Chapter XXXI

DISCOURSETH OF THE TWO ISLANDS CALLED MALE AND FEMALE, AND WHY
THEY ARE SO CALLED.

When you leave this kingdom of Kesmacoran, which is on the mainland, you go by sea some 500 miles towards the south; and then you find the two Islands, MALE and FEMALE, lying about 30 miles distant from one another. The people are all baptized Christians, but maintain the ordinances of the Old Testament; thus when their wives are with child they never go near them till their confinement, or for forty days thereafter.

In the Island however which is called Male, dwell the men alone, without their wives or any other women. Every year when the month of March arrives the men all set out for the other Island, and tarry there for three months, to wit, March, April, May, dwelling with their wives for that space. At the end of those three months they return to their own Island, and pursue their husbandry and trade for the other nine months.

They find on this Island very fine ambergris. They live on flesh and milk and rice. They are capital fishermen, and catch a great quantity of fine large sea-fish, and these they dry, so that all the year they have plenty of food, and also enough to sell to the traders who go thither. They have no chief except a bishop, who is subject to the archbishop of another Island, of which we shall presently speak, called SCOTRA. They have also a peculiar language.

As for the children which their wives bear to them, if they be girls they abide with their mothers; but if they be boys the mothers bring them up till they are fourteen, and then send them to the fathers. Such is the custom of these two Islands. The wives do nothing but nurse their children and gather such fruits as their Island produces; for their husbands do furnish them with all necessaries.{1}

NOTE 1.—It is not perhaps of much use to seek a serious
identification of the locality of these Islands, or, as Marsden
has done, to rationalise the fable. It ran from time immemorial,
and as nobody ever found the Islands, their locality shifted with
the horizon, though the legend long hung about Socotra and its
vicinity. Coronelli’s Atlas (Venice, 1696) identifies these islands
with those called Abdul Kuri near Cape Gardafui, and the same
notion finds favour with Marsden. No islands indeed exist in the
position indicated by Polo if we look to his direction “south of
Kesmacoran,” but if we take his indication of “half-way between
Mekrán and Socotra,” the Kuria Muria Islands on the Arabian coast,
in which M. Pauthier longs to trace these veritable Male and Female
Isles, will be nearer than any others. Marco’s statement that they
had a bishop subject to the metropolitan of Socotra certainly looks
as if certain concrete islands had been associated with the tale.
Friar Jordanus (p. 44) also places them between India the Greater
and India Tertia (_i.e._ with him Eastern Africa). Conti locates
them not more than 5 miles from Socotra, and yet 100 mile distant
from one another. “Sometimes the men pass over to the women, and
sometimes the women pass over to the men, and each return to their
own respective island before the expiration of six months. Those
who remain on the island of the others beyond this fatal period die
immediately” (p. 21). Fra Mauro places the islands to the south of
Zanzibar, and gives them the names of _Mangla_ and _Nebila_. One is
curious to know whence came these names, one of which seems to be
Sanskrit, the other (also in Sanudo’s map) Arabic; (_Nabílah_, Ar.,
“Beautiful”; _Mangala_, Sansk. “Fortunate”).

A savour of the story survived to the time of the Portuguese
discoveries, and it had by that time attached itself to Socotra.
(_De Barros_, Dec. II. Liv. i. cap. 3; _Bartoli, H. della Comp. di
Gesù_, Asia, I. p. 37; _P. Vincenzo_, p. 443.)

The story was, I imagine, a mere ramification of the ancient and
wide-spread fable of the Amazons, and is substantially the same
that Palladius tells of the Brahmans; how the men lived on one side
of the Ganges and the women on the other. The husbands visited
their wives for 40 days only in June, July, and August, “those
being their cold months, as the sun was then to the north.” And
when a wife had once borne a child the husband returned no more.
(_Müller’s Ps. Callisth._ 105.) The Mahábhárata celebrates the
Amazon country of Ráná Paramitá, where the regulations were much as
in Polo’s islands, only male children were put to death, and men if
they overstayed a month. (_Wheeler’s India_, I. 400.)

Hiuen Tsang’s version of the legend agrees with Marco’s in placing
the Woman’s Island to the south of Persia. It was called the
_Kingdom of Western Women_. There were none but women to be seen.
It was under _Folin_ (the Byzantine Empire), and the ruler thereof
sent husbands every year; if boys were born, the law prohibited
their being brought up. (_Vie et Voyages_, p. 268.) Alexander, in
Ferdúsi’s poem, visits the City of Women on an island in the sea,
where no man was allowed.

The Chinese accounts, dating from the 5th century, of a remote
Eastern Land called Fusang, which Neumann fancied to have been
Mexico, mention that to the east of that region again there was a
Woman’s Island, with the usual particulars. (_Lassen_, IV. 751.)
[Cf. _G. Schlegel, Niu Kouo, T’oung Pao_, III. pp. 495–510.—H. C.]
Oddly enough, Columbus heard the same story of an island called
Matityna or Matinino (apparently Martinique) which he sighted on
his second voyage. The Indians on board “asserted that it had no
inhabitants but women, who at a certain time of the year were
visited by the Cannibals (Caribs); if the children born were boys
they were brought up and sent to their fathers, if girls they were
retained by the mothers. They reported also that these women had
certain subterranean caverns in which they took refuge if any one
went thither except at the established season,” etc. (_P. Martyr_
in _Ramusio_, III. 3 _v._ and see 85.) Similar Amazons are placed
by Adam of Bremen on the Baltic Shores, a story there supposed to
have originated in a confusion between Gwenland, _i.e._ Finland,
and a land of _Cwens_ or Women.

Mendoza heard of the like in the vicinity of Japan (perhaps the
real Fusang story), though he opines judiciously that “this is
very doubtful to be beleeved, although I have bin certified by
religious men that have talked with persons that within these two
yeares have beene at the saide ilands, and have seene the saide
women.” (_H. of China_, II. 301.) Lane quotes a like tale about a
horde of Cossacks whose wives were said to live apart on certain
islands in the Dnieper. (_Arab. Nights_, 1859, III. 479.) The
same story is related by a missionary in the _Lettres Édifiantes_
of certain unknown islands supposed to lie south of the Marian
group. Pauthier, from whom I derive this last instance, draws the
conclusion: “On voit que le récit de Marc Pol est loin d’être
imaginaire.” Mine from the premises would be different!

Sometimes the fable took another form; in which the women are
entirely isolated, as in that which Mela quotes from Hanno (III.
9). So with the Isle of Women which Kazwini and Bakui place to the
South of China. They became enceinte by the Wind, or by eating a
particular fruit [or by plunging into the sea; cf. _Schlegel_,
_l.c._—H. C.], or, as in a Chinese tradition related by Magaillans,
by looking at their own faces in a well! The like fable is
localised by the Malays in the island of Engano off Sumatra, and
was related to Pigafetta of an island under Great Java called
Ocoloro, perhaps the same.

(_Magail._ 76; _Gildem._ 196; _N. et Ex._ II. 398; _Pigafetta_,
173; _Marsden’s Sumatra_, 1st ed. p. 264.)