The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works

by Thomas Nashe

  To these I might wedge in Cornelius the Brabantine191 who was feloniously suspected in ’87 for penning a discourse of tuftmockados, and a country gentleman of my acquaintance who is launching forth a treatise as big-garbed as the French Academy of The Cornucopia of a Cow and what an advantageable creature she is, beyond all the four-footed rabblement of herbagers and grass-champers (day nor night that she can rest for filing192 and tampering about it), as also a sworn brother of his that so bebangeth poor paper in laud of a bag-pudding,193 as a switzer194 would not believe it. Neither of their decads are yet stamped, but ere midsummer term they will be, if their words be sure payment, and then tell me if our English sconces195 be not right Sheffield196 or no.

  The application of this whole catalogue of waste authors is no more but this: Quot capita tot sententiae197 (‘so many heads, so many whirligigs’).198 And if all these have terlery-ginked199 it so frivolously of they recked not what, I may cum gratia et priveligio200 pronounce it, that a red herring is wholesome in a frosty morning, and rake up some few scattered syllables together in the exornation201 and polishing of it No more excursions and circumquaques202 but totaliter ad appositum.203

  That English merchandise is most precious which no country can be without. If you ask Suffolk, Essex, Kent, Sussex, or Lemster or Cotswold what merchandise that should be, they will answer you it is the very same which Polidore Vergil calls Vae aureum vellus,204 the true golden fleece of our wool and English cloth, and naught else. Other engrating205 upland cormorants206 will grunt out it is grana paradisi,207 our grain or corn, that is most sought after. The westerners and northerners that it is lead, tin and iron. ‘Butter and cheese, butter and cheese!’ saith the farmer. But from every one of these I dissent and will stoutly bide by it, that, to trowl in the cash throughout all nations of Christendom, there is no fellow to the red herring. The French, Spanish, and Italian have wool enough of their own whereof they make cloth to serve their turn, though it be somewhat coarser than ours. For corn, none of the east parts but surpasseth us. Of lead and tin is the most scarcity in foreign dominions, and plenty with us, though they are not utterly barren of them. As for iron, about Isenborough208 and other places of Germany they have quadruple the store that we have. As touching butter and cheese, the Hollanders cry ‘By your leave, we must go before you’; and the Transalpiners with their lordly parmasin (so named of the city of Parma in Italy where it is first clout-crushed209 and made) shoulder in for the upper hand as hotly. Whenas, of our appropriate glory of the red herring, no region twixt the poles artic and antartic may, can, or will rebate from us one scruple.

  On no coast like ours is it caught in such abundance, nowhere dressed in his right cue but under our horizon; hosted,210 roasted and toasted here alone it is, and as well powdered and salted as any Dutchman would desire. If you articulate with me of the gain or profit of it, without the which the newfanglest rarity, that nobody can boast of but ourselves, after three days gazing is reversed over to children for babies to play with. Behold, it is every man’s money, from the King to the courtier. Every householder or good-man Baltrop,211 that keeps a family in pay, casts for it as one of his standing provisions. The poorer sort make it three parts of their sustenance; with it, for his denier,212 the patchedest leather piltche labaratho213 may dine like a Spanish duke, when the niggardliest mouse214 of beef will cost him sixpence. In the craft of catching or taking it, and smudging215 it merchant and chapmanable216 as it should be, it sets a-work thousands, who live all the rest of the year gaily well by what in some few weeks they scratch up then, and come to bear office of questman217 and scavenger in the parish where they dwell; which they could never have done, but would have begged or starved with their wives and brats had not this captain of the squamy218 cattle so stood their good lord and master. Carpenters, shipwrights, makers of lines, ropes, and cables, dressers of hemp, spinners of thread, and net-weavers it gives their handfuls to, sets up so many salt-houses to make salt, and salt upon salt; keeps in earnings the cooper, the brewer, the baker, and numbers of other people, to gill, wash and pack it, and carry it, and recarry it.

  In exchange of it from other countries they return wine and woads, for which is always paid ready gold, with salt, canvas, vitre,219 and a great deal of good trash.220 Her Majesty’s tributes and customs this Semper Augustus221 of the seas’ finny freeholders augmenteth and enlargeth uncountably, and to the increase of navigation for her service he is no enemy.

