The depth because deep waters bear and sustain the greater burdens and the navigation is the more safe without peril; the pleasantness because it makes the navigation easy up and down which way soever you bend your course. therein it seems to some they have been much mistaken that had the ordering of the chattel that comes from Ticino to Milan, forasmuch as by the great fall of the water and the great advantage given to the water it hath so strong a current and is so violent that with infinite toil and labour and loss of time they have much ado to sail upward. But as touching rivers, nature hath showed herself very kind to Gallia Celtica and Belgica; forasmuch as in Gallia Celtica the rivers for the most part are most calm and still, and therefore they sail up and down with incredible facility because many of them come forth as it were in the plains and even grounds, by the means thereof their course is not violent, and they run not between the mountains, nor yet a short and little way, but many hundreds of miles through goodly and even plains. Where, for their recreation and their pleasure, otherwhile men take their course one way, another while another, now go on forwards, then turn back again, and so, by this winding and turning to and fro they help divers cities and provinces with water and victuals or other such things as they need. But there is not a country in Europe better furnished and provided of rivers than that part of Gallia Belgica that commonly we call Flanders. The Meuse, the Scheldt, the Moselle, Dender, Ruhr and Rhine, divided into three great arms or branches, run pleasantly and gallantly forthright and overthwart the province, and mightly enrich it by the commodity of navigation and traffic of infinite treasure, which certainly wants in Italy. For Italy being long and strait, and parted in the middest with the Apennine Hills, the rivers of Italy, through the shortness of their course, cannot neither much increase nor yet abate the violence of their streams.
The rivers of Lombardy come all, as it were, either out of the Alps, as the Ticino, Adda, Lambro, Serio, Adige, or out of the Apennine Hills, as the Toro, Lenza, Panaro, and Reno, and but a short way neither, wherein they rather deserve to be called land floods than rivers, for they soon find out the Po, which takes his course between the Apennine Hills and the Alps, so that he only resteth navigable. For washing the province over by all his whole length, he hath time to grow great, and enrich himself with the help of many rivers, and to moderate his natural swiftness by the long way he maketh. But this take withal, that forasmuch as the said rivers, through the shortness of their course, enter and meet together with a mighty rage and violence, they wax great otherwhile, and swell and run with such a raging course as they make the strongest cities afraid of them, much more the country thereabout. But the rivers of Romagna and of other parts of Italy, falling like raging land-floods partly on this side and partly on that side of the Apennine hills, soon find out the Adriatic or the Tyrrhenian or the Ionian seas, so that the most of them have no time to slake their rage, nor none of them have so much time to grow great, as might make them navigable. For that little that is navigable in Arno or Tiber, it is not worth the speaking.
The thickness of the water is also a very good help in this case. For it cannot be denied that the water of one river beareth great and weighty burdens much better than the water of some other. And in particular, when the Obelisk (set up in the time of Sixtus the Fifth) which is to be seen at this day in Saint Peter's Street, was brought to Rome, it is well known by good experience the water of Tiber was of more strength and of more force and firmness than the water of Nile.
And Seine, a mean river in France, beareth ships of such bulk, and carrieth burdens so great, that he who sees it not will not believe it; and there is not a river in the world that for proportion is able to bear the like burden. So that although it exceed not a mediocrity and be but a small river, yet notwithstanding it supplieth wonderfully all the necessities and wants of Paris, a city that in people and in abundance of all things exceedeth far all other cities whatsoever within the scope of Christendom.
Here a man might ask me how it comes to pass that one water should bear more burden than another?
Some will, that this proceedeth from the nature of the earth that thickeneth the water and maketh it stiff and by consequence firm and solid. This reason hath no other opposition but Nile, the water whereof is so earthy and so muddy that the Scripture calleth it the Troubled River, and it is not to be drunk before it be purged and settled well in the cistern. And it doth not only water and mellow all Egypt over with its liquidness, but more than that maketh it fertile and mucketh, as it were, the ground with its fatness. And yet it is not of the fittest nor the strongest to sustain and bear ships, boats or barks of any good burden, whereupon I should think that for such effect and purpose we should not so much prefer the muddiness of the water as the sliminess thereof; for that doth glue it, as it were, together, and thicken it the better, and maketh it more fit and more apt to bear good burden.
