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Born in the Republic of Venice in 1254, Marco Polo was a trader, traveler, and adventurer who (probably) journeyed to Central Asia and China in an era when vast swaths of the world were unknown to Europeans. When he returned from his adventures, he brought back stories that introduced the customs and cultures of Asia to his countrymen.

In his influential work, The Travels of Marco Polo, the explorer outlined the geography of Asia, described the traditions of the people, and told tales of life at the court of Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. But as amazing as all that may sound, it only scratches the surface of the bizarre and exciting life of the traveling merchant. Here are 15 things you might not know about Marco Polo. 

Marco Polo wasn’t yet a seasoned traveling merchant when he embarked on his great journey east. In fact, he was just 17 years old. In 1271, Polo left home with his father Niccolo and his uncle Maffeo and set out for Asia, hoping to reach the court of Kublai Khan. It was likely the first time the young Polo had left home as well as the first time he’d met his father and uncle, who had been traveling the world since Marco’s birth.

While The Travels of Marco Polo brought knowledge of the Far East to Europe, Marco Polo wasn’t actually the first European to visit China. In fact, he wasn’t even the first Polo to visit China. Before Marco embarked on his journey to Asia, Niccolo and Maffeo Polo had already traveled to China and met with Kublai Khan.

In some ways, Marco’s journey was a bit of a sequel to Niccolo and Maffeo’s original adventures: The two older travelers had befriended the great Mongol emperor and told him about Christianity, the pope, and the church in Rome. Curious about Western religion, Kublai Khan apparently requested that the travelers bring him 100 Christian men from whom to learn more about the religion, as well as some holy oil of the lamp in Jerusalem. Niccolo and Maffeo returned to Europe where they picked up the young Marco Polo and somehow procured the oil, but not the 100 Christians, before journeying east again.

After he left home at 17, Marco Polo didn’t return to Venice for 24 years. Over the course of two decades, he traveled roughly 15,000 miles on land along the Silk Road and by sea, traversing parts of Asia. If some highly controversial (and possibly forged) maps are to be believed, Polo also visited parts of the Alaskan coast hundreds of years before the Russian expedition led by the Danish explorer Vitus Bering.

When Marco Polo returned to Europe in 1295, his adventures were far from over. He found Venice at war against the Republic of Genoa, and took up arms on behalf of his homeland. After a skirmish at sea, Polo was captured by the Genoese forces and tossed in jail. There, he befriended another prisoner, Rustichello of Pisa, who just happened to be a writer of popular romances. He began dictating his story to Rustichello, who produced the manuscript that would become The Travels of Marco Polo.

The Mongol Empire was circulating paper money long before European nations began printing their own bills. Polo described the strange currency in his book, facetiously describing Kublai Khan as an alchemist who could transform mulberry trees into money instead of base metals into gold. He was fascinated by the way paper money was treated by the emperor’s subjects as though it were as valuable as gold or silver—and described the systems in place to prevent counterfeiting.

Marco Polo encountered numerous animals on his journey that were then unknown in Europe, such as the chow chow dog breed, the musk deer, and the yak. Of these, the yak seemed to be Polo’s favorite: Amazed by the silky softness of their fur, he brought yak hair to Venice with him, where he displayed it as a curiosity.

Many believe, erroneously, that Marco Polo introduced pasta to Italy. Noodles were already big in Europe by that time, but Polo did encounter some interesting foods while in Asia. During his travels, he found endless quantities of rare spices costing virtually nothing, such as ginger, which had been widely used in the Roman era but had become rare in the intervening centuries. And while he may not have brought ice cream to Europe either, as some sources suggest, Polo does describe an early milkshake. The Mongols reportedly dried milk and then filled their flasks with the powder to take on their travels on horseback. While riding, they added water to the milk, and the motion caused the concoction to thicken into a syrup.

In the 13th century, European folklore described unicorns as horned, horse-like animals who could tamed and captured only with the help of a young maiden. Marco Polo’s account of the animal debunked that superstition: unicorns weren’t serene and beautiful creatures who gravitated to the pure of heart. They were ugly and dangerous, with hair like a buffalo, feet like an elephant, the head of a wild boar, and a black horn in the middle of their foreheads. Unicorns, Polo informed his readers, liked to roll around in the mud and dirt, and attack people with their prickly tongues. Modern historians claim he was actually describing rhinoceroses.

