Further India/The Medieval Wanderers
CHAPTER II
THE MEDIEVAL WANDERERS
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Marco Polo, from a painting in the Gallery of Monsignore Badia at Rome
From the book of Ser Marco Polo (by permission of Mr. John Murray) years, was probably in his turn of thinking as much a Chinese as a European." What hampered Marco Polo in his observations of southeastern Asia far more materially than any accident of training, however, was that after traversing the entire continent, and living for a score of years in the land of the Great Kaan, the comparative insignificance of the countries of the Malay Archipelago must have struck him with peculiar force. There is internal evidence of some such attitude of mind in many of his references to these regions. In several passages Polo is constantly to be detected comparing everything he saw with that greater world of Cathay in which so large a portion of his life had been spent, and it is not wonderful, therefore, if he dismissed with a bare mention lands and peoples which fell so far short of the standard whereby he scaled them.
Setting out from the port of Zayton in the province of Fokien, Marco relates that "after sailing for some three months" he and his shipmates arrived "at a certain island towards the south which is called Java. . . . Quitting this island they continued to navigate the Sea of India for eighteen months before they arrived whither they were bound," viz., at Hormuz. The journey was made in immense Chinese junks, several of which carried crews of 250 or 260 men. The Java of which Marco Polo here speaks is not Java proper, but "Java the Less," as he elsewhere names it, or in other words, Sumatra. To the voyage to the mouth of the Straits of Malacca, therefore, must be added the run up the coast of Sumatra to a point near its northeastern extremity, an insignificant distance it is true, but one which a sailing vessel may take a long time in covering, since in these sheltered waters navigation is not aided by the constant winds of the monsoon. When every allowance has been made, however, it must be confessed that Marco Polo's journey from China to Sumatra occupied a prodigious time.
When, therefore, Sumatra was at last reached the force of the northeast monsoon was spent, and Marco Polo and his comrades had to make up their minds to a five months' stay upon the island while they awaited the return of a favourable wind.
Concerning the lands of southeastern Asia he has no very illuminating information to supply. Champa, or Chamba, was to him remarkable chiefly because it was a "very rich region, having a King of its own," whose children numbered 326 souls! He notes the vast quantity of tame elephants in use in this country, the "abundance" of lignaloes, and the existence of extensive forests of a jet-black timber, called bonús, but his account of Kublai Kaan's attempts to subdue the country is startlingly inaccurate. His description of Java—not "Java the Less," but the smaller and richer island over which the Dutch flag flies to-day—is hardly more exact, and it is plain that, lying as it does far from the highway between China and the West, he never personally visited it. He greatly overestimates its size, mentions that its king had no over-lord, and credits it with many vegetable products which it does not produce, the fact being that Java was at this period the great emporium of the trade of the Malayan Archipelago, the produce of the islands being brought thither and thence distributed to the markets of the world. The islands of Sondur and Condur, 700 miles from Champa, at which Marco's ship would appear to have touched, are the Pûlau Kondor of to-day, once the site of a factory of the British East. India Company, and now a penal settlement to which convicts are sent from Saigon, the capital of French Indo-China. Locac—"a good country and a rich; (it is on the mainland); and it has a king of its own. The people are idolaters and have a peculiar language, and pay tribute to nobody, for their country is so situated that no one can enter it to do them ill,"—is also described as yielding brasil "in great plenty; and they also have gold in incredible quantity." "They also," he adds, "have elephants and much game. In this kingdom too are gathered all the porcelain shells which are used for small change in all these regions." The identity of Locac has been much disputed, but the strongest case is made out by Sir Henry Yule, who places it in the Malay Peninsula, somewhere in what is now called Lower Siam.
Marco Polo's Pentam, "a very wild place," 500 miles towards the south, is almost certainly the island of Bentan near the entrance to the Straits of Malacca, "and when you have gone these sixty miles and again about thirty more, you come to an island which forms a kingdom, and is called Malaiur. The people have a king of their own and a peculiar language. The city is a fine and noble one, and there is great trade carried on there, and all other necessaries of life." It is impossible to disregard Polo's distinct assertion that Malaiur was an island, and further the fact that it is not included in his list of Sumatran kingdoms, wherefore it seems probable that in his day there existed a Malayan state of considerable importance, possibly upon the island on which the town of Singapore now stands.
