The Polos’ clear purpose in coming to Hormuz was to take a ship across to Cambay in India, then down the Malabar coast to one of the ports from where convoys sailed straight to China. Instead, they turned back and chose the overland route after all. Marco does not explain why outright, but the reason for this retreat is plain enough. The ‘sewn boats’, the traditional craft of the Indian Ocean, looked too dangerous: ‘Their ships are very bad and many of them are wrecked, because they are not fastened with iron nails but stitched together with thread made of coconut husks … This makes it a risky undertaking to sail in these ships. And you can take my word that many of them sink, because the Indian Ocean is often very stormy.’5
Even if a vessel stayed afloat, the voyage would be anything but agreeable: ‘The ships have one mast, one sail and one rudder, but no deck. After they are loaded, however, the cargo is covered with a piece of hide, and on top of the cargo thus covered are placed the horses that are taken to India to be sold.’ Marco notes as a gloomy afterthought that the boats were not caulked with pitch, but ‘greased with a fish oil’.
The sea voyage had seemed impossibly hazardous, yet the Polos barely survived their two-year journey overland to Cathay. After many mishaps they finally bowed before the Great Khan, to be welcomed with all the honour due to emissaries from Christendom. There was little incentive to hasten back to Venice, and Marco began collecting the material which for three centuries was to have an unequalled influence upon Europe’s thinking about other races and continents.
Gold and silver to fill my storehouse year by year;
Corn and rice to crowd my sheds at every harvest.
Chinese slaves to take charge of treasury and barn.
Foreign slaves to take care of my cattle and sheep.
Strong-legged slaves to run by saddle and stirrup when I ride,
Powerful slaves to till the fields with might and main.
Handsome slaves to play the harp and hand the wine;
Slim-waisted slaves to sing me songs, and dance …
—a bridegroom’s dream, in Ballads and Stories from Tim-Huang (c. A.D. 750 trans. Arthur Waley)
THERE ARE too few guidelines in his book to tell precisely where Marco Polo travelled during his twenty years in the East, yet he certainly saw much of China, and journeyed beyond its borders, apparently to carry out diplomatic tasks for the Great Khan.1 One mission took him to India by sea, but the ship in which he was a passenger seems to have reached Sumatra too late to catch the summer monsoon. He had to wait on the island for five months, until the wind began blowing again towards the north.
Marco filled his time by learning all he could about this unfamiliar part of the world. He describes the woods and spices produced in the region of Sumatra and ‘Malayur’, for he is always thinking of the trading possibilities. (At one point he steps outside his narrative to mention having brought a particular variety of seed back to Venice in the hope of cultivating it there; but the climate had defeated him.)
On the other hand, Marco – doubtless encouraged by his scribe Rustichello – never misses a chance to dwell upon the macabre. He denounces as fraudulent several embalmed specimens of tiny ‘pygmies’ which had reached Europe from the East and caused much amazement. Having been where they were made, he knows they are nothing but small monkeys with faces like humans. The Sumatrans were experts at ‘doctoring’ the monkey corpses to make them look more convincing.
He goes on to tell of a kingdom called Dagroian, where the people had one ‘particularly bad’ custom. When a sick patient was considered unlikely to recover he was suffocated and cooked: ‘Then all his kinsfolk assemble and eat him whole. I assure you that they even devour all the marrow in his bones.’ He discerned a religious purpose here, for if any flesh were left it would breed worms, the worms would die of hunger and the dead man’s soul would suffer torment because so many souls ‘generated by his substance’ had met their deaths.
When Marco was finally able to sail on from Sumatra he showed none of his earlier fear of the Indian Ocean, doubtless because he was now on board a large Chinese junk, markedly different from the filthy horse-boats of Hormuz. It was from his narrative that Europe was to gain the first detailed description of these oriental ships, by far the world’s most advanced sea-going vessels at that time. They carried crews of up to four hundred, were propelled by sails made of split bamboo cane on as many as four masts, and the hulls had strong watertight bulkheads to limit the flooding if the sides were pierced by reefs. Unlike the Arab and Persian ships, in which passengers had a wretched time, the junks were described by Marco as planned for comfort, ‘with at least sixty cabins, each of which can comfortably accommodate one merchant’.
The young Venetian travelled up both sides of India, going from port to port and giving a precise account of the trading prospects there. Since the old fantasies about monstrous beasts and bizarre humans still fascinated Europe, the lack of them in Marco’s memoirs may have been a disappointment to some of his readers; on the other hand, this first coherent account of India’s exotic richness was destined to arouse much excitement among both monarchs and merchants.
His first stopping-place had been Ceylon, and what impressed him there was the abundance of rubies, sapphires, topazes and other gems. One ruby, the length of a palm and as thick as a man’s arm, was so famous that the Great Khan sent emissaries to buy it; but the king of Ceylon turned them away. Marco’s detailed account implies that he may have been among these emissaries.
As he voyaged up the west side of India, along the Malabar coast, Marco marvelled at the immense production of pepper, cinnamon, ginger and other spices. Some regions produced cotton, and everywhere it was possible to buy beautiful buckram, as delicate as linen, and fine leather, stitched with gold and embossed with birds and beasts. The merchants of India, known as banians, from an old Sanskrit word, were scrupulous in their trading, and goods could be left with them in complete safety; so it was not surprising that ships came to Malabar from many lands. Towards the end of his journey Marco visited the great Gujarati port of Cambay, the terminus for much of the trade across the western half of the Indian Ocean. The merchants of Cambay regularly travelled as far as Egypt, and many of their goods were sold on to the Mediterranean countries.2
About the time when Marco was in India, the ruler of Ceylon, named Buvanekabahu, had sent an envoy to Cairo in a bid to win a share of this trade. His message to the Mamluke rulers said: ‘I have a prodigious quantity of pearls and precious stones of every kind. I have vessels, elephants, muslins and other cloths, wood, cinnamon, and all the objects of commerce which are brought to you by the banian merchants.’3 However, the Indian monopoly was to prove far too strong for him to break, although the discovery of Ceylonese coins near Mogadishu, in the Horn of Africa, suggests that Buvanekabahu may have had some success in expanding his island’s trade.
Marco was impressed by India’s exports of cotton and imports of gold; one of the shipping routes took merchants directly across the ocean, to exchange brightly-coloured cloth for the gold of southern Africa. A trade which continued to fascinate him was the traffic in horses from Arabia and Persia. ‘You may take it for a fact that the merchants of Hormuz and Kais, of Dhofar and Shihr and Aden, all of which provinces produce large numbers of battle chargers and other horses, buy up the best horses and load them on ships and export them.’ Some were sold for as much as 500 saggi (about 2,500 grams) of gold, and one kingdom alone on the Coromandel coast imported about 6,000 horses a year. By the end of the year no more than 100 would still be alive, because the Indians had no idea of how to care for them. According to Marco, the merchants who sold the horses did not allow any veterinarian to