  Voyages of purchase or reprisals, which are now grown a common traffic, swallow up and consume more sailors and mariners than they breed, and lightly not a slop of a rope-haler they send forth to the Queen’s ships, but he is first broken to the sea in the herring man’s skiff or cock-boat, where having learned to brook all waters, and drink as he can out of a tarry can, and eat poor-John out of swuttie222 platters, when he may get it, without butter or mustard, there is no ho223 with him, but, once heartened thus, he will needs be a man of war, or a tobacco-taker, and wear a silver whistle. Some of these for their haughty climbing come home with wooden legs, and some with none, but leave body and all behind. Those that escape to bring news tell of nothing but eating tallow and young blackamoors, of five and five to a rat in every mess, and the ship-boy to the tail, of stopping their noses when they drank stinking water that came out of the pump of the ship, and cutting a greasy buff jerkin in tripes and broiling it for their dinners. Divers Indian adventures have been seasoned with direr mishaps, not having for eight days’ space the quantity of a candle’s end among eight-score to grease their lips with; and landing in the end to seek food, by the cannibal savages they have been circumvented, and forced to yield their bodies to feed them.

  Our mitred Archpatriarch, Leopold Herring, exacts no such muscovian vassalage of his liegemen, though he put them to their trumps224 other while, and scuppets225 not his benefice into their mouths with such freshwater facility as Master Ascham in his Schoolmaster would imply. His words are these in his censure upon Varro: ‘He enters not,’ saith he, ‘into any great depth of eloquence, but as one carried in a small low vessel by himself very nigh the common shore, not much unlike the fishermen of Rie, or herring men of Yarmouth, who deserve by common men’s opinion small commendation for any cunning sailing at all.’ Well, he was Her. Majesty’s schoolmaster, and a St John’s man in Cambridge, in which house once I took up my inn for seven year together lacking a quarter, and yet love it still, for it is and ever was the sweetest nurse of knowledge in all that University. Therefore I will keep fair quarter with him, and expostulate the matter more tamely. Memorandum non ab uno:226 I vary not a minim from him, that, in the captious mystery of Monsieur Herring, low vessels will not give their heads for the washing,227 holding their own pell-mell in all weathers as roughly as vaster timber-men, though not so near the shore as, through ignorance of the coast, he soundeth, nor one man by himself alone to do everything, which is the opinion of one man by himself alone, and not believed of any other. Five to one, if he were alive, I would beat against him, since one without five is as good as none, to govern the most eggshell shallop that floateth, and spread her nets and draw them in. As stiffly could I controvert it with him about pricking his card so badly in Cape Norfolk or Sinus Yarmouthiensis and discrediting our countrymen for shorecreepers, like these Colchester oystermen, or whiting-mongers and sprot-catchers.228 Solyman Herring, would you should persuade yourselves, is loftier minded and keepeth more aloof than so. And those that are his followers, if they will seek him where he is, more than common danger they must incur in close driving under the sands which alternately or betwixt times, when he is disposed to ensconce himself, are his entrenched randevowe229 or castle of retiring; and otherwhile forty or threescore leagues in the roaring territory they are glad on their wooden horses to post after him, and scour it with their ethiope pitchboards230 till they be windless in his quest and pursuing. Returning from waiting on him, have with you to the Adriatic and abroad everywhere far and near to make port-sail231 of their perfumed smok
y commodities, and, that toil rocked asleep, they are for Ultima Thule,232 the north-seas, or Iceland, and thence yerk over233 that worthy Pallamede don pedro de linge,234 and his worshipful nephew Hugo Haberdine,235 and a trundle-tail236 tyke237 or shaugh238 or two, and towards Michlemas scud home to catch herring again. This argues they should have some experience of navigation, and are not such halcyons to build their nests all on the shore as Master Ascham supposeth.

  Rie is one of the ancient towns belonging to the cinq ports, yet limpeth cinq ace239 behind Yarmouth, and it will sink when Yarmouth riseth, and yet, if it were put in the balance against Yarmouth, it would rise when Yarmouth sinketh; and to stand threshing no longer about it, Rie is rye and no more but rye, and Yarmouth wheat compared with it. Wherefore had he been a right clerk of the market, he would have set a higher price on the one than the other, and set that one of highest price above the other.

