The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 | Page 4

in Kerman.
Mr. BLOCHMANN of the Calcutta Madrasa, Sir DOUGLAS
FORSYTH, C.B., lately Envoy to Kashgar, M. de MAS LATRIE, the
Historian of Cyprus, Mr. ARTHUR GROTE, Mr. EUGENE
SCHUYLER of the U.S. Legation at St. Petersburg, Dr. BUSHELL and
Mr. W.F. MAYERS, of H.M.'s Legation at Peking, Mr. G. PHILLIPS
of Fuchau, Madame OLGA FEDTCHENKO, the widow of a great
traveller too early lost to the world, Colonel KEATINGE, V.C., C.S.I.,
Major-General KEYES, C.B., Dr. GEORGE BIRDWOOD, Mr.
BURGESS, of Bombay, my old and valued friend Colonel W. H.
GREATHED, C.B., and the Master of Mediaeval Geography, M.
D'AVEZAC himself, with others besides, have kindly lent assistance of
one kind or another, several of them spontaneously, and the rest in
prompt answer to my requests.
Having always attached much importance to the matter of
illustrations,[2] I feel greatly indebted to the liberal action of Mr.
Murray in enabling me largely to increase their number in this edition.
Though many are original, we have also borrowed a good many;[3] a
proceeding which seems to me entirely unobjectionable when the
engravings are truly illustrative of the text, and not hackneyed.
I regret the augmented bulk of the volumes. There has been some
excision, but the additions visibly and palpably preponderate. The truth
is that since the completion of the first edition, just four years ago,

large additions have been made to the stock of our knowledge bearing
on the subjects of this Book; and how these additions have continued to
come in up to the last moment, may be seen in Appendix L,[4] which
has had to undergo repeated interpolation after being put in type.
KARAKORUM, for a brief space the seat of the widest empire the
world has known, has been visited; the ruins of SHANG-TU, the
"Xanadu of Cublay Khan," have been explored; PAMIR and TANGUT
have been penetrated from side to side; the famous mountain Road of
SHEN-SI has been traversed and described; the mysterious CAINDU
has been unveiled; the publication of my lamented friend Lieutenant
Garnier's great work on the French Exploration of Indo-China has
provided a mass of illustration of that YUN-NAN for which but the
other day Marco Polo was well-nigh the most recent authority. Nay, the
last two years have thrown a promise of light even on what seemed the
wildest of Marco's stories, and the bones of a veritable RUC from New
Zealand lie on the table of Professor Owen's Cabinet!
M. VIVIEN de St. MARTIN, during the interval of which we have
been speaking, has published a History of Geography. In treating of
Marco Polo, he alludes to the first edition of this work, most evidently
with no intention of disparagement, but speaks of it as merely a
revision of Marsden's Book. The last thing I should allow myself to do
would be to apply to a Geographer, whose works I hold in so much
esteem, the disrespectful definition which the adage quoted in my
former Preface[5] gives of the _vir qui docet quod non sapit_; but I feel
bound to say that on this occasion M. Vivien de St. Martin has
permitted himself to pronounce on a matter with which he had not
made himself acquainted; for the perusal of the very first lines of the
Preface (I will say nothing of the Book) would have shown him that
such a notion was utterly unfounded.
In concluding these "forewords" I am probably taking leave of Marco
Polo,[6] the companion of many pleasant and some laborious hours,
whilst I have been contemplating with him ("_vôlti a levante_") that
Orient in which I also had spent years not a few.
* * * * *
And as the writer lingered over this conclusion, his thoughts wandered
back in reverie to those many venerable libraries in which he had
formerly made search for mediaeval copies of the Traveller's story; and

it seemed to him as if he sate in a recess of one of these with a
manuscript before him which had never till then been examined with
any care, and which he found with delight to contain passages that
appear in no version of the Book hitherto known. It was written in clear
Gothic text, and in the Old French tongue of the early 14th century.
Was it possible that he had lighted on the long-lost original of
Ramusio's Version? No; it proved to be different. Instead of the tedious
story of the northern wars, which occupies much of our Fourth Book,
there were passages occurring in the later history of Ser Marco, some
years after his release from the Genoese captivity. They appeared to
contain strange anachronisms certainly; but we have often had occasion
to remark on puzzles in the chronology of Marco's story![7] And in
some respects they tended to justify our intimated