clad in tree cloth from the waist down. 1 ' Mentioning the scribes of 

 a ruler, he says that they write on "very thin tree bark", and he 

 describes the sail of a junk as made of "the bark of trees." 



There is no hint of a reason for Pigafetta's use of or omission of 

 "palm"; possibly he saw bark removed from another kind of tree 

 and, as a result, chose the general rather than the specific. 



In his mentions of bark cloth, Pigafetta himself is not always 

 primarily responsible for errors. In the Beinecke-Yale manu- 

 script, it is stated that the bark is beaten "avecq du boys," trans- 

 lated as "with wood." In the Ambrosian manuscript, the phrase is 

 "co legni", translated as "with bits of wood." Since there is no 

 explanatory note in either translation, the answer to this puzzle 

 must be that neither Skelton nor Robertson realized that Piga- 

 fetta could have been saying that a wooden beater was used. 

 Pigafetta's description of the finished cloth as "like a cloth of raw 

 silk with threads in it making it appear as if woven" stengthens 

 this assumption. If undecorated bark cloth is examined with 

 back-lighting, the "watermarking" made by geometrically pat- 

 terned beaters is plainly visible and suggests the texture of woven 

 cloth. Pigafetta was here most probably referring to an imple- 

 ment made of wood or even simply to a stick of wood used. 



M 



or when 



translation stops at the literal although accuracy depends on 

 extension. In addition, in the case of handwritten manuscripts 

 such as Pigafetta's Relation, mistakes result from a scribe's mis- 

 understanding of a word or when, in transcription, he alters a 

 phrase. 



What source is responsible for Pigafetta's statement that bark 

 cloth is obtained from palms, is not stated in any of the literature 

 consulted. In reading Marco Polo, he must have noticed (no 

 matter which manuscript or printed book he used) that Polo 

 nowhere mentions the palm, but refers either to "certain trees"or 

 specifically to the mulberry, "the leaves of which are fed to 

 si!kworms"and in both cases states clearly that it is the inner bark 

 that is utilized for making both paper and cloth for summer 

 clothing in China. 



62 



