If you expect to be well lodged on the road you will be disappointed, the inns being not only bad, but often very bad, and even the best in the country are ‘only indifferent when compared to those to which Englishmen are accustomed at home, and have created on those high roads of the Continent which they most frequent.’
Ford’s comments on inns continue for pages, many of the buildings having ‘at a distance quite the air of a gentleman’s mansion. Their white walls, towers, and often elegant elevations, glitter in the sun, gay and promising, while all within is dark, dirty, and dilapidated.’
The traveller’s reception is hardly ever as he would wish: ‘… no one greets him; no obsequious landlord, bustling waiter, or simpering chambermaid, takes any notice of his arrival. He proceeds, unaided, to unload or unsaddle his beast …’
As for which inn to choose at the end of the day: ‘The safe rule is to go to the one where the diligence puts up — The Coach Inn. We shall not be able often to give him the exact names of the posadas, nor is it requisite. The simple direction “Let us go to the inn,” will be enough in smaller towns; for the question is rather, Is there an inn, and where is it? than, Which is the best inn?’
In spite of earlier reassurances about public security, the pages later devoted at length to the matter may well have caused a frisson of romantic alarm in the bosoms of many readers. Travelling with a baggage waggon is ‘of all others that which most exposes the party to be robbed’.
When the caravan arrives in the small villages it attracts immediate notice, and if it gets wind that the travellers are foreigners, and still more English, they are supposed to be laden with gold and booty. In the villages near the inns there is seldom a lack of loiterers, who act as spies, and convey intelligence to their confederates; again, the bulk of the equipment, the noise and clatter of men and mules, is seen and heard from afar, by robbers who lurk in hiding-places or eminences, who are well provided with telescopes, besides with longer and sharper noses. The slow pace and impossibility of flight render the traveller an easy prey to well mounted horsemen. We do not wish to frighten our readers with much notice on Spanish robbers, being well assured that they are the exception, not the rule, in Spanish travel. It is not, however, to be denied that Spain is, of all countries in Europe, the one in which the ancient classical and once universal system of robbing on the highway exists the most unchained.
First and foremost come the ‘ladrones’, the robbers on a great scale. These are the most formidable; and as they seldom attack any travellers except with overwhelming force, and under circumstances of ambuscade and surprise, where everything is in their favour, resistance is generally useless, and can only lead to fatal accidents; it is better to submit at once to the summons which will take no denial. Those who are provided with such a sum of money as the robbers think according to their class of life, that they ought to carry about them, are very rarely ill-used; a frank, confident, and good-humoured surrender generally not only prevents any bad treatment, but secures even civility during the disagreeable operation. The Spaniard is by nature high-bred and a ‘caballero’, and responds to any appeal to qualities of which his nation has reason to be proud; notwithstanding these moral securities, if only by way of making assurance doubly sure, an Englishman will do well when travelling in exposed districts to be provided with a bag containing fifty to one hundred dollars, which makes a handsome purse, feels heavy in the hand, and is that sort of amount which the Spanish brigand thinks a native of this proverbially rich country ought to have with him on his travels. The traveller should be particularly careful to have a watch of some kind, one with a gaudy gilt chain and seals is the best suited: not to have a watch of any kind exposes the traveller to more certain indignities than a scantily filled purse.
Some consolation is intended by the remark that Spanish robbers may well think twice before attacking armed English travellers, ‘particularly if they appear on their guard. The robbers dislike fighting. They hate danger, from knowing what it is; they have no chivalrous courage, or abstract notions of fair play. They have also a peculiar dislike to English guns and gunpowder, which, in fact, both as arms and ammunition, are infinitely superior to the ruder Spanish weapons. Though three or four Englishmen have nothing to fear, yet where there are ladies it is always far better to be provided with an escort.’
Travel was certainly slow, and indeed leisurely, for Ford tells us that to make a general tour of Spain ‘would be a work of much time and difficulty’, and ‘could scarcely be accomplished in under a year and a half; indeed we ourselves devoted three years to the task’.
On the way to Seville we are told to beware of the inn rooms where, in summer, ‘legions of fleas breed in the mattings; the leaf of the oleander is often strewed as a preventive. Bugs, or French ladybirds, make bad beds resemble busy ant-hills, and the walls of ventas, where they especially lodge, are often stained with the marks of nocturnal combat, evincing the internecine guerrilla, waged against enemies who, if not exterminated, murder innocent sleep; were the bugs and fleas unanimous, they would eat up a Goliath, but fortunately, like true Iberians, they never pull together, and are conquered in detail … From these evils, however, the best houses in Seville are comparatively free.’
Ford does not genuflect to any tenets of ‘political correctness’ — happily unformulated in his day — when dwelling on the character of the people in southern Spain. They are, he writes, ‘as impressionable as children, heedless of results, uncalculating of contingencies, passive victims to violent impulse, gay, clever, good humoured, and light-hearted, and the most subservient dupes of plausible nonsense. Tell them that their country is the most beautiful, themselves the finest, handsomest, bravest, the most civilized of mortals, and they may be led forthwith by the nose. Of all Spaniards the Andalucian is the greatest boaster; he brags chiefly of his courage and wealth. He ends in believing his own lie, and hence is always pleased with himself, with whom he is on the best of terms. His redeeming qualities are his kind and good manners, his lively, social turn, his ready wit and sparkle: he is ostentatious, and, as far as his limited means will allow, eager to show hospitality to the stranger, after the Spanish acceptation of that term, which has no English reference to the kitchen.’
Ford goes on thus for some time, until his analysis takes on a more political, not to say racial, aspect: ‘If the people are sometimes cruel and ferocious when collected in numbers, we must remember that the blood of Africa boils in their veins; their fathers were the children of the Arab, whose arm is against every man; they have never had a chance given them — an iniquitous and long-continued system of misgovernment in church and state has tended to depress their good qualities and encourage their vices; the former, which are all their own, have flourished in spite of the depressing incubus. Can it be wondered that their armies should fly when every means of efficiency is wanting to the poor soldier, and when unworthy chiefs set the example? Is there no allowance to be made for their taking the law into their own hands, when they see the fountains of justice habitually corrupted? The world is not their friend, nor the world’s law; their lives, sinews, and little properties have never been respected by the powers that be, who have ever favoured the rich and strong, at the expense of the poor and weak; the people, therefore, from sad experience have no confidence in institutions, and when armed with power, and their blood on fire, can it be expected that they should not slake their great revenge?’