Journey

Marco Polo — the Indian Ocean homeward (c. 1292–95)

Stops (10)

1. Venice · home · and the book

   He left Venice as a teenager in 1271, reached Kublai Khan's court, served him for seventeen years, and came home by sea in 1295. The book was dictated in a Genoese prison after Venice lost a battle, which is why the greatest European account of Asia was written by a merchant who had nothing else to do with his time.

2. Quanzhou · sailed from Zaiton

   He sailed from Quanzhou — Zaiton — in about 1292 with a Mongol princess being sent to marry the Ilkhan, in a fleet of fourteen ships. He calls it one of the two greatest ports in the world and describes the customs duty at ten per cent on pepper, which is the sort of figure only someone doing business would bother to record.

3. Ilamuridesam (Lamuri / Lambri, Aceh) · Lambri, five months

   Held five months at Lambri or Samudra in northern Sumatra waiting out the monsoon, stockaded on shore against the people he calls man-eaters. He describes the pepper, the sago palm and the rhinoceros he took for a unicorn and was disappointed by — the longest single stop on the homeward voyage, and the fullest chapters in the book.

4. Nakkavaram / Nicobar Islands · the Nicobars

   The Nicobars — “Necuveran” — whose people he describes as living without clothes or rulers. He did not go ashore, and says so. The Chola inscription of 1025 calls the same islands Nakkavaram, which is where the modern name comes from, so a Tamil naval record and a Venetian merchant describe one archipelago three centuries apart.

5. Adam's Peak / Sri Pāda · Ceylon and Sagamoni Borcan

   Ceylon, “the best island of its size in the world”, and the mountain with the footprint, where he retells the story of Sagamoni Borcan — the Buddha — as a saint's life. That is how the Buddha's biography first entered European literature, alongside Barlaam and Josaphat, and neither version knew what it was.

6. San Thome, Mylapore · the tomb of St Thomas

   The shrine at Mylapore on the Coromandel, where he saw both Christians and Hindus revering the apostle's tomb and taking away red earth as a cure. The earth was still being given to pilgrims when the Portuguese arrived two centuries later looking for the same shrine, partly on the strength of accounts like his.

7. Kollam / Quilon · Quilon

   Quilon, for pepper, indigo and brazilwood, and the Christian and Jewish merchants settled there — communities already centuries old when he saw them. He is the earliest European source to name the port, and his spelling Coilum is the one that entered the medieval maps and stayed on them. His spelling Coilum is the one that entered the medieval maps and stayed on them for three centuries.

8. Kozhikode / Calicut · Malabar and the pirates

   Malabar and Calicut, where he describes the pepper trade and the pirates who worked the coast in cordons of ships — twenty or thirty abreast with signal fires, so that nothing could pass. Those were the Malabar shipowners' own fleets, which the Portuguese met two centuries later as the Marakkars.

9. Khambhat / Cambay · Cambay and Gujarat

   Cambay and Gujarat, the last Indian coast before the Gulf — cotton, indigo and leatherwork going west. His Indian chapters were dictated from memory, which is why the coast is described in the right order with distances that do not work, and why he calls Gujarat's tanners the best in the world.

10. Hormuz · Hormuz

    Hormuz at the mouth of the Gulf, where the sea voyage ended and the overland road to Trebizond began. He describes the heat, the date-fed cattle and the horse trade going the other way — Arabian and Persian mounts shipped to Indian armies in thousands, because the subcontinent could not breed cavalry at scale.