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Updated: June 29, 2025
"That is what troubles me," replied Hartog. "Marco Polo knew the Great South Land, but not so thoroughly as we are beginning to know it now. From this chart I place the Ruby Mountains on the north-west coast of the continent of New Holland." "Whose chart is it?" I inquired. "Marco Polo's own," said Hartog.
On Marco Polo's omissions see Yule, op. cit., I, Introd., p. 110. Marco Polo, op. cit., p. 288. VI of this book on the art which flourished under the Mongol dynasty is interesting. See also L. Binyon, Painting in the Far East , pp. 75-7, 146-7. One of Chao Mêng-fu's horse pictures, or rather a copy of it by a Japanese artist, is reproduced in Giles, op. cit., opposite p. 159.
If rubies were to be obtained, I argued, it must be by a more practical method than that employed by Marco Polo's men. Besides, we had no fresh meat with which to give Polo's experiment a trial. After our recent brush with the natives these wild men gave us a wide berth, and we saw no sign of them on our way to the mountains, to which we came after two hours of walking.
The narrative taken down in prison was, however, distributed in an innumerable number of manuscript copies. The great Christopher Columbus, discoverer of America, found in it a support to his conviction that by sailing west a man would at length come to India. There are many curious statements in Marco Polo's book.
Marco Polo's book, dictated by him in prison, is remarkable for its reserve and its scantiness of all semblance of ornament in its literary style. Messer Marco evidently did not greatly affect the arts and graces of fine writing. Like most of the Italian gentlefolk of his day and generation, he held the business of writing in low esteem.
The wolves chase Marco Polo's sheep by a cunningly devised method. They hunt up a herd and single out some less cautious or less quick-footed member. This animal is forced by a watch posted ready beforehand to take refuge on a projecting rock which is surrounded by wolves.
This, together with the whole account of the first journey of the elder Polos, the circumstances of the second journey, and of their subsequent return occurs in the first chapter of Marco Polo's book, which is a general introduction, after which he proceeds to describe in order the lands through which he passed. This autobiographical section is unfortunately all too short.
In the chart that I am describing, Australia is called Jave-la-Grande La Grande Jave would have been the proper French construction; but the term Jave-la-Grande is merely the translation of Java Maior, the Portuguese for Marco Polo's Java Major.
Marco Polo's best wonders made but a dingy show beside the "Field of the Cloth of Gold," where in this June the two defeated candidates for imperial honours had kissed each other midway between the ruined moat of Guisnes and the rased battlements of Arde. Then, on top of this, came the rumours of the English King's undertaking to answer Luther's most formidable attack on Rome.
In Lord Curzon's opinion, confirmed by Spiegel, Droysen and Schindler, the Sirdara Pass, some forty miles from Teheran on the way to Meshed, must have been the defile which Alexander's army forced. I think it will be found that Marco Polo's geography is less reliable than that of Benjamin. Rabad I, a contemporary of Benjamin, speaks of the land of Gurgan in his Sefer Hakabalah.
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