Sumatra, or "Java the Less," is dealt with in somewhat greater detail. In speaking of Ferlec (Pĕrlak) he says:
"This kingdom, you must know, is so much frequented by the Saracen merchants that they have converted the natives to the Law of Mahommet—I mean the townspeople only, for the hill-people live for all the world like beasts, and eat human flesh, clean or unclean. And they worship this, that, and the other thing; for in fact the first thing they see on rising in the morning, that they do worship for the rest of the day."
We have here yet another proof of the frequency with which the Arab merchants resorted to Malaya, and a hint at the length of that intercourse, for even the more civilised sections of a community do not become converted to an alien faith save after long and intimate association with its professors.
Basma (Pâsei), another Sumatran State, declared itself, Marco Polo tells us, to be subject to the Great Kaan, though it paid him no regular tribute, only sending him presents from time to time. Ibn Batuta, the Arab traveller, when he returned from China some fifty years later, made the voyage in a ship which belonged to "the King of Sumatra” who had been to pay homage to the Emperor, and it is possible that this Muhammadan potentate may have been no other than the then Râja of Pâsei. It is in writing of this State that Polo tells us of wild elephants and of "numerous unicorns, which are very nearly as big." His description of these latter monsters is delightful:
"They have hair like that of a buffalo, feet like those of an elephant, and a horn in the middle of the forehead, which is black and very thick. They do no mischief, however, with the horn, but with the tongue alone; for this is covered all over with long and strong prickles (and when savage with any one they crush him under their knees and then rasp him with their tongue). The head resembles that of a wild boar, and they carry it ever bent towards the ground. They delight much to abide in mire and mud. 'Tis a passing ugly beast to look upon, and it is not in the least like that which our stories tell us of as being caught in the lap of a virgin: in fact 'tis altogether different from what we fancied."
Here, in spite of some flowers of fancy, we have no sort of difficulty in recognising the rhinoceros, a truly different creature to the graceful unicorn of our legends; but it is curious that the Sumatran species is two horned, and that while it has hair like that of a water-buffalo, it carries its head far more erect than does the one-horned variety commonly met with on the other side of the Straits of Malacca. One cannot help fancying that Polo had actually seen a specimen of the one-horned rhinoceros, and that he subsequently heard of the existence of the creature in Sumatra, for on the whole he describes the animal with wonderful accuracy.
Another interesting passage about Basma is as follows:
"I may tell you moreover that when people bring home pigmies which they allege come from India, 't is all a lie and a cheat. For these little men, as they call them, are manufactured on this Island, and I will tell you how. You see there is on this Island a kind of monkey which is very small and hath a face like a man's. They take these, and pluck out all the hair, except the hair of the beard and on the breast, and then they dry them and stuff them and daub them with saffron and other things until they look like men. But you see it is all a cheat; for nowhere in India nor anywhere else in the world were there ever men seen so small as these pretended pigmies."
The creature here referred to is obviously the yellow gibbon, found in great numbers in the Malay Peninsula and in Sumatra, an ape of peculiarly human aspect, tail-less, and though of a purely arborial habit unable to walk save upon its hind legs. If Polo is right, the manufacture of "freaks" would seem to be by no means a modern or an American invention!
Of Dagroian, which would seem to have occupied the position of the little State now known as Pêdir, Polo tells us that the natives were in the habit of devouring their ailing relatives, whose death they caused by suffocation as soon as their recovery had been declared to be impossible by the medicine-men. The reason of this custom, as given by Polo, is curious:
"And I assure you," he says, "they do suck the very bones till not a particle of marrow remains in them; for they say that if any nourishment remained in the bones this would breed worms, and then the worms would die for want of food, and the death of these worms would be laid to the charge of the deceased man's soul. And so they eat him up stump and rump. And when they have eaten him they collect his bones and put them in fine chests, and carry them away, and place them in caverns among the mountains where no beast nor other creature can get at them. And you must know also that if they take prisoner a man of another country, and he cannot pay ransom in coin, they kill and eat him straightway. It is a very evil custom and a parlous."
