XXI. CONCERNING THE CITY OF CAIL…

XXI. CONCERNING THE CITY OF CAIL

Cail is a great and noble city, and belongs to ASHAR, the eldest of the five brother Kings. It is at this city that all the ships touch that come from the west, as from Hormos and from Kis and from Aden, and all Arabia, laden with horses and with other things for sale. And this brings a great concourse of people from the country round about, and so there is great business done in this city of Cail.{1}

The King possesses vast treasures, and wears upon his person great store of rich jewels. He maintains great state and administers his kingdom with great equity, and extends great favour to merchants and foreigners, so that they are very glad to visit his city.{2}

This King has some 300 wives; for in those parts the man who has most wives is most thought of.

As I told you before, there are in this great province of Maabar five crowned Kings, who are all own brothers born of one father and of one mother, and this king is one of them. Their mother is still living. And when they disagree and go forth to war against one another, their mother throws herself between them to prevent their fighting. And should they persist in desiring to fight, she will take a knife and threaten that if they will do so she will cut off the paps that suckled them and rip open the womb that bare them, and so perish before their eyes. In this way hath she full many a time brought them to desist. But when she dies it will most assuredly happen that they will fall out and destroy one another.{3}

[All the people of this city, as well as of the rest of India, have a custom of perpetually keeping in the mouth a certain leaf called Tembul, to gratify a certain habit and desire they have, continually chewing it and spitting out the saliva that it excites. The Lords and gentlefolks and the King have these leaves prepared with camphor and other aromatic spices, and also mixt with quicklime. And this practice was said to be very good for the health.{4} If any one desires to offer a gross insult to another, when he meets him he spits this leaf or its juice in his face. The other immediately runs before the King, relates the insult that has been offered him, and demands leave to fight the offender. The King supplies the arms, which are sword and target, and all the people flock to see, and there the two fight till one of them is killed. They must not use the point of the sword, for this the King forbids.]{5}

NOTE 1.—KAIL, now forgotten, was long a famous port on the coast of what is now the Tinnevelly District of the Madras Presidency. It is mentioned as a port of Ma’bar by our author’s contemporary Rashiduddin, though the name has been perverted by careless transcription into Báwal and Kábal. (See Elliot, I. pp. 69, 72.) It is also mistranscribed as Kábil in Quatremère’s publication of Abdurrazzák, who mentions it as “a place situated opposite the island of Serendib, otherwise called Ceylon,” and as being the extremity of what he was led to regard as Malabar (p. 19). It is mentioned as Cahila, the site of the pearl-fishery, by Nicolo Conti (p. 7). The Roteiro of Vasco da Gama notes it as Caell, a state having a Mussulman King and a Christian (for which read Káfir) people. Here were many pearls. Giovanni d’Empoli notices it (Gael) also for the pearl-fishery, as do Varthema and Barbosa. From the latter we learn that it was still a considerable seaport, having rich Mahomedan merchants, and was visited by many ships from Malabar, Coromandel, and Bengal. In the time of the last writers it belonged to the King of Kaulam, who generally resided at Kail.

The real site of this once celebrated port has, I believe, till now never been identified in any published work. I had supposed the still existing Káyalpaṭṭanam to have been in all probability the place, and I am again indebted to the kindness of the Rev. Dr. Caldwell for conclusive and most interesting information on this subject. He writes:

“There are no relics of ancient greatness in Káyalpaṭṭanam, and no traditions of foreign trade, and it is admitted by its inhabitants to be a place of recent origin, which came into existence after the abandonment of the true Káyal. They state also that the name of Káyalpaṭṭanam has only recently been given to it, as a reminiscence of the older city, and that its original name was Sônagarpaṭṭanam.[1] There is another small port in the same neighbourhood, a little to the north of Káyalpaṭṭanam, called Pinna Cael in the maps, properly Punnei-Káyal, from Punnei, the Indian Laurel; but this is also a place of recent origin, and many of the inhabitants of this place, as of Káyalpaṭṭanam, state that their ancestors came originally from Káyal, subsequently to the removal of the Portuguese from that place to Tuticorin.

