Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/45

 vessels, although generally going not further than the Malacca Straits, journeyed as far as Africa and the Indies. Marco Polo himself at the end of the thirteenth century, when he left the land of Cathay after his remarkable sojourn at the Court of Kublai Khan, sailed from Amoy, in the southern province of Fuhkien, for the Persian Gulf in a Chinese deep-sea junk of which he says:—

And first let us speak of the ships in which merchants go to and fro amongst the Isles of India. These ships, you must know, are of fir timber. They have but one deck, though each of them contains some fifty or sixty cabins wherein the merchants abide greatly at their ease, every man having one to himself. The ship hath but one rudder, but it hath four masts; and sometimes they have two additional masts, which they ship and unship at pleasure. Each of these great ships requires at least 200 mariners, some of them 300. They are indeed of great size, for one ship shall carry 5,000 or 6,000 baskets of pepper, and they used to be formerly larger than they are now. . ..

The Cantonese and other South Chinese were therefore very familiar with foreign things; their argosies had long dotted the seas of the Malay archipelago when the first conquistadores passed through the Malacca Straits and