  Those that deserve by common men’s opinion small commendation for any cunning sailing at all are not the Yarmouthers (however there is a foul fault in the print escaped, that curstly squinteth and leereth that way) but the bonny northern cobbles of his country, with their Indian canoes or boats like great beef-trays or kneading-troughs, firking240 as flight241 swift thorough the glassy fields of Thetis as if it were the land of ice, and sliding over the boiling desert so early, and never bruise one bubble of it, as though they contended to outstrip the light-foot tripper in the Metamorphosis,242 who would run over the ripe-bending ears of corn and never shed or perish one kernel. No such iron-fisted cyclops to hew it out of the flint and run thorough anything as these frost-bitten crabtree-faced lads, spun out of the hards243 of the tow, which are Donzel244 Herring’s lackeys at Yarmouth every fishing.

  Let the careeringest245 billow confess and absolve itself, before it prick up his bristles against them, for, if it come upon his dancing horse, and offer to tilt it with them, they will ask no trustier lances than their oars to beat out the brains of it and stop his throat from belching.

  These rubs246 removed, on with our game as fast as we may, and to the gain of the red herring again another crash.247 Item: if it were not for this Huniades248 of the liquid element, that word Quadragesima, or Lent, might be clean sponged out of the calendar, with rogation weeks, saints’ eves, and the whole ragman’s rule of fasting days; and fishmongers might keep Christmas all the year for any overlavish takings they should have of clowns and clouted shoes,249 and the rubbish menialty, their best customers; and their bloody adversaries, the butchers, would never leave cleaving it out in the whole chines,250 till they had got a Lord Mayor of their company as well as they. Nay, out of their wits they would be haunted with continual takings and stand cross-gagged with knives in their mouths from one Shrove Tuesday to another, and wear candles’-ends in their hats at midsummer, having no time to shave their pricks251 or wash their flyblown aprons, if Domingo Rufus252 or Sacrapant253 Herring caused not the dice to run contrary.

  The Romish rotten Pythagoreans or Carthusian friars, that mump254 on nothing but fish, in what a phlegmatic predicament would they be, did not his counterpoison of the spitting-sickness (sixtyfold more restorative than bezer255) patch them out and preserve them; which, being double-roasted and dried as it is, not only sucks up all rheumatic inundations, but is a shoeing horn256 for a pint of wine over-plus.

  The sweet smack that Yarmouth finds in it, and how it hath made it Lippitudo Atticae257 (as it was said of Aegina, her near adjacent confronter), the blemish and stain of all her salt-water sisters in England, and multiplied it from a mole-hill of sand to a cloud-crowned Mount Teneriffe, abbreviately and meetly according to my old Sarum plain-song258 I have harped upon, and that, if there were no other certificate or instance of the inlinked consanguinity twixt him and Lady Lucar,259 is instar mille,260 worth a million of witnesses, to exemplify the riches of him. The poets were trivial that set up Helen’s face for such a top-gallant summer maypole for men to gaze at, and strouted261 it out so in their buskined braves262 of her beauty, whereof the only Circe’s Heypass and Repass263 was that it drew a thousand ships to Troy, to fetch her back with a pestilence. Wise men in Greece in the meanwhile to swagger so about a whore!

  Eloquious264 hoary-beard father Nestor, you were one of them, and you, Master Ulysses, the prudent dwarf of Pallas, another, of whom it is iliadized that your very nose dropped sugar candy, and that your spittle was honey. Natalis Comes,265 if he were above ground, would be sworn upon it. As loud a ringing miracle as the attractive melting eye of that strumpet can we supply therewith of our dappert Piemont Huldrick266 Herring, which draweth more barques to Yarmouth Bay than her beauty did to Troy. Oh, he is attended upon most Babylonically; and Xerxes so over-cloyed not the Hellespont with his foists, galleys and brigandines, as he mantleth the narrow seas with his retinue, being not much behind, in the check-roll of his janissaries and contributories, with eagle-soaring Bullingbroke, that at his removing of household into banishment (as Father Froissart threaps us down267) was accompanied with 40,000 men, women and children weeping, from London to the land’s end at Dover. A colony of critical Zenos,268 should they sinnow269 their syllogistical cluster-fists270 in one bundle to confute and disprove moving, were they, but during the time they might lap up a mass of buttered fish, in Yarmouth one fishing, such a violent motion of toiling myrmidons271 they should be spectators of and a confused stirring to and fro of a Lepantalike hoste of undefatigable flood-bickerers and foam-curbers, that they would not move or stir one foot till they had declaimed and abjured their bedrid spital272 positions. In verament and sincerity, I never crowded through this confluent herring fair, but it put me in memory of the great year of jubilee in Edward the Third’s time, in which it is sealed and delivered under the hands of a public notary, three hundred thousand people roamed to Rome for purgatory pills and paternal venial benedictions, and the ways beyond sea were so bunged up with your daily orators or beadsmen and your crutched or crouchant friars or cross-creepers and barefoot penitentiaries, that a snail could not wriggle in her horns betwixt them. Small things we may express by great, and great by small, though the greatness of the red herring be not small (as small a hop-on-my-thumb he seemeth). It is with him as with great personages, which from their high estate and not their high statures propagate the elevate titles of their gogmagognes.273 Cast274 his state who will, and they shall find it to be very high-coloured (as high-coloured as his complexion if I said there were not a pimple to be abated). In Yarmouth he hath set up his state house, where one quarter of a year he keeps open court for Jews and Gentiles.

