A desire to emulate Spain developed on the English Isles and prevailed by the early 1600s, manifested by the first voyages of the East India Company, however controversial and unsuccessful earlier English maritime exploits might have been. Using a variety of sources, including books, pamphlets, private memoirs, legal records and anecdotes, Anthony Parr discusses the origins of the wager-journey (the mad voyage) and its progression up until the eighteenth century. Furthermore, in this thoroughly researched and dynamic book, the author also reviews the urges the mad voyage was supposed to satisfy and its impact upon a variety of spheres of English society, including tourism, eccentricity, literature, diplomacy and national identity.
What certainly helped the nascent trade of mad voyages develop was the idea of turning travel into a commodity in order to profit by the travellers’ ventures. In fact, the author suggests that the economic aspect of the mad voyage has often been ignored in traditional analyses of pastimes and unusual customs. Parr asserts that since endeavours such as dance and travel became so marketable and popular among both gentry and commonalty, the mad voyage should be interpreted as a sign of a new world that was taking shape at the time. Moreover, Parr explains why a gentlemen’s wager that became so widespread in the eighteenth century owes much to the increased mobility, opportunity and enterprise of the mediaeval and Elizabethan culture. The author postulates that the mad voyages should be considered “part of the ferment of travel activity in Tudor-Stuart England,” affected by “new or greatly expanded initiatives,” such as continental tourism and the many kinds of maritime venture (6). Therefore, according to him, the mad voyages should certainly be considered much more than “a current fashion for ludic exploits”, and the participants a new class of traveller, bound to expand people’s freedom to more around or to experiment with the available space and time (7).
The mad voyages also symbolize an important aspect of the changing social conditions of the early modern English society, namely, the mobility of the lower orders of society, as evidenced by the shift in attitude which generated the conditions “for several adventurers of humble origins on England’s roads and waterways”, later to be expanded into continental tourism, which centred primarily on Rome and Constantinople, however controversial and dangerous English tourism to Catholic and Muslim Europe had been (11). As a matter of fact, the mad voyages helped create a new kind of hero, who captured the imaginations of ordinary people and served as an illustration of English eccentricity. Furthermore, they allow us to better understand the origins of English eccentricity and its meaning in the early modern era, since, as a German visitor to England observed, a spirit of gaming was more prevalent in England than among any other European nation. In fact, the same observer even asked “where is there any people so fond of frequent and oftentimes high betting not seldom about extreme trifles, as the English?” (12). But, the mad voyages did not appear out of the blue. The author convincingly demonstrates how “the vogue for travel exploits tapped into a fund of stories and journeying tropes that had shaped the collective mind for generations”, because “when English adventurers started to experiment with new peripatetic opportunities, they were participating in a process where time-honoured ideas of fantastic travel were being modified by the pressures of the time” (19). Consequently, he determines that English eccentricity did not originate in the wager-books of eighteenth-century London clubs, but in the taverns and town houses of Renaissance England. One cannot, however, underestimate the importance of the ever-expanding capital. London was either a point of departure or the city within which many of the travel exploits occurred. Accordingly, the author demonstrates how the mad voyage became a ready metaphor for Londoners’ “excited bewilderment at social conditions and (for some) a new and flamboyant vehicle for their aspirations in a challenging environment”, as they attempted to understand “the space they inhabited and the dangers and possibilities of urban experience” (213). In other words, as demonstrated by the significance of the inns, the focal point of cultural life, rapid urban growth and development contributed to the development of the games of travel wagers, which included a pilgrimage to Rome or Jerusalem, or walking “202 times round the area of Upper Moorfields in 27 hours”, or rowing “a small Boat to the Citie of Bristow” (44).
Long-distance walking became a celebrity activity and an occasion for authorship, which resulted not only in fame but also in monetary gratification for individuals. Moreover, these mad voyages also allowed England to catch up with other Europeans’ levels of navigation and technical know-how and while the mad voyages might have been a distinctly English phenomenon, they were not confined to domestic roads and waterways and were inspired by foreign adventure and even influenced by much earlier Christian pilgrimages and merchants, since while the spiritual was of the goals of a pilgrimage, speculation on personal travel was the other.
As travel wagers became more common, they precipitated both a new stage in mobility and a greatly expanded set of opportunities and dangers, all the while challenging the settled restrictions and ideas of identity. Interestingly, it was almost impossible for insurers to adequately measure travel risks. No mathematics of probability existed until the 1650s and the emergence of the mad voyages coincided with the evolution of the insurance industry, which was more readily tolerated in England than it was on the Continent. At any rate, “dicing with death had become ... a hallmark of English travel”, though it must be understood that even the riskiest of the wagers were entered into willingly and travellers were not victims of perilous circumstances, even if they risked being accused of spying in Rome or were perceived as crusaders in Constantinople, in which case they might have ended up in being sold into slavery or held for ransom (148).
In his examination of the impact of travel wagers upon English colonization overseas, the author also demonstrates how public lotteries helped sustain the Virginia colony. Portraying the settlement as a national project, the Virginia Company attempted to raise money promoting the lottery as a worthy cause, regardless of whether participants would win or not. As a matter of fact, they were encouraged to forgo their potential earnings for a stake in the company. Indeed, while this particular lottery was hardly successful, it nonetheless was “crucial to the survival of Jamestown throughout the second decade of the seventeenth century”, even though what it provided was subsistence, not development (155).
This excellent and thorough book is a captivating addition to the literature of travel exploits. As Parr concludes, further exploitation of what mad travel accomplished as well as an authoritative study of the tradition of speculative voyage literature in English are still needed. However, this great compendium certainly achieves its goal of depicting the new world of travel developing in early modern England.