“The Cail of Marco Polo, commonly called in the neighbourhood Old Káyal, and erroneously named Koil in the Ordnance Map of India, is situated on the Tâmraparnî River, about a mile and a half from its mouth. The Tamil word káyal means ‘a backwater, a lagoon,’ and the map shows the existence of a large number of these káyals or backwaters near the mouth of the river. Many of these kayals have now dried up more or less completely, and in several of them salt-pans have been established. The name of Káyal was naturally given to a town erected on the margin of a káyal; and this circumstance occasioned also the adoption of the name of Punnei Káyal, and served to give currency to the name of Káyalpaṭṭanam assumed by Sônagarpaṭṭanam, both those places being in the vicinity of kayals.

“KAYAL stood originally on or near the sea-beach, but it is now about a mile and a half inland, the sand carried down by the river having silted up the ancient harbour, and formed a waste sandy tract between the sea and the town. It has now shrunk into a petty village, inhabited partly by Mahommedans and partly by Roman Catholic fishermen of the Parava caste, with a still smaller hamlet adjoining inhabited by Brahmans and Vellalars; but unlikely as the place may now seem to have been identical with ‘the great and noble city’ described by Marco Polo, its identity is established by the relics of its ancient greatness which it still retains. Ruins of old fortifications, temples, storehouses, wells and tanks, are found everywhere along the coast for two or three miles north of the village of Kayal, and a mile and a half inland; the whole plain is covered with broken tiles and remnants of pottery, chiefly of China manufacture, and several mounds are apparent, in which, besides the shells of the pearl-oyster and broken pottery, mineral drugs (cinnabar, brimstone, etc.), such as are sold in the bazaars of sea-port towns, and a few ancient coins have been found. I send you herewith an interesting coin discovered in one of those mounds by Mr. R. Puckle, collector of Tinnevelly.[2]

“The people of the place have forgotten the existence of any trade between Kayal and China, though the China pottery that lies all about testifies to its existence at some former period; but they retain a distinct tradition of its trade with the Arabian and Persian coasts, as vouched for by Marco Polo, that trade having in some degree survived to comparatively recent times.... Captain Phipps, the Master Attendant at Tuticorin, says: ‘The roadstead of Old Cael (Káyal) is still used by native craft when upon the coast and meeting with south winds, from which it is sheltered. The depth of water is 16 to 14 feet; I fancy years ago it was deeper.... There is a surf on the bar at the entrance (of the river), but boats go through it at all times.’

* * * * *

“I am tempted to carry this long account of Kayal a little further, so as to bring to light the Kolkhoi [κόλχοι ἐμπόριον] of the Greek merchants, the situation of the older city being nearly identical with that of the more modern one. Kolkhoi, described by Ptolemy and the author of the Periplus as an emporium of the pearl-trade, as situated on the sea-coast to the east of Cape Comorin, and as giving its name to the Kolkhic Gulf or Gulf of Manaar, has been identified by Lassen with Keelkarei; but this identification is merely conjectural, founded on nothing better than a slight apparent resemblance in the names. Lassen could not have failed to identify Kolkhoi with KORKAI, the mother-city of Kayal, if he had been acquainted with its existence and claims. Korkai, properly KOLKAI (the l being changed into r by a modern refinement—it is still called Kolka in Malayalam), holds an important place in Tamil traditions, being regarded as the birthplace of the Pandyan Dynasty, the place where the princes of that race ruled previously to their removal to Madura. One of the titles of the Pandyan Kings is ‘Ruler of Korkai.’ Korkai is situated two or three miles inland from Kayal, higher up the river. It is not marked in the Ordnance Map of India, but a village in the immediate neighbourhood of it, called Mâramangalam, ‘the Good-fortune of the Pandyas,’ will be found in the map. This place, together with several others in the neighbourhood, on both sides of the river, is proved by inscriptions and relics to have been formerly included in Korkai, and the whole intervening space between Korkai and Kayal exhibits traces of ancient dwellings. The people of Kayal maintain that their city was originally so large as to include Korkai, but there is much more probability in the tradition of the people of Korkai, which is to the effect that Korkai itself was originally a sea-port; that as the sea retired it became less and less suitable for trade, that Kayal rose as Korkai fell, and that at length, as the sea continued to retire, Kayal also was abandoned. They add that the trade for which the place was famous in ancient times was the trade in pearls.” In an article in the Madras Journal (VII. 379) it is stated that at the great Siva Pagoda at Tinnevelly the earth used ceremonially at the annual festival is brought from Korkai, but no position is indicated.

