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.
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
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