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 CHAPTER II

THE MEDIEVAL WANDERERS

HE first of the European wanderers in the Far East, the personal narrative of whose adven- tures has come down to us, is Messer Marco Polo, the Venetian. The wonderful story of the great overland journey made by this traveller in the company of his father and uncle when they set out from Constan- tinople" to traverse the world," will be dealt with in a sep- arate volume, and need not here be recapitulated in detail. For us the travels of Marco Polo begin and end with his passage across the seas and amidst the islands of south- eastern Asia on his return journey from Cathay to Europe. And once again the fate, which we have noted as doom- ing the Indo-Chinese peninsula to obscurity, causes this portion of Marco Polo's narrative to be more tangled and more destitute of detail than almost any other chapters in his book. The slovenliness of his descriptions of the countries between Champa, or Chamba, as he calls it, and Ceylon, and the scant measure of reliable fact which is to be extracted from his account of his journey, moved the late Mr. John Crawfurd to contemptuous in- dignation. "The information communicated," he declares, is more like what might be expected from a Chinese than a European traveller, and the author who had gone to China at eighteen, and lived there for twenty