Message #160277

[Autolocus]

I Kings, 10: 22.

Chau Ju-Kua: His Work on Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and
Thirteenth Centuries Entitled Chu-fan-chi, transl. and annotated by Friedrich
Hirth and W. W. Rockhill, St. Petersburg. 1911, p. 142.



THE ATLANTIS LEGEND 3

This statement is credited to only a hundred years before
Marco Polo. One naturally suspects some exaggeration. But a
parallel account, nearly as expansive and very circumstantial, is
given in the same work concerning giant vessels sailing in the
opposite direction some six hundred years earlier. It begins:
"The ships that sail the Southern Sea and south of it are like
houses. When their sails are spread they are like great clouds in
the sky." Professor Holmes, drawing attention to these passages
(which he quotes), very justly observes, "who shall say that the
mastery of the sea known to have been attained in the Orient
500 A. D. had not been achieved long prior to that date?" 5