Where the leaven of new ideas was showing itself was not in a cessation, but in a decrease, of pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The state of transition is definitely marked by the diversity of the preoccupations which men carried thither; the change itself by the discontinuance of the pilgrim galleys. This took place between 1581 and 1586. It had been usual for two galleys to sail to Jaffa and back each year specially for pilgrims, from Venice, starting on different dates between Ascension Day and early in July; the latter date being dictated by the weather, the former doubtless by everybody's desire to wait to witness the Espousal of the Sea. In 1581 a boat[87] started on May 7 or 8 with fifty-six on board, all told; this was wrecked in the Adriatic, thirty persons only being saved. On July 14, another left, but the pilgrims by this had to change into a smaller vessel at Cyprus. In 1587, however, a guide-book writer,[88] advising on the basis of his experiences the previous year, tells the pilgrim to take the first boat to Tripoli in the spring, before Easter if possible, otherwise there may be none towards Palestine till August, since the pilgrim-galleys have ceased sailing, although the procession is still kept up at Venice in which every intending pilgrim had the honour of walking on the right hand of a noble, bearing a lighted wax candle. That this discontinuance was sudden and recent may be assumed from the fact that a priest who was visiting the shrines of Christendom as the deputy of Philip II, who had vowed such a pilgrimage when his son was ill, hurried[89] on his way to Italy in 1587, expecting to find a pilgrim-galley ready to start. But that this discontinuance was not merely temporary is clear enough from all subsequent writers.