The characteristic of present-day London, at which all foreigners most marvel, is the amount of traffic in the streets. In Elizabethan London this characteristic existed in the chief highway--the Thames. The passenger-boats were generally described as "wherries," and they were likened by Elizabethan travellers to the gondolas of Venice; for instance, by Coryat, in his _Crudities_, who thought the playhouses of Venice very beggarly compared with those of London, but admired the gondoliers, because they were "altogether as swift as our rowers about London." The maps of the period reveal the extraordinary number of "stairs" for landing passengers along both banks of the river, besides the numerous wharves for goods. John Stow, the author of the _Survey of London_, published first in 1598, and again in a second edition in 1603, describes the traffic on the river. "By the Thames," he says, "all kinds of merchandise be easily conveyed to London, the principal storehouse and staple of all commodities within this realm. So that, omitting to speak of great ships and other vessels of burthen, there pertaineth to the cities of London, Westminster, and borough of Southwark, above the number, as is supposed, of 2,000 wherries and other small boats, whereby 3,000 poor men at the least be set on work and maintained." Many of these watermen were old sailors, who had sailed and fought under Drake. The Armada deliverance was recalled by Drake's ship, which lay in the river below the bridge. The voyage of the Earl of Essex to Spain, the expeditions to Ireland and to the Low Countries, formed the staple of the gossip of these old sailors who found employment in the chief means of locomotion in Elizabethan London. There was only the single bridge, but there were several ferries. The principal ferry was from Blackfriars and the Fleet river to a point opposite on the Surrey side, called Paris Garden stairs--nearly in a line with the present Blackfriars Bridge. At Westminster was another, from the Horseferry Road to a point a little west of Lambeth Palace--almost in the line of the present Lambeth Bridge. The river was fordable at low tide at this point; horses crossed here--whence the name Horseferry--and possibly other cattle, when the tide was unusually low.