bringing with him immense wealth in precious stones and other
Eastern commodities. The report of his wonderful adventures
interested all Europe, for he was supposed to have found the
Tarshish of the Scriptures, that land of gold and spices which had
enriched the Tyrian merchants in the time of Solomon,--men supposed
by some to have sailed around the Cape of Good Hope in their three
years' voyages. Among the wonderful things which Polo had seen was
a city on an island off the coast of China, which was represented
to contain six hundred thousand families, so rich that the palaces
of its nobles were covered with plates of gold, so inviting that
odoriferous plants and flowers diffused the most grateful perfumes,
so strong that even the Tartar conquerors of China could not subdue
it. This island, known now as Japan, was called Cipango, and was
supposed to be inexhaustible in riches, especially when the reports
of Polo were confirmed by Sir John Mandeville, an English traveller
in the time of Edward III.,--and with even greater exaggerations,
since he represented the royal palace to be more than six miles in
circumference, occupied by three hundred thousand men.

In an awakening age of enterprise, when chivalry had not passed
away, nor the credulity of the Middle Ages, the reports of this
Cipango inflamed the imagination of Europe, and to reach it became
at once the desire and the problem of adventurers and merchants.
But how could this El Dorado be reached? Not by sailing round
Africa; for to sail South, in popular estimation, was to encounter
torrid suns with ever increasing heat, and suffocating vapors, and
unknown dangers. The scientific world had lost the knowledge of
what even the ancients knew. Nobody surmised that there was a Cape
of Good Hope which could be doubled, and would open the way to the
Indian Ocean and its islands of spices and gold. Nor could this