-license was necessary, that could easily be obtained also by being, or pretending to be, a student. Loyola lived in term-time at Paris on what he gained by begging at fairs in Flanders and England during holidays. Another useful option open to students, of whatever social position, was the exemption from local tolls, frequently a privilege belonging to all who had matriculated at the university of the district; the graduate of Padua, for instance, was exempt throughout Venetian territory. It so happened that one of these tourists¹²¹ was elected rector of Bologna University during his stay there in 1575, and that during his term of office some students were forced to pay taxes. He and the managing body at once appealed to the Pope, who not only confirmed, but extended, the immunities. In Italy the tolls were so oppressive that the matriculation fees, twenty lire [£5] at Padua, twelve at Bologna, were soon made good, even supposing them to have been paid; at Bologna, at least, matriculation could be obtained for nothing by applying in formâ pauperis. The examination was no bar worth mentioning. In Germany, moreover, according to Moryson, the tenancy of a house often carried with it the obligation to board and lodge a student free. Another traveller who economised thoroughly was Sastrow, who, on reaching Rome, took service at the hospital of Santa Brigitta, cooked, washed-up, made the beds, and received the equivalent of 2s. 6d. a month, while Jacques Callot, the artist, when he ran away from home, took the way to Italy in the company of those gypsies who appear in those sketches of his which form one of the most vivid memorials of the travelling life of the time. Yet with all these opportunities which presented themselves to the needy, we are told that Turkey was the only country of Europe where poverty was no bar to travel.

Outside Europe fresh estimates have to be quoted. The fare to Jaffa and back by the pilgrim-galley varied from fifty to sixty ducats [say £100]: this included food. Additional expenses brought the ordinary cost of a visit to Jerusalem from Venice under these earlier conditions up to three or four hundred pounds in present-day values. This, of course, omits the expenses of the pilgrim between his home and Venice. The minimum recorded cost for this period is represented by the two hundred and twenty crowns [£350] spent by one Switzer in thirty weeks, and two hundred and twenty-eight crowns spent by another, a barber, in eleven months (1583-84),¹²² of which times only about three months, in each case, was taken up by the voyage from Venice to Jerusalem and back, the remainder being devoted to Italy. The pilgrimage may be considered as accounting for but little more than two hundred pounds of the expenditure of each. Many went, moreover, who never possessed this much, since it was common for one man to go as deputy for several, who jointly defrayed his expenses; and it was also a common form of charity for rich pilgrims to pay for poor ones. Later, in fact, they were often forced to do so by the Turks when the latter had reduced to beggary those who had come away with too little, which led to there arising a custom among pilgrims of showing each other their money; if one refused, the others avoided his company to escape the possibility of being compelled to pay for him.

With the cessation of the pilgrim-galley the cost of the pilgrimage doubled itself, what with the increased length of the journey due to a roundabout way having to be taken, and, still more, to its increased duration, owing to the uncertainty; especially as every day additional brought its own additional risks and extortions. Moryson and his brother spent four hundred and eighty pounds [nearly, if not quite, £3000].

Certain circumstances raised the cost to him above the average, and he was away more than a year and a half, whereas the journey would be done within the year ordinarily. On the other hand, as his brother died near Aleppo, the return-journey represents the expenditure of one man instead of two. How a thrifty man who was used to roughing it would be forced to spend the equivalent of one thousand pounds or more on a journey that would nowadays cost him about sixty-five pounds is partly explained by the exactions of the Turks. When Sandys was at Jerusalem the monks of S. Salvatore had just been compelled to pay eight hundred dollars [£900] for an imaginary offence. When Lithgow arrived late one night after the gates had been shut, the friars let down food to him over the wall; the Turks, being informed of this, insisted they must have been importing weapons, and inflicted another fine, one hundred piasters [£125]. It is not surprising, then, that with expenses like these, and ordinary expenses to match, the monks expected sums from the pilgrims that seem at first sight outrageous. To Lithgow they made a definite charge of a piaster [£1 10s.] a day for board and lodging alone; but their general custom was to throw themselves on the traveller's generosity and grumble at the result.

