Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [158]
Marco explains how Arabs caught their whales, and how merchants turned a handsome profit from the creature’s by-products. He begins with the procedure for preparing tuna, used as bait. “The tuna is very fat, and they cut it into pieces and place it in large vases or jars and put in salt and make much brine,” he says. “This done, there will be perhaps twelve who will take a small ship and, putting on board this fish with all the brine or salt broth of the fish, will go out to sea. And then they will have some remnants of torn pieces or of other cast-off things, and they will soak these leavings tied in a bundle in the brine that will be very fat, and afterward they will throw them into the water; and they will be tied to the little ship with a rope. They will then hoist sail and will go all day wandering through the high seas hither and thither; and wherever they pass the fat that is in the brine leaves as it were a path on the water.”
Marco was astonished by the whale’s endurance—“If it happens that they pass by a place where a whale is, or by some means the whale perceives the scent of the fat of the tuna, [the whale] follows that track…for a hundred miles”—and its vulnerability. When the hunters reached their elusive prey and threw it “two or three pieces of tuna,” the whale, on devouring the bait, was “immediately made drunk as a man is made drunken with wine.”
The bravest whale hunters clambered out of their craft onto the back of the slippery wet beast and attempted to balance themselves. One held a “stake of iron barbed at the end so that if it is fixed in, it cannot be pulled out because of the barb.” At the first opportunity, one of the hunters “will put the stake on the head of the whale and another will strike the stake with a wooden mallet and will immediately fix it all in the head of the whale. For the whale through drunkenness hardly feels the men who stand on it, so that they can do whatever they wish.”
By “stake,” Marco meant a harpoon; once it was fixed, the stage was set for the wildest of rides. “When the whale plunges and flees, it drags the boat to which the rope is tied after it. If it seems to succeed in drawing the boat downward too much, then another barrel with another flag is thrown out, because it cannot draw the barrels under water, and so it is so tired by dragging them after it that in the end it is weakened by the wound and dies.”
At the moment of the whale’s death, the small vessel following the beast approached; the men tied the whale securely to their craft and towed it to “their island or to one that is near them, where they sold it. They took the ambergris”—a waxy excretion of the whale’s intestines—“out of the belly,” and “many butts of oil from the head.” Marco estimated that one whale produced a thousand pounds of oil.
Whale by-products were just one feature of Socotra’s abundant marketplace. In the course of his strolls along the waterfront, Marco noted that “many ships come to this island with many merchants and with many wares that they sell in this island, and carry away again with them of the things that are in the island, of which they make great gain and profit.” Amid the abundance, piracy flourished openly: “Corsairs come to this island with their ships when they have made their cruise, and make camp there and sell all the things that they have stolen at sea.” Most everyone on the scene knew about the pirates, and most everyone looked the other way, including Christians who were aware that “all those things are robbed from idolaters and from Saracens.” At the same time, Marco says, the Christians “hold that they can lawfully buy them all gladly,” and so they financed the pirates whom they condemned.
In these lawless waters, magicians, charmers, and necromancers all practiced their versions of extortion, meeting with much criticism but little interference. The archbishop