Touring in 1600

At the top would be found "La Chapelle des Transis," the wayfarers' mortuary, not empty probably; in March 1578 it contained fifteen bodies.106 After heavy snowfalls the monks of the neighbouring hospice of St. Nicolas used to send out search parties; corpses discovered were examined for proofs of orthodoxy, beads, for instance, failing which the bodies were left to the beasts of prey.

During this period the Mt. Cenis route came to be used more exclusively for passing between France and Italy than had previously been the case, doubtless as a result of the transference of the capital of Savoy from Chambéry to Turin in 1559, between which towns this route was the most direct. Yet notwithstanding that travellers note here, and here alone, that the population on either side of the pass had no other means of livelihood than by ministering to travellers, the most frequented route must be considered the Brenner. It was the only one which wheeled traffic could pass, though even there the waggon had to be kept from falling off the road "by force of men's shoulders," according to Moryson.

Of the experiences to be met with in crossing an Alpine pass other than the Brenner, there is no better account than that which the Infanta Clara Eugenia wrote home concerning the St. Gothard. Even before reaching Bellinzona the luggage carts had to be exchanged for mules. And at Bellinzona, too, she notes that there was not a woman without an enormous goitre; and, indeed, the frequency with which travellers remark on the number of those afflicted in this way leaves no doubt but that the disease was far more prevalent then than now. It was generally accepted that the cause lay in the water, but one old resident, at least, disbelieved this, since he had one himself, although, as he told a tourist, he had never drunk water in his life. The worst of the Infanta's journey occupied the four days after leaving Bellinzona; the way so narrow that a horse could scarcely walk and the litters had continually to be taken off the mules and transferred to men. This narrow path, of course, lay always with the mountain-side high above it and a precipice and a river below. The ladies' litters were by no means according to royal standards; just four poles and a linen seat, from which the royal legs dangled; but she rode most of the way, feeling no fear of anything but the "snow-bridges," two of which had to be crossed. On the farther side there was the "Devil's Bridge" to pass also, or, as she names it, "Hell Bridge"; which now does not even exist; twenty paces long above the Reuss, so far above that the river was out of sight, although the rush of it resounded so loudly that she could not hear herself speak. The whole road had been specially prepared for her passage, and among the preparations was the erecting of railings along "Hell Bridge"; in the ordinary way there were none, the wind being so strong in the narrow gorge as always to sweep them away very soon. He who passed by the St. Gothard under ordinary conditions, and the Furka, too, wore gloves and boots studded with nails to preserve his hold; and the average Alpine bridge answered to the description which Cellini gives of those he found on the Simplon route, a few tree-trunks laid down. Another Italian going home that way says the last bridge was thirty feet by two and bent in the middle; he crossed it at night, coming as it did among the "last four leagues"(?) between the summit and Domodossola, all of which he and his traversed in pitch-darkness among precipices, the foremost calling at intervals "Ave Maria" and the hindmost answering "Gratiâ plena."

Most travellers rode horses or mules where they could, and led, or crawled with them, the rest of the way; but sledges were also in use, in which case, Moryson was told, "it sometimes happens the sledge whereon the passenger sits is cast out of the way and hangs down in a most deep valley with the passenger's head downward. Woe be to him, then, if he let his hold go, or the harness tying the sledge to the horse should break." Moryson himself had only passed by the Bernina and the Brenner, the former of which seems to have ranked third in order of popularity in spite of the track being no more than a yard wide in places. The Splügen was used as often, perhaps, but when the two St. Bernards and the Gemmi have been added to the list, there is an end of those frequented by tourists. One used the San Marco and Sir Henry Wotton another, which cannot now be identified, when the ordinary ones were shut against him by plague. But for an instance of some one keeping to the coast between France and Italy, it seems necessary to go back to Beatis in 1518, a man whose narrative is obviously trustworthy; yet, after mentioning that it was so dangerous that few rode, he adds what may sound incredible except in his own words. "Ben vero che questo Camino è di sorte Che in tale giornata di XV miglia solamente le bestie se besognarno ferrare quactro et cinque volte." For all practical purposes, moreover, the mountains near Grenoble must be considered as part of the Alps, lying, as they did, across the route of all who crossed Mt. Cenis, and being no less fearful than any of the Alpine passes themselves. At one point, nearest Aiguebelette, horses and mules were specially trained for the ascent and descent, holes having been cut in the rock which made the way more practicable for animals accustomed to them, but almost impossible to any others, unless riderless.

