Barter also ought not to be wholly left out of sight. In Norway dried fish was more serviceable than coin, as was tobacco among Turks, the only people prompt to copy the English in the use of it for pleasure; but by the middle of the seventeenth century the same might be said of Western Russia. And there is the case of one Thomas Douglas in 1600 who could not make arrangements for four hundred crowns to be advised for him at Algiers, applying to the English government for leave to take with him duty-free the broadcloth he had bought with the money and meant to realise there, to discharge the ransom which the money represented.[141]
Supposing, however, that all these means failed? The tourist became a beggar till he found friends. He might try, of course, to raise a loan, but only on terms which would possibly induce him to prefer beggary. The "German Ulysses," Karl Nützel of Nuremberg, was robbed at Alexandria of his capital; at Cairo he persuaded a ship's captain to lend him four hundred ducats, undertaking to pay him six hundred at Constantinople. They arrived thither in two months; the interest was therefore at the rate of three hundred per cent.[142] Sir Henry Wotton, when an ambassador, paid twenty per cent for a loan at Venice.
In considering loans we have passed away from necessities into the second half of the subject of cost,—its reasonable possibilities. These consist of the risks and difficulties to which the traveller was liable, nowhere summarised so well as in the English Litany, which was written at this period:—
"From lightning and tempest; from plague, pestilence and famine; from battle and murder; and from sudden death,
Of the eight risks here mentioned, to most of which an Englishman at least was more liable abroad than at home, all but two have been minimised since. And if we note how in all other clauses of the Litany, only those troubles or desires which have affinity with each other are grouped together, it becomes significant in what company travellers are prayed for;—
"That it may please thee to preserve all that travel by land or water, all women labouring of child, all sick persons, and young children; and to shew thy pity upon all prisoners and captives.