Touring in 1600: A Study in the Development of Travel as a Means of EducationBates, E. S. (Ernest Stuart)
History
Touring in 1600: A Study in the Development of Travel as a Means of Education
Bates, E. S. (Ernest Stuart)
Europe -- Description and travel; Europe -- Social life and customs; Travel -- History
Besides the business man who became a tourist without knowing it, there
were the tourists who became so because home was too hot for them. Of
their number was William Lithgow, whose "Rare Adventures" is the record
of nineteen years' travel, ended in 1620 by the severity of the torture
he endured in Spain through being taken for a spy. Although fifty years
of age when he started writing his account, a fair sample of his style
is,—"Here in Argos I had the ground to be a pillow, and the world-wide
fields to be a chamber, the whirling windy skies to be a roof to my
winter-blasted lodging, the humid vapours of cold Nocturna to accompany
the unwished-for bed of my repose." And this was accompanied by so much
second-hand history and doggerel that the printer rebelled and saved us
from much more of it. The trustworthiness of his facts may be gauged by
his stating as the result of his personal experience that Scotland is
one hundred and twenty miles longer than England. On the other hand,
he visited more places in Europe than any other one tourist, besides
having some experience of Palestine and North Africa; and what he wrote
he wrote after he had seen all that he did see. His comparisons are,
therefore, worth attention, and these and the personal experiences
which his verbiage has not crowded out of his book give it a permanent
value and interest to those who have the patience to find them.
All this while we are forgetting the ladies; very few in number,
but three at least possessing personality,—two princesses and an
ambassador's wife. Princess number one was the eldest daughter of
Philip II of Spain, the Infanta Doña Clara Eugenia, who crossed Europe
with her husband, to take up the government of the Low Countries,
in 1599, and wrote a long letter to her brother about the journey
from Milan to Brussels, bright and pithy, one of the most readable
and sensible letters that remain to us from the sixteenth century.
Princess number two is the daughter of a king of Sweden, who had
trouble in finding a husband for Princess Cecily, inasmuch as she
would marry no one who would not promise to take her to England within
a year from the wedding day; for the great desire of her life was to
see Queen Elizabeth. A marquis of Baden accepted the condition, and
on November 12, 1564, they started, by which time she had spent four
years learning English and could speak it well. The voyage took ten
months, the winter was a severe one, and much of their way lay through
countries whose kings were hostile to her father and the inhabitants
to every stranger. Leaving Stockholm while her relatives expressed
their opinion about her journey by lamentations and fainting-fits,
she crossed to Finland in a storm, in which the pilot lost heart to
the extent of pointing out the rock on which they were going to be
shipwrecked. Finland they left in four days, to escape starvation,
during another storm; crossed to Lithuania; thence by land through
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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