Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [156]
WHEREVER MARCO TRAVELED along India’s coast, the “fervent heat” tormented him. “The sun is so hot that one can scarcely bear it there,” he complains. “Even the water is so hot that if you were to put an egg into some river when the sun is shining brightly on it, it would be cooked before you were gone at all far, just as in boiling water.” Despite the oppressive climate, merchant ships from the four corners of the earth converged to trade.
Exotic and terrifying creatures populated the region, and they were “different from all the others in the world,” according to Marco. There were “black lions” (probably panthers); beautiful “parrots” as white as snow, with red beaks and feet (Marco apparently had another bird in mind, for which he lacked a name); peacocks larger than any to be found in Venice; hens bigger and better than any he had ever encountered; and fruit, the likes of which he had never seen, and which he could not name. For once, the variety of flora and fauna rendered Marco Polo speechless.
Melibar.
Upon reaching this “great kingdom to the west,” Marco posts an urgent warning concerning the scourge of pirates. He denounces them as “great robbers of the sea” and describes their modus operandi, apparently from anxious personal experience: “Most of the ships of these evil corsairs are parted hither and thither to wait for and find ships of the merchants who pass by.” He says that they are so adept at catching their prey that “no merchant ship may pass that is not taken, for they go together in companies of twenty or of thirty ships of these corsairs and form a great line on the sea.” Anchored about five miles apart, “twenty pirate corsairs control over one hundred miles of open water with this strategy.”
The hunt went on day and night. “As soon as they [the pirates] see any merchant ship they make a light of fire or smoke for a signal, and they all collect together and go there hard and take everything.” The cargo consisted of items as varied and valuable as copper (used for ballast), silk, and pepper, spikenard, cloves, and other spices concealed aboard the unlucky ships. As a merchant, Marco realizes that his colleagues “know well the way of these evil corsairs and know well they are bound to find them,” so “they go many together and so well armed and so well prepared that they have no fear of them when they find them, for they defend themselves bravely and very often do them great harm.”
Occasionally, the pirates ensnared one of the merchant vessels, taking the goods aboard but sparing the lives of the men, whom they taunted by saying, “Go home to gain some other goods, so you will give them to us again!”
Goçurat.
Here the pirates were even more “cruel and evil” than elsewhere. Cringing with empathy for the victims, Marco tells how they “seize the merchants and beside taking the goods from them, torture them and put a ransom on their persons; and if they do not quickly pay the ransom, they give them so great torments that many die of it.”
Nothing that Marco had seen, not even among the Mongols, notorious for their savagery, affected him as deeply as the reports of the torments inflicted on merchants by Arab pirates. Waxing increasingly indignant on the part of his fellow merchants, he describes the lengths to which the merchants would go to prevent their tormentors from succeeding. If they are carrying pearls and other precious stones, he says, “they swallow them that they may not be snatched from them by the pirates,” and thus manage to keep some of their goods.
But the pirates are “infected with evilness,” Marco warns, “for you may know that when these wicked corsairs take some ship of the merchants and find no stones and pearls, they give them to drink a certain drug called tamarind and seawater, so that the merchants go much below and pass or vomit all that they have in belly.”
A long-lived, massive tree, the tamarind is distinguished by graceful, feathery dark-green foliage that withdraws by night. Lost in this