Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [157]
“The corsairs have all that the merchants pass collected and have it searched to see if there are pearls or any other precious stones,” Marco explains, with mingled sympathy and disgust. “The merchants can in no way escape without losing everything if they were taken.” Either way, the pirates claimed their loot and inflicted a humiliating lesson on the merchants in the process. “Now you have seen…great malice,” Marco snorts, as he considers these maritime thugs.
Tana.
Marco implies that he has visited the place, without insisting on it. His casual handling of his sources of information becomes increasingly apparent as he traces his course through India, relying ever more heavily on secondhand information. Whether or not he stretched a point to include it in his travels, Tana suited his theme: the dangers of piracy to merchants and the India trade, otherwise so profitable. Here pepper and incense abounded, as did buckram and cotton. “Great trade is done there and ships and merchants go there in plenty,” he informs his public, “and the merchants who come there with their ships bring and carry in with them several things; these are gold, silver, and brass, and many other things that are necessary to the kingdom from which they trust to profit and gain.”
Here, too, pirates infested the waters, earning another rebuke from the Venetian: “Many corsairs come out from this kingdom, who go about the sea doing great harm to the merchants.” Oddly, they plied their nefarious trade in collusion with the king of Tana, in exchange for horses, which his kingdom needed. “The king has made this agreement with the corsairs that they are pledged to give him all the horses that they take.” At the same time, “all other goods, both gold and silver and precious stones, belong to the corsairs.” In the face of this corruption, damaging to merchants throughout India, the Venetian could only lament, “…this is an evil thing, and it is not kingly work.”
Socotra.
Marco’s yearning for the sea, and, by extension, the voyage home, prompted him to sail across the Indian Ocean to the island of Socotra, at the entrance to the Gulf of Aden.
Part of an archipelago of much smaller islands, Socotra seems to stand alone as it rises out of the sea on massive coral banks. Home to an ecosystem that had been isolated for millions of years, the island held many biological rarities. The Venetian had just entered a biologist’s dream in which about one-third of the plants and animals surrounding him were found there and only there; the unique specimens included land crabs living at more than two thousand feet above sea level, rare birds, and a profusion of exotic reptiles. The most celebrated of the island’s flora was the Dragon’s Tree, whose astringent resin was used to treat wounds. So impressed was Marco by the island’s flora and fauna, its giant lizards and fanlike Dragon Trees standing in isolation against the infinite sky, that he came to declare it “the most enchanted place on earth.”
To his delight, Marco discovered that this remote but strategically located outpost supported thriving tuna and whaling industries, which appealed to his mercantile instincts. The whale was well known, if poorly understood, in Europe. For centuries, the giant mammal had furnished meat, blubber, and teeth to northern Europeans. Whalebone was especially prized for fashioning weaving tools, gaming pieces, and chopping blocks. In the eleventh century, an Arab traveler