As every one has learned from experience, who has himself made some attempt to collect versions of local superstitions, to examine quaint customs, and to seek for their explanations from the people among whom they prevail, it is fatally easy to misconceive and misinterpret if long and familiar intercourse has not given to the enquirer a very thorough understanding of and sympathy with the native point of view. One and the same practice, regarded from the standpoint of those to whom immemorial usage has made it a matter of course, and from that of the stranger who lights upon it unexpectedly, assumes wholly different aspects and proportions, and to this fact is due more than half the cock-and-bull stories and patently absurd explanations which to this day travellers bring back with them from their sojourns among peoples whom they have imperfectly comprehended.
Of Lambri—the Lambrij of de Barros, the Al Ramni of the Arabs—a State which seems to have been situated upon the northern borders of the modern Acheh, Polo tells us that the natives called themselves the subjects of the Great Kaan, that they cultivated brasil, and had "plenty of camphor and all sorts of spices." He also relates that there were here men with tails, "a palm in length," hairless, and "about the thickness of a dog's,"—a very popular fable of the Archipelago which is still current among the natives in many places even in our own time.
Polo's remarks on the subject of the Sumatran States have been examined in some detail, not because they have much intrinsic importance, but because they can claim a certain interest as being the first notes ever made by a European upon the condition of an island of the Malayan Archipelago. Of geographical data little indeed is to be won from a perusal of Messer Marco's book, his itinerary showing, what we already knew, that the sea-route from China via southeastern Asia had become a great highway of commerce, and that certain ports of call, known to the Arabs centuries earlier, were still used to the exclusion of all others at the end of the thirteenth century. For the rest we learn that the trade in the distinctive products of the Malayan Archipelago was flourishing in 1296, as it had been, in all probability, before the days of Ptolemy; that the ubiquitous Arab merchants had already established colonies and begun the conversion of the Malays to Muhammadanism on the east coast of Sumatra; and that cannibalism was a marked feature in the customs of the pagan people of the island. All this adds little to the story of exploration in southeastern Asia, yet we have felt constrained to follow Marco Polo closely because the figure of this early European wanderer is at once so interesting, so picturesque and so romantic, and the imagination is tempted to dwell and linger over the story of the three lonely white men who so far as we have any record, were the first of their kind to sojourn for a season amid the mysterious forests of Malaya-the lands which were fated to become at a later period the heritage of the nations of the West.
The impossibility of fixing even approximately the date which first saw the opening-up of the sea-route to China has already been noted, and though Messer Marco Polo is the earliest European wanderer in the Far East who has become for us articulate, it is possible that many before him penetrated to Cathay or traversed the seas of which he wrote. The wide dissemination of Nestorian Christianity from Jerusalem eastward to Peking, which had taken place by the fourteenth century, argues a closer intercourse between the West and the East via the overland route than is generally recognised, while the celebrated inscription disinterred at Sing-an-fu proves that the heretical doctrine was publicly preached in China, and received sanction and encouragement from the authorities, as early as the seventh century. That the intercourse which is thus implied was carried on wholly by land seems the reverse of probable, yet the fact remains that no authentic record of Europeans having travelled through southeastern Asia is to be found earlier than the date of the Polo manuscripts.
Of later wanderers, however, there are not a few, though for the most part their references to Malaya and Indo-China are merely incidental, and it is curious to note the impunity with which, during the Middle Ages, solitary white men were able to travel unmolested through Asiatic lands. This forces upon us a recognition of the fact that the European invasion of Asia, which began with the rounding of the Cape by Vasco da Gama in 1497, has had a very injurious effect upon the character of the Oriental peoples. Prior to the coming of the white men an extraordinary measure of tolerance, even of hospitality, was extended to strangers without distinction of race or creed. All the early travellers combine in bearing testimony to the care which was taken of aliens by, for example, the authorities in China, the people who before all others are to-day a byword for their suspicious dislike of foreigners. The reason of this change of attitude is to be sought for, not in the naughtiness of the Oriental, nor in his moral degeneracy, but in the misconduct of the early European filibusters which put the East forever on the defensive, and caused the name of the white man to stink in the nostrils of the brown peoples.
