Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [146]
Marco, like other Western wayfarers of the era, remained vague about what he meant by “India.” Europeans often referred to “the Three Indias” or to a “Greater” and a “Lesser” India—all rather flexible terms. Each writer or traveler reconfigured “India” to suit his purpose or preconceptions, and Marco was no exception. In any case, India was for him a byword for escape more than an actual place on the map.
En route to India, Marco the overland explorer metamorphosed into Marco the navigator, as might be expected of a gentleman of Venice, the empire by the sea. As a remedy for his malaise, he discovered, nothing surpassed the ocean. Marco reveled in blue water’s therapeutic buoyancy, expansiveness, and sense of freedom.
“WE SHALL BEGIN first of all to tell about the great ships in which the merchants go and come into Indie,” Marco announces. These were sophisticated vessels of Arab and Chinese design, constructed of fir and pine, and fitted with a broad deck. For his European readers, accustomed to primitive sailing vessels, the surprise was their sheer size. The ship on which he sailed featured sixty cabins, each sufficient for a merchant to “stay comfortably.” It was equipped with a rudder, four masts, and four sails. “They often add…two masts more, which are raised and put away whenever they wish,” Marco reports. The larger ships boasted as many as thirteen holds, “so that if it happens by accident that the ship is staved in any place”—by a rock, for instance, or an aggressive whale “in search of food”—the injured craft would stay afloat.
Six centuries before Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Marco described how an Arab ship survived a deadly encounter with a cetacean. “If the ship sailing by night [and] making the water ripple passes near a whale, the whale, seeing the water glisten as it moves, thinks there will be food for it, and, moving quickly forward, strikes against the ship and often staves the ship in some part. And then the water entering through the hole runs to the bilge, which never remains filled with anything.” Here Marco mentions a piece of nautical technology unknown to Europeans: a watertight hold. It was nothing short of an engineering marvel. “And then the sailors find out where the ship is staved, and then the hold that answers to the break is emptied into the others, for the water cannot pass from one hold to another, so strongly are they shut in; then they repair the ship and replace the goods that have been removed. They are nailed in such a way; for they are all lined, that is, two boards, one above the other,…[and] they are, in the common speech of our sailors, caulked both outside and inside, and they are nailed with iron pins.”
Relying on his study of Arab shipbuilding methods, Marco describes a technique for making craft watertight, one that would have been of great interest to the shipbuilders of Venice’s Arsenal. “They are not pitched with pitch, because they have none of it,” he says. “I tell you that they take lime and hemp chopped fine, and they pound it all together, mixed with an oil from a tree…. And with this thing, they smear their ships, and this is worth quite as much as pitch.”
Not only were the Arab ships better engineered and safer than their Western counterparts, they were so large that Marco could not resist another opportunity to dazzle his audience with statistics. The vessels were operated by between 150 and 300 sailors, and they carried far more cargo than anything afloat in Venice. Ships of bygone days had been larger still, before a series of storms, or what he termed “the violence of the sea,” made harbors and coastlines too shallow to accommodate “those great ships, and so they are now made smaller; but they are [still] so large that they carry five thousand baskets of pepper, and some six thousand.”
The great vessels also had “tenders” large