EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WATER TRAVEL
is the worst road in England, with respect to the conveniences of travelling, and must certainly impress foreigners with an unfavorable opinion of the nation in general. The chambers are in general cold and comfortless, the beds paultry, the cookery execrable, the wine poison, the attendance bad, the publicans insolent, and the bills extortion;[1] there is not a drop of tolerable malt liquor to be had from London to Dover."[2]
When the winds permitted, regular packet boats carrying mail and passengers left Dover for Calais on Tuesdays and Fridays of every week, and Calais for Dover on Wednesdays and Saturdays.[3] Besides these there were three or four barques belonging to private owners in Dover or Calais in which passage, including transportation of luggage, could be had for ten or twelve livres a person.[4] The exclusive use of a small vessel cost about five guineas.[5]
Before the introduction of steam vessels travelers were entirely at the mercy of the winds, and might be delayed on land for many days. In the sixteenth century, says Bates, "a forty-eight hour passage was nothing to grumble at."[6] Coryate, on his famous journey, went from Dover to Calais in ten hours. His characteristic description would apply in some particulars to a crossing even in our day. "I arrived," says he, "about five of the clocke in the after-noone, after I had varnished the exterior parts of the ship with the excrementall ebullitions of my tumultuous stomach, as desiring to satiate the gormandizing paunches of the hungry Haddocks … with that wherewith I had superfluously stuffed my selfe at land, having made my rumbling belly their capacious aumbrie."[7]
In the eighteenth century five hours or more was an ordinary allowance for a crossing in a fair wind,[8] though the run was often made in three hours, or even less.[9] In 1754, the Earl of Cork and Orrery crossed from Dover to Calais in three hours and ten minutes.[10] In 1772, Dr. Charles Burney spent nine days at Calais in waiting for weather that would permit him to cross the Channel. When he finally arrived at London he suffered a severe attack of
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- ↑ "The Ship inn upon the quay at Dover is the best and most reasonable house." The Gentleman's Guide, p. 15.
- ↑ Travels through France and Italy, I, 3, 4.
- ↑ These were, at all events, the ordinary days in the middle of the eighteenth century.
- ↑ De la Force, Nouvelle Description de la France, I, 341.
- ↑ Fitzgerald, Life of Sterne, p. 329.
- ↑ Bates, Touring in 1600, p. 63.
- ↑ Crudities, I, 152.
- ↑ Journal of Major Richard Ferrier (1687), p. 17; Wright, Some Observations made in Travelling through France, Italy, etc. (1719–20), I, 1.
- ↑ H. St. John writes from Paris to Selwyn, December 22, 1770, "I arrived here at five o'clock in the morning, last Sunday; had a fine passage of less than three hours." Jesse, George Selwyn and his Contemporaries, III, 3.
- ↑ Letters from Italy, p. 10.
