And if they had their special sea-troubles of pirates and Greek sailors and small boats in high seas, how much more certain was sea-sickness and the length of its enduring. Lauder remembered leaving Dover at 2 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 Rabelais, who says that Pantagruel and company departed with full stomachs and for that reason were not sea-sick; a better precaution, he goes on, 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 sea-sick when the storm came. As a picture of sea-sickness, Rabelais' account of Panurge sea-sick is probably unsurpassed. "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. Bous, bous, bous; paisch; hu, hu, hu, ha, ha, ha, I drown … eighteen hundred 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, couldn't you throw me ashore?'"33
Sea-sickness was probably more common then than now because the discomforts were so much farther from being minimised. Moryson recommends passengers to take rose leaves, lemons or oranges, or the roots or the 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 travelling as compared with horseback; and because the contact with each other was close.
It is not without signification that practically all district-maps of this date mark the courses of rivers, but not of roads. Probably few records could be found of any touring of this period worth calling a tour which was not partly conducted by river. One advantage of river travel was that that 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 travelling in a sixteenth-century waggon produced something like sea-sickness in those unaccustomed to it. On the other hand, to get the benefit of the cheapness of river travelling, as compared with riding, one had to wait, at times, for fellow-travellers 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 up-stream 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 Lady Fanshawe, who tried it, right from Nantes to Orleans, 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. Where towing was most frequently used was probably Russia, all by hand; sometimes as many as three hundred men were being employed at once by Charles II's ambassador for the six barges and one boat between Archangel and Vologda.
When rowing was to be done, the tourist found himself expected, practically compelled, to take his share on the Elbe and the Rhine, and often on other rivers too. The diarist Evelyn reckoned that he rowed twenty leagues of the distance between Roanne and Orleans, and no doubt Edmund Waller, the poet, did the same, as he was one of the party. If any exemptions were made, it was the boatman who exempted himself.
Another poet, or, at 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.
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 explaining34 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