NOTE 2.—Dr. Caldwell again brings his invaluable aid:—

“Marco Polo represents Kayal as being governed by a king whom he calls Asciar (a name which you suppose to be intended to be pronounced Ashar), and says that this king of Kayal was the elder brother of Sonderbandi, the king of that part of the district of Maabar where he landed. There is a distinct tradition, not only amongst the people now inhabiting Kayal, but in the district of Tinnevelly generally, that Kayal, during the period of its greatness, was ruled by a king. This king is sometimes spoken of as one of ‘the Five Kings’ who reigned in various parts of Tinnevelly, but whether he was independent of the King of Madura, or only a viceroy, the people cannot now say.... The tradition of the people of Kayal is that ... Sûr-Raja was the name of the last king of the place. They state that this last king was a Mahommedan, ... but though Sûr-Raja does not sound like the name of a Mahommedan prince, they all agree in asserting that this was his name.... Can this Sûr be the person whom Marco calls Asciar? Probably not, as Asciar seems to have been a Hindu by religion. I have discovered what appears to be a more probable identification in the name of a prince mentioned in an inscription on the walls of a temple at Sri-Vaikuntham, a town on the Tamraparni R., about 20 miles from Kayal. In the inscription in question a donation to the temple is recorded as having been given in the time of ‘Asaḍia-deva called also Surya-deva.’ This name ‘Asaḍia’ is neither Sanskrit nor Tamil; and as the hard ḍ is often changed into r, Marco’s Ashar may have been an attempt to render this Asaḍ. If this Asaḍia or Surya-deva were really Sundara-pandi-deva’s brother, he must have ruled over a narrow range of country, probably over Kayal alone, whilst his more eminent brother was alive; for there is an inscription on the walls of a temple at Sindamangalam, a place only a few miles from Kayal, which records a donation made to the place ‘in the reign of Sundara-pandi-deva.’”[3]

NOTE 3.—[“O aljofar, e perolas, que me manda que lha enuie, nom as posso auer, que as ha em Ceylão e Caille, que são as fontes dellas: compralashia do meu sangue, a do meu dinheiro, que o tenho porque vós me daes.” (Letter of the Viceroy Dom Francisco to the King, Anno de 1508). (G. Correa, Lendas da India, I. pp. 908–909.)—Note by Yule.]

NOTE 4.—Tembúl is the Persian name for the betel-leaf or pán, from the Sanskrit Támbúla. The latter is also used in Tamul, though Vettilei is the proper Tamul word, whence Betel (Dr. Caldwell). Marsden supposes the mention of camphor among the ingredients with which the pán is prepared to be a mistake, and suggests as a possible origin of the error that kápúr in the Malay language means not only camphor but quicklime. This is curious, but in addition to the fact that the lime is mentioned in the text, there seems ample evidence that his doubt about camphor is unfounded.

Garcia de Orta says distinctly: “In chewing betre ... they mix areca with it and a little lime.... Some add Licio (i.e. catechu), but the rich and grandees add some Borneo camphor, and some also lign-aloes, musk, and ambergris” (31 v. and 32). Abdurrazzák also says: “The manner of eating it is as follows: They bruise a portion of faufel (areca), otherwise called sipari, and put it in the mouth. Moistening a leaf of the betel, together with a grain of lime, they rub the one upon the other, roll them together, and then place them in the mouth. They thus take as many as four leaves of betel at a time and chew them. Sometimes they add camphor to it” (p. 32). And Abu’l Fazl: “They also put some betel-nut and kath (catechu) on one leaf, and some lime-paste on another, and roll them up; this is called a berah. Some put camphor and musk into it, and tie both leaves with a silk thread,” etc. (See Blochmann’s Transl. p. 73.) Finally one of the Chinese notices of Kamboja, translated by Abel Rémusat, says: “When a guest comes it is usual to present him with areca, camphor, and other aromatics.” (Nouv. Mél. I. 84.)