Elsewhere, wherever mountains have to be traversed, similar conditions prevailed. Near Spalato, it is true, the path was railed in some distance, the only railings of the kind in Europe, apparently; but near Mt. Olympus one looked over the edge of the precipice he had to ride along and saw carcasses of horses, caught as they fell, or fallen, to warn him to be careful. Says one who knew both, the road over Pen-maen-mawr in these days was more fearful than any Alpine way. As for Spain, there were quite a number of main roads which allowed nothing more than single file here and there: the pass into Castile on the road from Bayonne, for instance, and another between Granada and Cartagena, on entering which it was customary for travellers to tighten their belts and say an "Ave Maria" for those who had lost their lives thereabouts. Above San Sebastian ten men might hold the road against an army and no beasts but mules could be trusted on it, nor on the pass from France into Aragon, so steep that no man was safe there; while south of Santander, according to Sir Richard Wynn, for two leagues the road was two feet broad and one hundred perpendicular fathoms above the river.

Neither were the efforts thus entailed brightened by the idea of mountaineering as a form of pleasure. Probably the only recorded climb undertaken during this period with no other object than that of getting to the top is the ascent of "Les Jumelles," the highest peak near Pau, an ascent known to us through De Thou. One M. de Candale started at four o'clock one May morning in the first half of the sixteenth century. Before half-way was reached, his younger companions were on the way down; they had come in their shirts and found the cold too much for them; M. de Candale was wearing a fur coat. At half-way the last trace of a human being was left behind, but he and some peasants reached the top with the help of ladders and grappling-irons and took measurements. It is characteristic enough of the age that De Thou's comments on the calculated height are a comparison with the reckonings of Apuleius and Plutarch concerning Olympus, which they considered the highest mountain in the world. Mediæval opinion put Mt. Sinai first, probably because that was the only mountain a mediæval Christian ever tried to get to the top of, a process of reasoning which may be traced in the guesses of these travellers, and in local opinion, as to which was the highest of the Alps; it is always one of those past which they endeavoured to make their way, St. Gothard or St. Bernard, for which they claim preëminence. Another fashion of reckoning is to calculate, not perpendicularly, but according to the apparent length of the way, which makes Mt. Quarantana "six miles high"; while one traveller has a unit of measurement entirely his own, a mountain being to him so many "towers" high, the tower in question being the belfry of Malines, his native place.

There was, nevertheless, one piece of mountaineering that was continually being done under the guise of a pilgrimage, the ascent of the Roche Melon, near Mt. Cenis, or, as it is termed in full as late as 1574,107 Roche Rommelon; the Latin name had been Mons Romuleus. Of the origin of this pilgrimage and the reason for building a chapel to Our Lady on the summit, nothing has been ascertained beyond what may be read to-day in the cathedral at Susa, where is still to be seen,108 though unmentioned by Baedeker, a triptych representing a Madonna and Child, St. George, St. James, and a kneeling warrior, with an inscription to the effect that one Bonifacio Rotario of Asti "brought me [i. e. the triptych] hither in honour of our Blessed Lord and our Lady on September 1, 1358." The word "hither" refers to the summit of this Roche Melon, to which the picture is still carried up every year.109 In 1588 Villamont made the ascent, which was only practicable in August, with spikes on his feet and hooks fastened to his hands, and rather more assistance than a modern mountaineer would consider dignified. The feat is the more remarkable inasmuch as the height (11,605 feet) is more than half as high again as the highest point of any pass that was used then.

