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| The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
SOME ESTIMATE OF POLO AND ITIS BOOK
109
" In the Tibarenian Land
When some good woman bears her lord a babe, 'Tis he is swathed and groaning put to bed ; Whilst she, arising, tends his baths, and serves Nice possets for her husband in the straw."*
Of scientific notions, such as we find in the unvera-
cious Maundevile, we have no trace in truthful Marco. The
former, " lying with a circumstance," tells us boldly
Abs
that he was in 33° of South Latitude ; the latter is scientificence of
notions.
full of wonder that some of the Indian Islands
where he had been lay so far to the south that you lost sight
of the Pole-star. When it rises again on his horizon he esti-
mates the Latitude by the Pole-star's being so many cubits
high. So the gallant Baber speaks of the sun having mounted
spear-14k when the onset of battle began at Paniput. Such
expressions convey no notion at all to such as have had their
ideas sophisticated by angular perceptions of altitude, but
similar expressions are common among Orientals,- and indeed
-I have heard them from educated Englishmen. In another
place Marco states regarding certain islands in the Northern
Ocean that they lie so very far to the north that in going
thither one actually leaves the Pole-star a trifle behind towards
the south ; a statement to which we know only one parallel,
to wit, in the voyage of that adventurous Dutch skipper who
told Master Moxon, King Charles II.'s Hydrographer, that he
had sailed two degrees beyond the Pole !
The Book, however, is full of bearings and distances,
and I have thought it worth while to construct a map from its
indications, in order to get some approximation to
Map con-
Polo's own idea of the face of that world which structed on
Polo's data.
he had traversed so extensively. There are three
allusions to maps in the course of his work (II. 245, 312, 424).
In his own bearings, at least on land journeys, he usually
carries us along a great general traverse line, without much
caring about small changes of direction. Thus on the great
outward journey from the frontier of Persia to that of China
the line runs almost continuously " entre Levant et Grec" or
E.N.E. In his journey from Cambaluc or Peking to Mien or
•
I
r
* vol. ii. p. 85, and Apollonius Rhodius, Argonaut. II. 1012.
t Chinese Observers record the length of Cornets' tails by cubits!
q'1•1
41':1
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