NOTE 5.—This is the only passage of Ramusio’s version, so far as I know, that suggests interpolation from a recent author, as distinguished from mere editorial modification. There is in Barbosa a description of the duello as practised in Canara, which is rather too like this one.

---------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] “Sônagar or Jônagar is a Tamil corruption of Yavanar, the Yavanas, the name by which the Arabs were known, and is the name most commonly used in the Tamil country to designate the mixed race descended from Arab colonists, who are called Mâpillas on the Malabar coast, and Lubbies in the neighbourhood of Madras.” (Dr. C.’s note)

[2] I am sorry to say that the coin never reached its destination. In the latter part of 1872 a quantity of treasure was found near Káyal by the labourers on irrigation works. Much of it was dispersed without coming under intelligent eyes, and most of the coins recovered were Arabic. One, however, is stated to have been a coin of “Joanna of Castille, A.D. 1236.” (Allen’s India Mail, 5th January, 1874.) There is no such queen. Qu. Joanna I. of Navarre (1274–1276)? or Joanna II. of Navarre (1328–1336)?Return to passage

[3] See above, p. 334, as to Dr. Caldwell’s view of Polo’s Sonderbandi. May not Ashar very well represent Áśháḍha, “invincible,” among the applications of which Williams gives “N. of a prince”? I observe also that Áśchar (Sansk. Áśchariya “marvellous”) is the name of one of the objects of worship in the dark Sakti system, once apparently potent in S. India. (See Taylor’s Catalogue Raisonné, II. 414, 423, 426, 443, and remark p. xlix.)Return to passage

[“Ils disent donc que Dieu qu’ils appellent Achar, c’est-à-dire, immobile ou immuable.” (F. Bernier, Voy., ed. 1699, II. p. 134.)—MS. Note.—H. Y.]

XXII. OF THE KINGDOM OF COILUM

When you quit Maabar and go 500 miles towards the south-west you come to the kingdom of COILUM. The people are Idolaters, but there are also some Christians and some Jews. The natives have a language of their own, and a King of their own, and are tributary to no one.{1}

A great deal of brazil is got here which is called brazil Coilumin from the country which produces it; ’tis of very fine quality.{2} Good ginger also grows here, and it is known by the same name of Coilumin after the country.{3} Pepper too grows in great abundance throughout this country, and I will tell you how. You must know that the pepper-trees are (not wild but) cultivated, being regularly planted and watered; and the pepper is gathered in the months of May, June, and July. They have also abundance of very fine indigo. This is made of a certain herb which is gathered, and [after the roots have been removed] is put into great vessels upon which they pour water and then leave it till the whole of the plant is decomposed. They then put this liquid in the sun, which is tremendously hot there, so that it boils and coagulates, and becomes such as we see it. [They then divide it into pieces of four ounces each, and in that form it is exported to our parts.]{4} And I assure you that the heat of the sun is so great there that it is scarcely to be endured; in fact if you put an egg into one of the rivers it will be boiled, before you have had time to go any distance, by the mere heat of the sun!

The merchants from Manzi, and from Arabia, and from the Levant come thither with their ships and their merchandise and make great profits both by what they import and by what they export.

There are in this country many and divers beasts quite different from those of other parts of the world. Thus there are lions black all over, with no mixture of any other colour; and there are parrots of many sorts, for some are white as snow with red beak and feet, and some are red, and some are blue, forming the most charming sight in the world; there are green ones too. There are also some parrots of exceeding small size, beautiful creatures.{5} They have also very beautiful peacocks, larger than ours, and different; and they have cocks and hens quite different from ours; and what more shall I say? In short, everything they have is different from ours, and finer and better. Neither is their fruit like ours, nor their beasts, nor their birds; and this difference all comes of the excessive heat.