The only medieval wanderers with whose passage through southeastern Asia we need concern ourselves are Blessed Odoric of Pordone in Friuli, a friar of the Order of St. Francis, Abu Abd Allah Muhammad Ibn Abd Allah El Lawâti, commonly called Ibn Batuta, "the traveller without peer of the whole Arab nation," as he is affectionately called by a holy man of 
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Odoric
From the Cittadino Italiano his own faith, and Friar John de' Marignolli, who in 1338 was sent by the Pope on a mission to the Great Kaan.
Odoric is supposed to have been born in 1286, to have begun his Oriental travels about 1318, to have returned to Europe in 1330 or thereabouts, and to have dictated his reminiscences to a brother Franciscan at Padua ere he crept home to the House of his Order at Udine, where he died in January, 1331. He made his way to Constantinople, thence overland to the Persian Gulf, eventually reaching the coast of Malabar, where he visited the shrine of St. Thomas the Apostle at Mailapur, the modern Madras.
"Departing from this region towards the south across the ocean sea," he tells us, "I came in fifty days to a certain country called Lamori (the State in Sumatra called Al Ramni by the Arabs and Lambri by Polo) in which I began to lose sight of the north star, as the earth intercepted it. And in that country the heat is so excessive that all folk there, both men and women, go naked, not clothing themselves in any wise."
The natives of this State are described as "an evil and pestilent generation" who had no formal marriage, all women being in common. This is an allegation often made against savage and semi-savage communities since Cæsar wrote of Britain, and on closer examination it is usually found to be based upon a misunderstanding of native customs.
Odoric's narrative is interesting because he is the first writer to make mention of a "kingdom by name Sumoltra," doubtless the same as Polo's Samara, which he places to the south of Lamori, a State which later gave its name to the island upon the coast of which it was situated. It is doubtful whether the fact of the insularity of their native lands was realised at all generally by the inhabitants of Sumatra, of Java or of Borneo, and I greatly question whether the average Malay of these parts, even now, has any true appreciation of these geographical facts.
Odoric also mentions still further to the south "another realm called Resengo," though he tells us naught concerning it. The name, however, would lead us to infer that the country of the Rejang is indicated, the State in which the British East India Company's station of Bengcoolen was subsequently established. Its inhabitants, of whom by the way Polo makes no mention, were among the most civilised of the Sumatrans, possessing not only a peculiar language, but also an original written character.
From Sumatra Odoric passed to Java, which he states was ruled by a king who had seven other monarchs tributary to him. It is, he quaintly says, "the second best of islands that exist," and he was greatly struck by its riches and by the magnificence of the palace in which its sovereign had his dwelling. He adds that the Great Kaan "many times engaged in war with this king; but this king always vanquished and got the better of him," a statement which is historically true, Kublai Kaan having launched two unsuccessful expeditions against Java during the time which had elapsed between Marco Polo's passage through the Straits of Malacca and Odoric's visit to the island.
Near Java—a somewhat vague term—Odoric places a country called "Panten, but others call it Thalamasyn, the king whereof hath many islands under him." It produced sago, honey, toddy and a deadly vegetable poison, which was used to smear the blow-pipe darts of the natives who were "nearly all rovers," or pirates. All this points with some certainty to Borneo, and Banjarmasin, which was a flourishing kingdom as early as the eleventh century, may have been Odoric's Thalamasyn, or Panten may have stood for Kalamantan, a name by which a portion of Borneo was known in ancient times.
"By the coast of this country towards the south," Odoric continues, "is the sea called the Dead Sea, the water whereof runneth ever towards the south, and if any falleth into that water he is never found more."
At a later period de Barros relates a superstition of the natives to the effect that the currents beyond the Straits of Bâli acted in a similar manner, and it is possible that in this legend is to be found the germ of the tale concerning the current which wrecked Sindbad, and cast him up, more fortunate than his fellows, upon the bone-strewn island whence he escaped by means of the subterranean passage. To Odoric we also owe one of the earliest descriptions of the bamboo "canes or reeds like great trees," and of the rattan, while he further speaks of stones found in these "canes" which were regarded as charms that conferred the advantage of invulnerability upon their wearers. It is curious to note that these siliceous deposits are still treasured by the Malays for similar reasons in the present day.