  To fetch him in,* in Trojan equipage, some of every of the Christcross alphabet275 of outlandish cosmopoli furrow up the rugged brine, and sweep through his tumultuous ooze, will or nill he, rather than in tendering their allegiance they should be benighted with tardity. For our English Mikrokosmos or Phoenician Dido’s hide of ground,276 no shire, county, count palatine,277 or quarter of it, but rigs out some oaken squadron or other to waft him along Cleopatrian† Olympickly‡ and not the diminutivest nook or cruise of them but is parturient278 of the like super-officiousness,§ arming forth though it be but a catch or pink,279 no capabler than a rundlet280 or washing bowl to imp281 the wings of his convoy. Holy Saint Taubard, in what droves the gouty-bagged Londoners hurry down and dye the watchet282 air of an iron russet hue with the dust that they raise in hot-spurred rowelling it on283 to perform compliments unto him. One beck more to the baillies of the cinq ports, whom I were a ruder barbarian than Smill, the Prince of the Crims and Nagayans,284 if in this action I should forget (having had good cheer at their tables more than once or twice whiles I loitered in this paragonless285 fish town). City, town, country, Robin Hood and Little John, and who not, are industrious and careful to squire and safe conduct him in; but in ushering him in, next to the baillies of Yarmouth, they trot before all, and play the provost marshals, helping to keep good rule the first three weeks of his ingress, and never leave roaring it out with their brazen horn as long as they stay, of
the freedoms and immunities sourcing from him. Being thus entered or brought in, the consistorians286 or settled standers of Yarmouth commence intestate287 wars amongst themselves who should give him the largest hospitality, and gather about him as flocking to handsel288 him and strike him good luck as the sweetkin madams did about valiant Sir Walter Manny, the martial tutor unto the Black Prince (he that built Charterhouse), who being upon the point of a hazardous journey into France, either to win the horse or lose the saddle, as it runs in the proverb,289 and taking his leave at Court in a suit of mail from top to toe, all the ladies clung about him and would not let him stretch out a step, till they had enfettered him with their variable favours, and embroidered over his armour like a gaudy summer mead, with their scarves, bracelets, chains, ouches;290 in generous reguerdonment291 whereof he sacramentally obliged himself, that, had the French King as many giants in his country as he hath pears or grapes, and they stood all enranged on the shore to interdict his disembarking, through the thickest thorny quickset of them he would pierce, or be tossed up to heaven on their spears, but, in honour of those debonair Idalian nymphs and their spangled trappings, he would be the first man should set foot in his kingdom, or unsheathe steel against him. As he promised, so was his* manly blade’s execution, and, in emulation of him, whole herds of knights and gentlemen closed up their right eyes with a piece of silk every one, and vowed never to uncover them or let them see light till, in the advancement of their mistress’s beauties, they had enacted with their brandished bilbowblades292 some chivalrous Bellerophon’s293 trick at arms, that from Salomons Islands to St Magnus’ corner294 might cry clang again. Oh it was a brave age then, and so it is ever, where there are offensive wars, and not defensive, and men fight for the spoil and not in fear to be spoiled, and are as lions seeking out their prey, and not as sheep that lie still whiles they are preyed on.