On reaching the top, Villamont forgot all his terror and fatigue in the glorious view, glorious not for the grandeur of the scenery to him, but because it was his first sight of Italy, "the paradise to gain which they willingly," as another phrases it, "passed through the purgatory of the Alps." Such was their opinion of Switzerland. They spoke of the Alps just as we do of the Channel – they had had a "good crossing," or the reverse. More definitely, to quote Howell's words, "the high and hideous Alps … those uncouth, huge, monstrous, Excrescences of Nature," productive of nothing useful. Few were those who were free-spirited enough to enjoy themselves. Of the exceptions most notable are Tasso and the Infanta. The former mentions the existence of a common preference for scenes characterised by unbroken spaciousness, but for himself, he likes a varied view with much to catch the eye, hills, dales, and trees, and even, he goes on, "E, che più, la sterilità e rigidezza dell' Alpi, facendone paragone alla vaghezza degli altri spettacoli, suole molte fiate riuscire piacevolissima."110 The Infanta's own words are still more remarkable: "Yo dudo que se pudiera ver mejor cosa en el mundo ni màs para ver." Even she, however, when going into detail, gives first places to the plants that were new to her and to the waterfalls. When, indeed, somebody else expresses any degree of pleasure in connection with the Alps, it is generally the waterfalls that occasion it. But there is a further exception even to this, and he, curiously enough, is a popular Parisian poet, St. Amant. Although he writes, in his "Polonaise," concerning Poland,

On n'y voit nulle eminenceComme on voit en d'autres lieux;Cela me charme, et je penseQu'on ne peut dire tant mieux,

he finds the characteristics of the Alps, even in winter, such that they

Sont si doux à mes yeux que d'aise ils en pétillent,

and is even modern enough to speak of

Et cet air net et sain, propre à l'esprit vital.111

These three have been entirely overlooked hitherto; the only person of this period whom the modern mountaineer is told to claim as his spiritual brother is the botanist Conrad Gesner; but in claiming him they claim too much – for themselves. It is true that Gesner does write112 that he never lets a year go by without climbing one or more of the Alps for exercise and pleasure as well as for botany; and that "whoever does not consider towering mountains preëminently worthy of more than ordinary attention is, to my mind, an enemy of Nature." But he goes on to show that the Alps meant far more to him than this much would prove. He looked on them as an epitome of all Nature's habits and experiments, the key to all Nature's secrets, to geology in the fullest sense of the word, structural, historical, dynamical; and that to a greater extent than is apparent at first sight, inasmuch as problems now treated as solved then belonged to dreamland and problems which seemed soluble there if anywhere are now known to be better studied elsewhere; the internal temperature of the earth, for instance, since it was not recognized in Gesner's day that there was any difference in kind between mountains and volcanoes.

The attitude of the average man of Gesner's time towards the Alps, however, is but the most striking instance of a general attitude towards Nature which circumstances at that time enforced and which different circumstances have since abolished. Further, of all classes of men, it was the tourists who were most oppressed by the circumstances of the past, and it is the tourists who get the greatest benefits from the changed circumstances of to-day. Further still, the difference was, and is, most noticeable by the tourist when on the road. In other words, the absence of enjoyment of the sterner aspects of Nature was the result of their having far more of Nature than an average man can stand. The growth of the size of towns has, so to speak, set a premium on Nature, just as it has, during the past century, created the custom of taking annual holidays; while the successive minimising of the dangers, the discomforts, and of so many of the lesser difficulties of travel has provided the traveller with contrast where once upon a time was none, and leaves him free to find pleasure (sometimes, perhaps, forces him to look for it to avoid being bored), where in 1600 all spelt pain and foreboding. This difference of sentiment culminated then, as it culminates now, when the tourist found himself among the Alps. There, above other places, were his faculties narrowed by fear and what remained of them wholly concentrated on self-preservation, until enjoyment was out of the question.

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 inaccessibleUnder 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 horreurEn augmente le terreur,Et la noire solitudeQui dort en ces bois espaisFait qu'avec inquiétudeOn y voit leur triste paix.Là le maistre et le valetRoulent, main au pistolet;On regarde si le glaiveS'offre à quitter le fourreau,Et dès qu'un zephir se lèveOn 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.