Champa, or Zampa as he spells it, is the last country in this part of the world of which Odoric leaves us any record, and here he echoes Polo's astonishment at the number of the king's offspring which he places at "a good two hundred."
It will be seen from the above summary that the Blessed Odoric does not add materially to the sum of our knowledge concerning the lands through which he wandered, and his narrative is chiefly noteworthy because it demonstrates that at the beginning of the fourteenth century it was possible for a solitary Italian friar to roam up and down the cast without let or hindrance, mainly, it must be supposed, at the charges of those whom he encountered on his journey. The achievement is all the more remarkable because, unlike Ibn Batuta, his religion gave him no claim upon the piety of the ubiquitous Muhammadan communities.
The Arab traveller, who was born in Tangier on February 24th, 1304, set out upon his wanderings in his twenty-first year. He did not return until 1347. In all he covered more than 75,000 English miles, a respectable record even in these days of easy and swift journeying; wandering over a large part of Asia before he finally made his way back to Fez, in which place his book was dictated by the order of the Sultan. It is a marvellous record, and the manner in which it is told is inimitably naive and amusing, but to us its chief interest lies in the fact that it illustrates in a striking manner the opportunities for travelling which in the early fourteenth century were open to any adventurous Muslim. Ibn Batuta, professional holy man, regarded his coreligionists as created for his comfort and convenience. Wherever he went he preyed upon them shamelessly, and deemed them sufficiently honoured by being suffered to minister to his needs, travelling in this fashion to the very ends of the then known earth. He managed things on a scale of unexampled magnificence, and it is our good fortune that he lived to tell his tale for our delight, but it is probable that he was only a preeminent member of a class, and that at this period there were numerous Muhammadans, with a curious taste in wives and a rapacious appetite for "rich presents," who wandered up and down the world and drew much profit from the ubiquity of the great religious fraternity established throughout the East by the Persian and Arabian merchants.
Ibn Batuta traversed the well-worn route to China, and has little enough to tell us concerning the lands of south-eastern Asia. He was duly impressed with the number of the king of Champa's children, and noted the multitude of tame elephants used in that country. He touched at some point in the Malay Peninsula, which he calls Mul-Java, or the mainland of Java, and he spent a season awaiting the change of the monsoon on the island of Sumatra. Here he was present at the marriage of the daughter of his host—the "king of Sumatra," as he calls him, though this potentate only ruled over a small portion of the island—and the account which he gives of the ceremony might have been written by an observer of a modern Malay wedding, a striking proof, were proof needed, of the extraordinary conservatism of this people. For the rest he has nothing new to tell us concerning these regions, though he shows us incidentally that ships still adhered as of old to the few well-known ports of call and rarely strayed far beyond the beaten track which had been in use for centuries.
