Travelling with Bacon

To the trains

Travelling is of all time. Only the means to travel have changed, and even these haven’t changed as much as we might think. Travelling by air is new, indeed, but you can see a car or train as an updated version of a coach. A car, so an automobile, actually is nothing but a cart with a motor, and a train actually is a number of carts coupled together pulled by a cart with a motor. Also the reasons for travelling haven’t fundamentally changed such as business, family visits, tourism, pilgrimage, study and exploration, and nomadic travels. What has changed over the years is the timescale of travelling. Today travelling goes faster. Moreover, it has become cheaper. The result has been mass tourism, a new phenomenon, indeed.
Humans have always travelled, even if the circumstances were difficult and dangerous. I have often been surprised how much, for instance, medieval people have travelled. Erasmus (c. 1467-1536), the great Dutch humanist, was born in Rotterdam and went to school in Deventer. He got his doctorate in Bologna in Italy, after having studied in Paris for some time, and he died in Basel, after having lived in several towns and cities in Western and Southern Europe. Erasmus rarely stayed at the same place for a long time. Also his Dutch predecessor Rodolphus Agricola (1444-1485) is a case in point. He was born in Baflo, a village in the north of the Netherlands near Groningen; he studied in Erfurt and Cologne (Germany), Leuven (Belgium), Pavia and Ferrara (Italy); and over the years he travelled often between these places. After having worked in Groningen for some years, he moved to Heidelberg (Germany), where he died, after having become ill on a trip to Rome. Or take Herodotus (c. 484 – c. 425), Ibn Batutta (1304-1368/9), and Zheng He (1371-1433/5), who were also avid travellers, not to forget all those prehistoric travellers whose names we’ll never know. Travelling is in our genes.
Montaigne (1533-1592) loved travelling, too, though he did it mainly in France. However, once Montaigne made a trip through Switzerland, Southern Germany, Austria and Italy. His travel journal has become famous, although he had written it only for himself; not for publication. Also Francis Bacon (1561-1626) has travelled quite a lot. He has travelled around in France and has been to Italy and Spain as well. He travelled mainly for educational reasons and for performing diplomatic tasks. He was about 20 years old then. In his days the habit arose that young men of good breeding made a “grand tour”, an educational trip through Europe and especially to Italy. We see this reflected in Bacon’s essay “Travel”, an essay full of advice. Just this makes the essay interesting for the modern reader, for many modern tourists travel not only to relax (like lying on the beach) but, if possible, they also want to learn something.
One of the first of Bacon’s advices for travellers is to learn the language of the country to be visited. I think he is right and during many trips I tried to learn a bit of the local language (not counting the fact that I know the main languages of Europe and have a basic knowledge of some other languages). But makes it still sense? How often doesn’t it happen to me now that I begin to speak, say, French or German and I get an answer in English! How annoying if you want to use the local language. Anyway, if you don’t speak the local language (and if the locals don’t speak English, I want to add), it’s good that you are accompanied by a teacher or a servant who does and who also knows what to see there, so Bacon. Nowadays, there is hardly any traveller who can afford this, but in modern terms we can say: Travel in a group with a tour guide or take part in local tours with a guide, and use the internet in order to find out what there is to see where you stay.
What then are the things you must see on your trip, anyway? Bacon gives a list of some fifty “things to be seen and observed”, too many to list here, but – in modern terms – he recommends to go to all those things that, indeed, modern tourists usually visit, too: Churches, monasteries, old buildings, ruins, museums, old cities, libraries, gardens, etc. and he advises us – again translated in modern terms – to go to shows, theatre performances, etc. Actually, it’s nothing new. However, what is quite remarkable for a modern tourist, Bacon tells us also that “… weddings, funerals, capital executions, and such shows … are not to be neglected.” The killing of a human was apparently seen as a show in those days. But would it be different today if there were still public executions? Even more, here and there in the world capital executions taking place in front of a large crowd still happen.
Then a list with travel advice follows. In short:
- keep a diary
- don’t stay too long at the same place; also when you’ll stay in the same city for some time, change your accommodation now and then
- avoid your compatriots, deal with the locals, and go to local restaurants
- take advantage of the advice and recommendations of the locals and others known with the region where you stay
- avoid quarrels and problems during your trip and avoid the company of people who might bring you in trouble

- after your return home, keep contact with some people in the region you visited
- and last but not least: “let [your] travel appear rather in [your] discourse than in [your] apparel or gesture; and in [your] discourse let [you] be advised in [your] answers rather than forward to tell stories; and let it appear that [you do] not change [your] own country’s manners for those of foreign parts, but only plant some flowers of what [you have] learned abroad into the customs of [your] own country.”

But for how many modern travellers is their trip nothing but living in an enclave and how many have stories to tell, anyway, let alone that they can give answers about the trip?