Cameron DeVries

Blog Post #4

The Travels of Marco Polo: Lesser Java

November 6, 2025

 

In the section entitled “From China to India”, I chose to look at Marco Polo’s descriptions of the island he calls “Lesser Java”, as this is one of the longer descriptions of this section and the place during this leg of the journey in which he runs into the most people and provides interesting descriptions. This area is part of Indonesia, and was part of his long journey by ship throughout the islands of Eastern and Southern Asia on the way to India. One thing to note first is that this is one of the few places in the narratives where Marco Polo gives a brief description of his own living conditions and interaction with the place he is staying in. When talking about Sumatra, one of the various kingdoms he encounters across the island, he says that he spent 5 months there due to weather. His descriptions showed some amount of struggle but also the ways that he and his people adapted to living in this uncharted territory. He says, “we dug a big trench round our encampment” and recalls using the timber from the area and supplies from trading with the native islanders to create wooden towers and fortifications that they lived in.

The reason for digging these trenches and building fortifications ties back to his writings on the people of Lesser Java, which is one of the aspects of this journey that he writes very harshly about in this section. This is a large island, and Marco Polo refers to eight different kingdoms, each with individual rulers and languages, and how all of them are idolaters (besides the people of Ferlec, having been converted to Islam). It is with these people that Marco Polo dives into his judgmental and denigrating comments – he claims they “live like beasts”, eat “every other sort of flesh, clean or unclean”, and “whatever they see first when they wake in the morning, that they worship.” To me, this section is interesting due to how matter of fact Marco Polo had remained before (for the most part) during his travels throughout Europe and the more mapped out parts of Asia. Here, he attacks dress, hygiene, diet, religion, appearance, and seemingly anything else he can think of. In the kingdom of Sumatra, he refers to the natives as “nasty and brutish folk who kill men for food.” This all goes hand in hand with the general attitude of this entire China to India chapter, where he ranges from the trite “savage” comments, to describing these islanders as looking like dogs and all sorts of other things.

Something that remains in line with Marco Polo’s attitude and position as a merchant is his view of the natural resources and “treasures” of the region he is passing through. Some comments he makes on this front detail how “the island abounds in treasure and in costly products”, including descriptions of how delicious wine is made in tree stumps, how the fish and camphor are the best in the world, and how all kinds of precious woods, spices, fruits and plants can be found in Lesser Java. Kind of going hand in hand with this is description of the wonders of wildlife he encounters, such as elephants, monkeys, and rhinos, which he calls unicorns.

It is interesting to see Marco Polo’s mercantile nature and outlook on exotic goods continue to come out here, but also now to see how his views on wealth are tied into the people nearby and the ways in which they use it. He approves of nature’s wealth here, but seeing as this part of the world may have been considered off the beaten track or apart from what was considered “major civilization” during this time, he doesn’t document a lot of large empires, structures, or shows of wealth in this region, which was something that impressed him throughout China. He seems curious and sees potential for trade, but still lets slip his Eurocentric and Christian nature, and his judgment comes out when presented with these more drastically different ways of life across Indonesia.