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cruel sport, according to Marco. “Now the men who are hunters take such monkeys as those and boil them and strip them all bare of all hair with a certain ointment, and fix and leave them the long hairs in the chin in place of beard and on the chest, and paint the skin with some color to make it like human skin. And when the skin is dry, the holes where the hairs are fixed are shrunken [so] that it seems as if they grew there naturally. And the feet and hands and the other limbs which are not quite like human limbs they stretch and reduce and fashion them by hand to the human likeness. Then they have them dried and put them in wooden molds with salt and smear them with saffron and with camphor and with other things that they may not decay, in such a way that they seem to have been men. And they sell them to merchants who carry them through the world for profit and give men to believe that there are men so small.”

Marco was talking not about monkeys but about pygmies—“men so small”—generally defined as humans less than sixty inches tall. Although frequently associated with Africa, pygmy communities or their remains have been found in Indonesia and throughout Southeast Asia. Asian pygmies have been labeled Negritos, in contrast to the name given to the pygmies of Africa, Negrillos, but both names have lately fallen into disfavor. Even today, the origins of pygmies are not fully understood. It is believed, but has not been proven, that all pygmies share a common ancestry, and common DNA, and in general, pygmy communities remain apart from the dominant community in which they live.

Sumatra.

The monsoon season arrived with him, to his dismay: “I myself, Marco Polo, stayed with my companions for about five months because of the unfavorable weather which we had, which forced me to stay there, and contrary winds which did not let us go our way.”

During his layover, Marco remained confined with two thousand other stranded travelers, who took up residence in five temporary wooden structures—“there is much timber here,” he explains. He asserts that he assumed a leadership role in defending the travelers against rising floodwaters during those five rain-sodden months. But Marco had assigned phantom heroic roles to himself in the past, and may have done so in this case. “Toward the island I caused great ditches to be dug round us,” he says, “of which the ends finished on either side upon the shore of the sea, for fear of beasts and of those bad beast-like men”—ravenous cannibals, it seems—“who gladly catch and kill and eat men.”

With the crisis behind him, Marco reveals that experienced merchants traded at a safe distance with the cannibals for food and other necessities for survival, especially rice and fish, for which he exhibited a fondness born of the fear of starvation, declaring it “the best fish in the world.” He passed the time drinking the local wine to ease the boredom and fear. “They have a kind of tree of which they cut off the branches,” he notes, “and from the branches flows water…which is wine. One puts a trough or very large jar at the stump that is left on the tree where the branch is cut off, just as they catch the sap of the vines…. Those branches drop [wine] very quickly, and in a day and night it is filled, and it is very good wine to drink, like our local wine.”

Dagroian.

When the rainy season ended, Marco groggily exchanged the shelter of wine-producing trees for the road leading to the next kingdom. There he came across appalling rituals for dealing with the sick, who were examined by “magicians”—seers who predicted whether the afflicted “must recover or die.”

The lucky ones were spared any further attention, and left to recover, but those pronounced doomed were subjected to a primitive form of euthanasia, followed by a banquet of cannibalism: “Some of these men who know how to kill sick persons most easily and gently come and press down the sick man who will soon be dead and…suffocate him immediately, and kill him before the time of his death. And when he is dead they cut him up and have him skillfully