Neither did the Franks suffer from indirect exactions only. The price for entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre went on increasing, from nothing at all in the fourteenth century to four zecchini [£10] in 1606. Some mention fees of four times that amount, but this higher sum included the toll at the city gate, the two being collected simultaneously and so mistaken for one charge: the Turks farmed the revenue from the Holy Sepulchre for eight thousand sultanons [over £19,000], says Sandys. Extras were almost endless, yet very few of them left any change out of a gold coin; the fee for the certificate of visitation, without which the poorest pilgrim would not think of departing, was three zecchini [seven guineas], while the knighthood, nominally thirty zecchini, does not seem to have been granted for less than ten. The monastery servants were liable to excommunication if they accepted a tip, but they gladly risked damnation for a zecchino, and, indeed, insisted on doing so.

By spending not more than a week at Jerusalem and that at a time which may profanely be termed out of the season, it was possible to see the sights of the city itself for the equivalent of £50; at any rate, that happened in 1676;¹²³ do as most Franks did, spend Easter there, and ten days or a fortnight, and accompany the excursions, cost nearly double that. On the journey, the tributes may be imagined from the fact that Sandys thought it worth while to pay four shariffs [£10] for a passport which saved a few of them; nothing availed against an Arab chief who sent to demand seven zecchini [sixteen guineas] a head, and then came in person to demand five more. Moreover, besides the special outfit to be bought, the charges themselves were always reckoned on the basis that a Frank must have heaps of money; from Rama to Jerusalem alone, one day's journey, another seven zecchini had to be paid to the dragoman, and the same amount coming back.

A considerable saving might be effected by hiring a Janizary at seven aspers [2s.] a day: his services more than paid for his keep; and there were times when even a Frank found himself living at an easy rate. This happened when he stayed at a "fondaco," or depôt of Christian traders, or so it may be inferred from casual remarks backed up by two definite instances in years far apart. The German Fürer lived so at Alexandria and Cairo for the equivalent of five shillings a day in 1565, and in 1625 two Germans¹²⁴ were received for two months free of all charges at the Venetian "fondaco" at Cairo.

Far above all economies, however, was the system known as "putting-out" money – and this applied to travel inside, as well as outside, Christendom. The mediæval custom of presenting offerings before starting had died out; sixteenth-century tourists only offered prayers, and, for the rest, often expected to take up, at their homecoming, all they had left behind them with additions, or even multiplication. They deposited, or "put out," money before their departure on that condition. The custom is said to have been developed in the Netherlands¹²⁵ during the first half of the sixteenth century out of a pilgrims' practice of leaving a will behind them in favour of a friend on the understanding that the pilgrim was to receive double the bequest if he came back. It would seem from what Moryson says that the custom was barely known in England till the last decade of the sixteenth century, and then spread so rapidly that it fell into disrepute, bankrupts employing it to reinstate themselves, and actors, then the scum of the populace, to gain notoriety. He apologises for his brother Henry doing it, who put out four hundred pounds to be repaid twelve hundred pounds if he came back from Jerusalem. If allusions to the practice in contemporary English literature¹²⁶ can be trusted, he drove a bad bargain; according to them he might have arranged for his hypothetical profit to be five hundred instead of three hundred per cent, the latter rate being granted against journeys to Italy. The only other instance known of an actual transaction of this kind was calculated to yield two thousand per cent [£10 to be repaid £200]; but this was against a voyage to Russia, near the middle of the century, from London, whence only one ship was known to have sailed thither and returned.

Life insurance in its present form was also adopted by some persons before starting for abroad; but public opinion condemned every form of life insurance equally as immoral, and in the Netherlands, France, and Genoa it was forbidden by law, "travel-wagers" being specially mentioned in the proclamations. The rate, however, is the point which specially concerns us here, as indicative of the risks of travel. At the present day, for all the parts of the world touched upon in this book, the safest insurance company will not only lay fifty to one that the traveller will return, in place of the rate then of three to five to one that he would not, but will further insure him against accidents at a lower rate than if he became a London butcher. The system is of interest, too, as marking the transition from mediæval to modern methods of insurance; from "protections" granted by the stronger to the weaker for a premium which took the form of personal service, to the capitalist's bond; the guarantee of redress by force being superseded by guarantee of reimbursement by a business man, because the latter had become both more feasible and more satisfactory.

It is clear, then, that, given the most favourable circumstances, the traveller might not only make his journeys pay their own expenses, but might clear a handsome profit. Yet how far these circumstances were made the most of is a question that has at present to be decided on negative evidence alone, the verdict on which must be that no case is made out. In leaving, therefore, the general estimates for details, both have to be put forward as net, subject to the mitigations already referred to.