Throughout his book, Polo describes encounters with magicians and sorcerers. At the court of Kublai Khan, Polo met astrologers who (allegedly) could control the weather from the palace rooftops, and magicians who made flagons of wine levitate at feasts.

If Marco Polo sounds a little bit superstitious, it’s likely because he lived in superstitious times. Throughout his book, he not only recounts first-hand experiences with magic, but repeats the myths and rumors he encounters as fact. Polo claims it’s well known that evil spirits haunt the Gobi Desert, torturing travelers with illusions, and calling their names to turn them away from their path and make them lose their way—which is probably a reference to the very real phenomenon of the Gobi’s “singing” sands.

In his book, Polo said he not only made it to the court of Kublai Khan in Shangdu—traveling farther than almost any European had in the process—but also befriended the emperor, becoming his right hand man and advisor.

When Marco Polo finally decided it was time to end his adventures and return home, Kublai Khan had grown so attached to the Venetian merchant that he denied his request. Polo finally convinced Kublai Khan to let him go in return for helping the emperor’s great nephew on a sea voyage. In order to ensure Polo was safe on his travels, the emperor awarded him a golden tablet of safe conduct—an inscribed gold plaque—which would help him obtain supplies on their journey and let everyone know he was under the emperor’s protection.

While Marco Polo and his ghostwriter Rustichello of Pisa were undoubtedly great storytellers, historians continue to debate exactly how true some of their stories were. Some historians have gone as far as to question whether Polo even made it to China, arguing he may have simply picked up stories from other merchants during his travels. While Polo’s historical significance isn’t up for debate, it’s unclear which of his tales stretched the truth.

After providing some of the first written descriptions of yaks, musk deer, and of course, unicorns, it seems fitting that Polo would eventually have an ungulate named after him. In 1841, zoologist Edward Blyth named a subspecies of Central Asian wild sheep Ovis ammon polii after Marco Polo (the sheep are colloquially called Marco Polo sheep). 

Marco Polo’s travels have inspired plenty of explorers to go on adventures of their own. Christopher Columbus brought a copy of Marco Polo’s book with him on his trips across the Atlantic Ocean. In the 1960s, a group of travelers even decided to follow Marco Polo’s exact route, journeying from Italy to China in cars and trailers instead of on horseback.

A version of this story was published in 2016; it has been updated for 2023.

There’s something ghoulishly fascinating about a mysterious disappearance, and our vast oceans offer seemingly endless space in which to vanish. The true fate of many of these ships will never be known, but speculation suggests that storms, piracy, mutiny, accidental bombing, and even the attack of a giant squid could be responsible for their disappearances. Below are seven ships that have vanished without leaving a trace.

Theodosia Burr Alston (1783–1813) was the daughter of American politician and third vice president of the United States Aaron Burr. Theodosia had a privileged upbringing and a good education, and in 1801, she married wealthy landowner Joseph Alston, who went on to become governor of South Carolina.

Sadly, in 1812, Theodosia lost her only son to a fever and she became sick with grief. Desperate for a change of scene, she boarded the schooner Patriot in South Carolina to visit her father in New York on New Year’s Eve 1812. The ship left dock and sailed north—but what happened after that is a mystery. It never arrived in New York, and no trace of the ship or crew was ever found.

A number of theories and legends have sprung up around the fate of Theodosia—some claim the ship was attacked by pirates and that she was forced to walk the plank, while others suggest that the Patriot got caught up in the War of 1812 and was sunk accidentally by an enemy ship. Perhaps most fanciful of all is the story put forward by a Karankawa chief, who claimed that he rescued a woman who had washed up on shore after a shipwreck, and that before she died she gifted him her locket—with the name Theodosia inscribed upon it. Whatever the story, it’s likely that after more than 200 years we shall never know the real fate of the Patriot and Theodosia Burr Alston.

The Merchant Royal was tasked with taking treasures from the New World to Spain under the command of Captain John Limbrey. In 1641, the ship was loaded with 100,000 pounds of gold, 400 bars of Mexican silver, and a huge amount of precious jewels. As the ship entered English waters, the weather turned bad; unfortunately the pumps on board the ship broke and it began to take on water. The Merchant Royal had been sailing in tandem with its sister ship the Dover Merchant, which came to the rescue of the captain and crew. The cargo, however, could not be saved, and the ship disappeared beneath the waves, somewhere off the coast of Land’s End.

