The disappearance of the pilgrim galley was more gain than loss, but it had the advantage of more variety in the company and the voyage, and probably, of a bigger ship; Moryson's ship was 900-tons and Della Valle's Gran Delfino was a great war galleon, with forty-five cannon and five hundred passengers,—too many, it proved; in the end twenty or thirty fell ill every day and some died. And the mixture that there was! Men and women, soldiers, traders, Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Persians, Jews, Italians from almost every state, French, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Germans, Flemings. In Moryson's boat there were Indian sun-worshippers as well. In another, Moors and Muscovites. Every day in the Gran Delfino a bell was rung for prayer, when each man prayed in his own way; prayer over, the sailors, all Greeks, turned bareheaded to the East and cried three times, "Buon' Viaggio!!!" and the captain preached a non-sectarian sermon. With the Gran Delfino, moreover, the start was an impressive function; the vessel, belonging as it did to the State, being towed beyond the lagoons by thirty-three eight-oared boats, directed by a venerable signor deputed by the authorities. Once outside, however, and left to itself, it was less impressive, at the mercy of a wind so uncertain that it crossed the Adriatic from shore to shore twenty-five times. In reckoning the length of voyages it would not be sufficient to multiply the delay by bad weather that took place in the Channel crossings by the extra mileage of a given distance; there was the additional delay due to the difficulty of obtaining a ship at all, even in the best of weathers, a difficulty proportionate to the length of the voyage. The first-mentioned difficulty must not be minimised; it was reasonable caricature for Sir John Harington, Queen Elizabeth's godson, to represent his Rabelaisian hero as returning from "Japana near China" in a "24-hours sail with some two or three odd years beside." And by way of illustration it may be added that one and the same voyage—from Messina to Smyrna—took one man thirteen weeks and another thirty-five days; and that whereas the usual length of the pilgrim voyage from Jaffa to Venice was under five weeks, one band of pilgrims whose return journey was delayed till the winter storms caught them, were continuously at sea, or continuously trying to be at sea, from September 19th till January 25th. Yet another cause of delay, in the Mediterranean, at least, was the Italian custom of paying the sailors by the day; English ships, payment on which was at so much a voyage, were by far the quicker.