The Travels by Marco Polo

Author:Marco Polo
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf, pdf
ISBN: 9780141198781
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

SIX

From China to India

Now since we have told you about so many regions of the mainland as you have heard, we will leave all that behind and make our way into India; and we will relate all the wonders that are found there, beginning first of all with the ships in which the merchants travel to and from India.1

Now you should know that these ships are made in the following manner. I can tell you that they are built from a wood called spruce as well as from pine. They have one deck, and above this deck there are generally no fewer than sixty cabins, each capable of accommodating a merchant in comfort. They have one rudder and four masts, to which are often added two more masts that are raised and lowered as needed. Below decks on some of the ships, namely the bigger ones, there are also no fewer than thirteen holds, or rather compartments, formed from strong planks tightly joined together; these provide protection in case disaster strikes and the ship is holed, whether by hitting a reef or being rammed by a whale searching for food. This happens all the time, for if a ship is sailing at night and churning up the water when it passes near a whale, the whale takes the light shimmering on the foam as a sign that there is food at hand and leaps forward, slamming into the ship and as often as not rupturing part of the hull. When the water pours through the breach it runs into the bilge, which is always kept unobstructed. Then the sailors track down the leak and shift the cargo from the flooded compartment into the others, for the bulkheads are so soundly built that water cannot pass from one compartment to another; and then they repair the damage to the hull and put back the displaced cargo.

The hulls are fastened together in a particular way; for they are all lined, which is to say they have two layers of planking, one on top of the other. This lining extends all the way round, with one plank on top of another. They are caulked both inside and out and hammered together with iron nails. They are not coated with pitch, since they have none; instead they oil them in the manner I will describe, because they have another substance that they consider superior to pitch. Let me tell you, then, that they take lime and finely chopped hemp and pound them together with a type of oil extracted from a tree. And when they have thoroughly pounded these three things, I assure you they form a substance as sticky as birdlime. They daub their ships with it, and it is every bit as good as pitch.

I can also tell you that some of these ships require a crew of around 300 sailors, some 200, and some 150, the number varying with their size. Moreover, they carry a much larger cargo than our ships.

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