Of course, with such valuable cargo, countless people have attempted to find the wreck, which has become known as the “Eldorado of the seas.” In 2007, it was thought that Odyssey Marine Exploration may have found the Merchant Royal wreck after it salvaged 500,000 pieces of gold and silver from a site off the southwestern tip of Great Britain, but it was later identified as treasure from a Spanish vessel. In 2019, fisherman pulled up what may be the ship’s anchor, but so far, the unimagined riches of the Merchant Royal still await discovery.

The USS Cyclops was a huge steel-hulled fuel ship, tasked with carrying coal and other useful supplies for the U.S. Navy in the 1910s. On its final journey, the Cyclops set sail from Rio de Janeiro with a full load of 10,800 tons of manganese ore and over 300 people on board.

On March 4, 1918 the ship was spotted for the last time as it left Barbados and sailed into what we now sometimes call the Bermuda Triangle. The ship seemingly disappeared without a trace, and the case has been seen as especially mysterious since no distress call was made and no bad weather was reported in the region. Theories began to surface (some more imaginative than others) that the ship had been sunk by the Germans, attacked by a giant squid or octopus, or been victim of a violent mutiny. A huge search for the Cyclops was launched with a number of boats and planes scouring the area for debris or survivors, but nothing of the enormous ship was ever seen again.

On December 22, 1967, experienced yachtsman Dan Burack and his friend, Father Patrick Horgan, set sail in the 23-foot luxury yacht Witchcraft to see the holiday lights off the coast of Miami. Unfortunately, after just one mile, the pair experienced difficulty when it seemed as if the yacht had hit something.

Burack calmly called the Miami Coast Guard to report the trouble and request assistance. The official who took the call later commented that Burack seemed unconcerned—perhaps because the yacht was fitted with a special flotation device that was supposed to make the vessel unsinkable. The Coast Guard arrived at the scene just 19 minutes after the call, and were surprised to find no trace of the large yacht, no debris, and no sign of Burack or Horgan. Over the next six days, hundreds of square miles of ocean were searched, but nothing was ever found, and the Witchcraft has been chalked up as another vessel mysteriously lost to the Bermuda Triangle.

The Andrea Gail was a 72-foot-long-liner boat that fished in the North Atlantic for swordfish. In September 1991, the ship, along with several other fishing vessels, set sail from Gloucester, Massachusetts, for the last fishing session of the season. By October, the Andrea Gail and its six-man crew was out off the coast of Newfoundland when the confluence of terrible weather fronts conspired to create what has been dubbed “the perfect storm.” Powerful winds whipped up waves as high as 100 feet, and any ship caught in their path faced being sucked into the wave and flipped over repeatedly.

The devastating storm battered the coast of New England and Canada, and after the worst of it had passed and the Andrea Gail had failed to return to port, a number of rescue missions set out to find the ship—but nothing was ever found. The story of the storm and the imagined fate of the Andrea Gail and her crew was later told in the book The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger, as well as a Hollywood movie of the same name.

USS Porpoise was a brig involved in 19th century exploration and surveying missions, taking part in a voyage in 1838 that confirmed the existence of Antarctica and later circumnavigating the globe. In 1854 the ship set sail from Hong Kong carrying 69 men in order to carry out a survey of the South Sea Islands. Somewhere between China and Taiwan, the ship sailed into dense fog and was separated from its partner ship, the USS Vincennes, and never seen again. Many ships searched for the ill-fated brig for over a year, but no sign of it was ever found. It’s thought to have been wrecked in a typhoon with all hands lost.

Over the course of its 20-year career, the British Navy ship HMS Sappho was used to suppress the slave trade off the coast of West Africa. It intercepted a number of ships loaded with slaves and freed hundreds of people.

In 1857, after wrongly chasing down and boarding an American ship—an event that caused something of a diplomatic crisis between America and Great Britain—the ship was ordered to set sail to Australia. The Sappho reached Cape Town without incident, and from there headed toward the Bass Strait, where it was last spotted by a passing brig on February 18, 1878. Bad weather was reported in the area, and it has been assumed that high winds caused the ship to founder and sink. No sign of the 147 crewmembers was ever found, but rumors abounded that the captain, Fairfax Moresby, had somehow escaped the wreck and made it to an island off Australia, where he was said to have lost his mind.

The SS Baychimo started life as a German trading vessel before being given to Great Britain after World War I as part of reparations. The Baychimo came under the ownership of the Hudson Bay Company, and made many voyages across the Atlantic from Scotland to Canada to trade with local Inuit tribes. In 1931, while journeying to Vancouver with a cargo of furs, the Baychimo fell victim ice floes, which surrounded the ship and locked it in an icy embrace. The crew escaped the stricken vessel and fled across the ice floes to safety, but some returned a few days later to try to rescue the ship and its valuable cargo.

