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Dear Jens:
[From the Encylopædia Britannica, 15th edition)
The known history of Marco Polos Il milione is that it was dictated
to one Rustichello (or Rusticiano), a fairly well-known writer of
romances, when in a Genoese prison sometime after his return to Venice in
1295.
Since all of this happened well before the invention of printing,
professional scribes or amateurs made dozens of copies of the book... In
fact, an authentic and original copy of Il milione does not exist; there
are some 140 different manuscript versions of the text, in a dozen different
languages and dialects...
Apparently Marco Polo himself also made a number of corrections and
additions in the two decades before his death in 1324.
It is clear that Polo did not travel to Japan but described it as he
remembered hearing about it when in the court of Kublai Khan.
In The Travels of Marco Polo [The Venetian]... edited by Manuel
Komroff (New York, 1926), the text matches that in your email, ...it
contains no fewer than seven thousand four hundred and forty islands, mostly
inhabited. The same number is used in the Introduction of The History of
Japan by Engelbert Kæmpfer, (London, 1727). However, if you consult The
Book of Ser Marco Polo the Venetian... edited by Sir Henry Yule (London,
1929), the same passage reads as follows: ...according to what is said by
the experienced pilots and mariners of those parts, there be 7459 Islands in
the waters frequented by the said mariners; and that is how they know the
fact...
I suppose that the number 7448 must have been in one or more of
the hundreds of manuscript versions circulating at the time when Münster was
drawing his map.
As an aside, Stanfords Compendium of Geography and Travel, based on
Hellwalds Die Erde und Ihre Völker, London, 1882, states in the opening
paragraph on Japan that:
It... stretches in an almost continuous chain across 26 degrees of
latitude... for a total length of about 1800 miles, and consists of about
4,000 islands of all sizes.
It all depends on when (and where) you stop counting...
Jason Hubbard
Dear Maphists,
My M|nster map of America Die Ne|wen Inseln/ so hinder Hispanien gegen
Orient/ bey dem Landt Indie ligen (sic) close to the island of ZIPANGRI
indicates that there are 7448 islands.
I understood this to be based on information from Marco Polo. He, however,
clearly states no fewer than 7440 islands. (Book 3, chapter 4, Of the Sea
of Chinaetc).
Is there an explanation for this discrepancy?
Jens Bornholt
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