Starting home by ship in 1291 or 1292, Polo was forced to spend five months on "Java the Less"—Sumatra—waiting for monsoon winds to shift so that he and his shipmates could sail northwestward toward Ceylon and India. 1
After his return to Venice in 1295, Marco Polo found himself in jail in Genoa. Some accounts of his life have him taken prisoner in a skirmish off the Anatolian coast in 1296. Others have him on the losing side after the battle of Curzola off the Dalmatian coast in September 1298.
Either way, he was there until someone paid a ransom in August 1299. In Genoa, he spent part of his time dictating an account of his travels to a fellow inmate, Rustichello da Pisa 2, who may well have incorporated his own material and other anecdotes to the content Marco dictated.
The result was the book that became known as The Travels of Marco Polo.
While the accuracy of the contents and Marco Polo's reliability as a source for later historians has become a matter of some debate, such issues do not concern us. The book was a significant influence on the likes of Christopher Columbus.
He is often portrayed as sailing around the Caribbean, trying to reconcile what he found there with descriptions of places in his copy of The Travels.
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1 Mike Edwards, Wonders and Whoppers, The Smithsonian Magazine, July 2008. Polo, his father and uncle, joined a fourteen-ship flotilla carrying the Mongol princess Kököchin to become the consort of Persia's Arghun Khan. Of the six hundred passengers who boarded the flotilla in Zaitun (modern-day Quanzhou), eighteen, including the three Polos and Kököchin, reached Persia.
2 Italian romance writer Rustichello da Pisa (a.k.a. Rusticiano, fl. late 13th century) is best known for co-writing Marco Polo's autobiography, The Travels of Marco Polo, while both were in a Genoese prison. He had previously written the Roman de Roi Artus (Romance of King Arthur), the earliest known Arthurian romance by an Italian author. See here for a more detailed biographical sketch.