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.[NOTE 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 Mekran 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; (Nabilah, 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 Gesu, 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. (Mueller's Ps. Callisth. 105.) The Mahabharata
celebrates the Amazon country of Rana Paramita, where the regulations were
much as in Polo's islands, only male children were put to death, and men if
they overstayed a month.
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