It's probably going too far to call him "the first English travel writer", but Thomas Coryat was certainly in at the very beginning of the idea of travel as something worth doing for its own sake. Earlier generations went on pilgrimages, military, diplomatic or scholarly missions, or simply to do business, but Coryat didn't bother with any such pretext: he was a gentleman, travelling for his own pleasure, to broaden his mind, and to gather material for a book. What would later be called the Grand Tour.

Coryat, who liked to emphasise his rural Somerset background, was a contemporary of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, a regular at the Mermaid Tavern, and had blagged his way into the court of James I's eldest son, Henry, Prince of Wales, where he seems to have acted as a kind of semi-rustic straight-man to the galaxy of high-powered London wits that met there. Coryat's Crudities is his record of a tour to Venice and back that took him five months in the summer of 1608.

Although Coryat liked to boast about his walking exploits, he seems to have taken whatever means of transport offered itself: horse, coach, or river-boat. He probably did about half the journey on foot. Outward he went via Paris and Lyon to the Mont Cenis pass, then on into Savoie and Italy. He spent six weeks in Venice, then on the way back he crossed the alps into Switzerland and followed the Rhine through Germany and Holland to Vlissingen.

One of the oddest things about the book is the blurb — all 150 pages of it. As was usual, he asked a few of his literary friends to contribute verses recommending the book. They did so, but with tongue firmly in cheek, and they also suggested to a few of their friends to join in, until the whole thing snowballed into the in-joke of the moment, and there was practically no-one in literary London (from Ben Jonson and John Donne down to the lowliest scribe) who hadn't written a humorous sonnet or ode in mock-praise of Coryat. Prince Henry was enchanted with the joke, and insisted, much to the author's embarrassment, that the entire collection be included in the book, where it took up about a third of Volume I.

Coryat obviously wasn't quite the buffoon his friends made him out to be, but he's not the most gifted of writers. His descriptions of palaces and cathedrals often read as though drafted by an estate agent, he has a tendency to overlook things like scenery, and relies on a very limited stock of adjectives. Metaphor and simile are devices he clearly doesn't approve of at all. But there are a lot of endearing little human touches, especially when he excuses himself - as he continually has to - for the things he should have seen but didn't. Or - in the case of his comments about Venetian courtesans and the dangers of drinking too much in Heidelberg - for the things he shouldn't have seen but did.

Coryat's most irritating habit is perhaps his insistence on quoting in full any Latin epitaph or inscription he happens to have seen. He has a great veneration for the Romans and anything written in their language, but he doesn't really explain why he is so interested: in most cases he simply quotes the text without comment, and after a while you realise that you can skip all the Latin without missing anything. (I did see a comment on the web somewhere that there are a few inscriptions for which Coryat is now the only surviving source, so even this effort wasn't entirely futile.)

The real joy of reading this book is the sense of getting a first-hand account of what Europe looked like 400 years ago. There are places where you can almost forget that distance in time, but then you're suddenly pulled up by the realisation that (for instance) he's just walked past the future site of the city of Karlsruhe, a hundred years before it was built. In Köln, he comments that the cathedral will be nice when it's finished...

Another joy, of course, is deciphering the 17th century language. I read the 1905 Glasgow edition, which leaves Coryat's eccentric spelling intact, apart from a few basic things like replacing ſ by s and modernising the use of u,v, and w. Especially with place names, there's sometimes quite a bit of puzzling involved before you've worked out which city he's talking about.

After getting back from this tour, Coryat had clearly been well and truly bitten by the travel bug. He set off for Asia not long after the Crudities were published, and managed to get to India, possibly the first British traveller to do so by the overland route. Unfortunately, he died before he could write another book, but some of his letters and notes from the Asian trip were published posthumously. ( )