Friar John de Marignolli, a Franciscan like Odoric, was born in Florence between 1280 and 1290. In December, 1338, he was sent from Avignon on a mission to the Great Kaan, and travelled overland to China, returning to India via Zayton and the Malay Archipelago in 1346 or 1347. Beyond the bare fact that he left Zayton and eventually arrived at Columbum (Quilon) he tells us absolutely nothing, but after some travels in India he paid a visit to an island which he names Saba, and clearly imagines it to be the same as the Saba of the Scriptures. The island, we learn, was so far to the south that the polar star was no longer visible; it was ruled by women; its queen possessed a fine palace, the walls of which were decked with historical pictures; there was a huge mountain on the island, and there were beasts in its forests nearly resembling human beings; elephants were in use, especially among the women; a few Christians lived there, and when he quitted its shores he was storm driven into a port of Ceylon. These are all the data which we have concerning Friar John's Saba, and it has been identified with Java by Meinert, and with the Maldives by Professor Kunstmann. Colonel Yule has shown that this latter theory is untenable, and declines to accept Java as the true identification because it is impossible to show that female government ever prevailed upon that island. He has, however, no alternative suggestion to make, and ends by giving the puzzle up as hopeless. To me, however, it seems that the best case can be made out for north Borneo, the native name of which is Sabah. The name alone would be of no sort of importance; but its position satisfies the friar's astronomical requirements; it is dominated by the magnificent mountain of Kinabalu, round which still cluster many of the superstitions of the natives, superstitions which the pious monk might very easily identify, as in truth he does, with traditions of Elias and the Magi; the jungles in which the mâyas, or ourang-outang, abound may well be said to contain "monsters" with faces like men; while tame elephants were plentiful in Brûnei when Magellan's ships visited the place in the sixteenth century, and the forests of northern Borneo are the only part of the island in which these animals now run wild. More important than all, however, is the fact that among the Dusun tribes, which compose the larger proportion of the natives of northern Borneo, women occupy a peculiar position and influence. This is mainly due to a belief that the world—which the Dûsuns rightly regard as a very imperfect piece of work—was created by the goddess Sinemundu during the temporary absence of her husband, Kinhoringan, who had designed a flawless universe, and a woman having thus brought the earth into being, it is felt to be right that women should manage the spiritual affairs of the creatrix's world. Priesthood, therefore, and not infrequently, the chieftainship of a tribe, are vested among these people in the women, and this may well be a relic of female sovereignty such as is described by Friar John. The palace, if such a building ever existed in northern Borneo, has utterly disappeared, together with its paintings, but there is evidence to show that this part of the island has sensibly degenerated in its arts and in the standard of its civilisation, while its population has dwindled and become debased, ever since its rediscovery by the Spaniards less than four hundred years ago. Nor need we experience much surprise that all tradition concerning the existence of a kingdom of such magnitude and importance as that described by Friar John should have vanished so speedily from the memories of the Borneans, for historical facts of a far more recent date, which are preserved for us in the writings of the European travellers of the sixteenth century, have also passed into oblivion, leaving among the natives of the island not so much as a whisper of story. In the semi-uncivilised lands of Asia dynasties have risen, have flourished, have come to proud maturity, have dwindled, pined and disappeared with a wonderful rapidity, and when the waves of time have closed over them they are forgotten with a completeness which finds few parallels in Europe. It is possible that the dense forests of northern Borneo may even yet yield up to us some traces of the wonderful palace which filled the Franciscan monk with awe and admiration. The difficulty of the return voyage which saw the monk's ship storm driven into a port of Ceylon need not greatly trouble us. A traveller, who fared from China to Malabar without saying a single word concerning the places at which he touched upon the way, may be supposed capable of passing through the Straits of Malacca, or even through those of Sunda, on his way from Saba to India, without making any particular mention of the fact.
With Friar John and his mysterious island we take leave of the portion of our enquiry in which from the outset we have found ourselves groping through a fog of doubt and of conjecture. We have noted the frequency with which the sea-route to China was used by men of numerous races from very early times, and the comparatively exact information concerning the Far East which from time to time was brought home by wanderers returning to the West. It is, therefore, a matter of considerable surprise to find that when these regions were rediscovered by the Portuguese and Spaniards in the sixteenth century they were regarded by the whole of Europe as worlds undreamed of. The scant knowledge possessed by the ancients of India extra Gangem and of the Chersonesus Aurea had been practically forgotten; the more accurate and detailed information supplied by Marco Polo and his successors had been dismissed as incredible, or had been scorned as the purest inventions born of unruly or disordered imaginations; the immense force of Islâm had reared a wall between Europe and Asia which for a long period the former was powerless to scale. Even the Book of Messer Marco himself had come to be regarded as a piece of mere fiction, and accordingly by the time the first Portuguese vessels made their way round the Cape of Good Hope, seeking a new highroad to India, the minds of even the learned of Europe presented something like a tabula rasa upon which was inscribed none of the facts concerning southeastern Asia that had been collected by the geographers and mariners of antiquity, which had been added to by many Arabian writers, and which had received detailed confirmation from the European wanderers of the Middle Ages. It is in the coming of the Portuguese, therefore, that the exploration of Malaya and of Indo-China by the peoples of the west may properly be said to have had its beginning.