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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