After over a month of braving the treacherous weather in a flimsy camp, a huge blizzard hit and the remaining crew lost sight of the ship—and by the time the storm cleared, the Baychimo had disappeared. The crew assumed it had sunk without trace.

But then, a week later, the ship was spotted by an Inuit hunter and the crew raced back on board to gather as much of the cargo as possible. The captain decided the ship was too badly damaged to be seaworthy and so abandoned it, thinking it would soon break apart.

How wrong he was: Over the years, the Baychimo was sighted a number of times, sometimes caught fast in ice, other times floating ghost-like through the Arctic waters. The last confirmed sighting was in 1969—an astonishing 37 years after it had been abandoned to its fate.

A version of this story ran in 2016; it has been updated for 2023.

English has many words for the feelings that can arise when a good, hard look at the state of the world seems to reveal only negatives. Hopelessness, despair, depression, discouragement, melancholy, sorrow, worry, disconsolation, distress, anxiety … there are so many that it would hardly seem necessary to borrow any more from other languages. But English never hesitates to borrow words that would lose certain subtleties in translation, and angst, ennui, and weltschmerz have made their way into English by offering a little something extra. Have you got a case of one of these imported maladies? Here’s a guide to help you diagnose.

Angst is the word for fear in German, Dutch, and Danish. It comes from the same Indo-European root (meaning “tight, constricted, painful”) that gave us anguish, anxiety, and anger. In the mid-19th century, it became associated with a specific kind of existential dread through the work of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. He talked about a type of anxiety that arises in response to nothing in particular, or the sense of nothingness itself. It’s not exactly fear, and not the same as worry, but a simple fact of the human condition, a feeling that disrupts peace and contentment for no definable reason.

The word was adopted into English after Sigmund Freud used it as a term for generalized anxiety. Now it carries shades of philosophical brooding mixed with a dash of psychoanalytic, clinical turmoil. While anxiety and angst are often interchangeable, anxiety foregrounds a feeling of suffering (also present in angst), while angst foregrounds dissatisfaction, a complaint about the way the world is.

Are you dissatisfied and worried in an introspective, overthinking German way? You’ve got angst.

Ennui is the French word for boredom. The English word annoy comes from an early, 13th century borrowing of the word, but it was borrowed again during the height of 18th century European Romanticism, when it stood for a particular, fashionable kind of boredom brought on by weariness with the world. Young people at that time, feeling that the promises of the French Revolution had gone unfulfilled, took on an attitude of lethargic disappointment, a preoccupation with the fundamental emptiness of existence. Nothing mattered, so nothing roused the passions.

By the middle of the 19th century, ennui became associated with the alienation of industrialization and modern life. Artists and poets suffered from it, and soon a claim to ennui was a mark of spiritual depth and sensitivity. It implied feelings of superiority and self-regard, the idea being that only bourgeois people too deluded or stupid to see the basic futility of any action could be happy. Now, in English, though it is defined as “a feeling of weariness and dissatisfaction,” ennui also has connotations of self-indulgent posturing and European decadence.

Are you tired, so tired of everything about the world and the way it is? Do you proclaim this, with a long, slow sigh, to everyone around you? You’ve got ennui.

Weltschmerz, German for “world pain,” was also coined during the Romantic era, and is in many ways the German version of ennui. It describes a world weariness felt from a perceived mismatch between the ideal image of how the world should be with how it really is.

In German philosophy, it was distinguished from pessimism, the idea that there is more bad than good in the world, because while pessimism was the logical conclusion of cool, rational philosophical pondering, weltschmerz was an emotional response. Though weltschmerz and ennui are pretty close synonyms, ennui foregrounds the listlessness brought on by world weariness (it can also be a term for more simple boredom), and weltschmerz foregrounds the pain or sadness. There is perhaps a greater sense of yearning in weltschmerz (part of the pain is that the sufferer really wants the world to be otherwise). Also, as an English word, weltschmerz isn’t as common as ennui, so there are fewer connotations about the type of person that comes down with it. Its very German sound (that “schm”!) makes it seem more serious and grim than ennui.

Do you have sadness in your heart for the world that can never be—and sensible shoes? You’ve got weltschmerz.

A version of this story ran in 2016; it has been updated for 2023.