Page:The lives of celebrated travellers (Volume 1).djvu/68

 provided for their voyage; and on board of this fleet they embarked with the queen and the ambassadors, and sailed away from China. It was probably from the officers of these ships, or from those with whom he had made his former voyage to India, that Marco Polo learned what little he knew of the great island of Zipangri or Japan. It was about fifteen hundred miles distant, as he was informed, from the shores of China. The people were fair, gentle in their manners, and governed by their own princes. Gold, its exportation being prohibited, was plentiful among them; so plentiful, indeed, that the roof of the prince's palace was covered with it, as churches in Europe sometimes are with lead, while the windows and floors were of the same metal. The prodigious opulence of this country tempted the ambition or rapacity of Kublai Khan, who with a vast fleet and army attempted to annex it with his empire, but without success. It was Marco's brief description of this insular El Dorado which is supposed to have kindled the spirit of discovery and adventure in the great soul of Columbus. Gentle as the manners of the Japanese are said to have been, neither they nor the Chinese themselves could escape the charge of cannibalism, which appears to be among barbarians what heresy was in Europe during the middle ages, the crime of which every one accuses his bitterest enemy. The innumerable islands scattered through the surrounding ocean were said to abound with spices and groves of odoriferous wood.

The vast islands and thickly-sprinkled archipelagoes which rear up their verdant and scented heads among the waters of the Indian ocean, now successively presented themselves to the observant eye of our traveller, and appeared like another world. Ziambar, with its woods of ebony; Borneo, with its spices and its gold; Lokak, with its sweet fruits, its Brazil wood, and its elephants;—these were the new and strange countries at which they touched