For Jerusalem the usual point of departure was Venice.  Pilgrims congregated there from all parts of Western and Central Europe, and there were regular services of ships, sailing mostly in the summer months.  The competition between shipmasters, or ‘patrons’, to secure custom was very keen.  Thus Torkington records:  ’On 3 May the patron of a new goodly ship with other merchants desired us pilgrims that we would come aboard and see his ship within:  which ship lay afore St. Mark’s Church.  We all went in, and there they made us goodly cheer with diverse subtilties, as comfits and march-panes and sweet wines.  Also 5 May the patron of another ship which lay in the sea five miles from Venice, desired us all pilgrims that we would come and see his ship.  And the same day we all went with him; and there he provided for us a marvellous good dinner, where we had all manner of good victuals and wine.’  Ultimately, Torkington sailed in a new ship of 800 tons,[37] under a patron named Thomas Dodo.  Only three days later another ship set sail with a large party of German pilgrims.

[37] If the figure is correct, she was a large vessel for the times; for a century later, the Pelican, in which Drake sailed round the world, was only 100 tons, the Squirrel, in which Sir Humfrey Gilbert was cast away in an Atlantic gale, only 10.

In all ages a great ship is a great wonder, representing for the time the final triumph of the shipwright’s art.  The monster vessel that set Lucian’s friend dreaming at the Piraeus had but one mast; yet the curious from Athens flocked down to see her extraordinary proportions and to admire the sailors who had beaten up in her from Egypt against the Etesian winds in only seventy days.  She was the ship of the hour:  anything greater scarcely conceivable.  Again, Macaulay returning from India in 1837 compares his comfortable sailing-ship to a huge floating hotel.  Burton on his way to Mecca in 1853, when steaming across the Bay of Biscay in a vessel of 2000 tons, prophesies that sea-sickness is at an end now that such monsters ply across the ocean and laugh at the storm.  How puny do they seem beside the Olympic and Imperator, at which we in our turn gaze wonderingly and think that engineering can no further go.  It is amusing to find the same proud admiration in a traveller of 1517:  ’Our ship was so great that when we came to land, we could not run her upon the beach like a galley, but must remain in deep water’, the passengers going ashore in boats.

Quite a number of contracts between patron and pilgrim have been preserved.  Some of the terms are as follows:  ’that the ship shall be properly armed and manned, and carry a barber and a physician; that it shall only touch at the usual ports, and not stay more than three days at Cyprus, because of malaria there.’  The Holy Land was in Turkish hands, and the Turks, though willing to receive the pilgrims, for the sake of the money they brought into the country,