Cipango

Would Samarkand or Cathay or Cipango have suffered the same fate if visited?

He began to hear of an island in that direction named Cuba, which, from the mistaken ideas of geography current at the time, he took for Marco Polo’s famed gold island of Cipango.

We need not say that he reached neither Cipango, India, nor the Khan; but he did discover Cuba, that beautiful island of the Caribbean Sea long dear to the heart of every consumer of the fragrant weed.

On the coasts of Cathay and Cipango forty years ago.

It was the etherealized spectacle of the sanguine hopes of all the conquistadores who had set sail for the rubies of Cipango; they had had great desires of white marble cities in which the women were lovely and dark, and gold was worked into the forms of every day.