Corn they have none but rice. So also their wine they make from [palm-]sugar; capital drink it is, and very speedily it makes a man drunk. All other necessaries of man’s life they have in great plenty and cheapness. They have very good astrologers and physicians. Man and woman, they are all black, and go naked, all save a fine cloth worn about the middle. They look not on any sin of the flesh as a sin. They marry their cousins german, and a man takes his brother’s wife after the brother’s death; and all the people of India have this custom.{6}

There is no more to tell you there; so we will proceed, and I will tell you of another country called Comari.

NOTE 1.—Futile doubts were raised by Baldelli Boni and Hugh Murray as to the position of COILUM, because of Marco’s mentioning it before Comari or Cape Comorin; and they have insisted on finding a Coilum to the east of that promontory. There is, however, in reality, no room for any question on this subject. For ages Coilum, Kaulam, or, as we now write it, Quilon, and properly Kollam, was one of the greatest ports of trade with Western Asia.[1] The earliest mention of it that I can indicate is in a letter written by the Nestorian Patriarch, Jesujabus of Adiabene, who died A.D. 660, to Simon Metropolitan of Fars, blaming his neglect of duty, through which he says, not only is India, “which extends from the coast of the Kingdom of Fars to COLON, a distance of 1200 parasangs, deprived of a regular ministry, but Fars itself is lying in darkness.” (Assem. III. pt. ii. 437.) The same place appears in the earlier part of the Arab Relations (A.D. 851) as Kaulam-Malé, the port of India made by vessels from Maskat, and already frequented by great Chinese Junks.

Abulfeda defines the position of Kaulam as at the extreme end of Balad-ul-Falfal, i.e. the Pepper country or Malabar, as you go eastward, standing on an inlet of the sea, in a sandy plain, adorned with many gardens. The brazil-tree grew there, and the Mahomedans had a fine mosque and square. Ibn Batuta also notices the fine mosque, and says the city was one of the finest in Malabar, with splendid markets and rich merchants, and was the chief resort of the Chinese traders in India. Odoric describes it as “at the extremity of the Pepper Forest towards the south,” and astonishing in the abundance of its merchandise. Friar Jordanus of Séverac was there as a missionary some time previous to 1328, in which year he was at home; [on the 21st of August, 1329, he] was nominated Bishop of the See of Kaulam, Latinised as Columbum or Columbus [created by John XXII. on the 9th of August of the same year—H. C.]. Twenty years later John Marignolli visited “the very noble city of Columbum, where the whole world’s pepper is produced,” and found there a Latin church of St. George, probably founded by Jordanus.[2] Kaulam or Coilon continued to be an important place to the beginning of the 16th century, when Varthema speaks of it as a fine port, and Barbosa as “a very great city,” with a very good haven, and with many great merchants, Moors and Gentoos, whose ships traded to all the Eastern ports as far as Bengal, Pegu, and the Archipelago. But after this its decay must have been rapid, and in the following century it had sunk into entire insignificance. Throughout the Middle Ages it appears to have been one of the chief seats of the St. Thomas Christians. Indeed both it and Káyal were two out of the seven ancient churches which Indo-Syrian tradition ascribed to St. Thomas himself.[3]

I have been desirous to give some illustration of the churches of that interesting body, certain of which must date from a very remote period, but I have found unlooked-for difficulties in procuring such illustration. Several are given in the Life of Dr. Claudius Buchanan from his own sketches, and a few others in the Life of Bishop D. Wilson. But nearly all represent the churches as they were perverted in the 17th century and since, by a coarse imitation of a style of architecture bad enough in its genuine form. I give, after Buchanan, the old church at Parúr, not far from Cranganore, which had escaped masquerade, with one from Bishop Wilson’s Life, showing the quasi-Jesuit deformation alluded to, and an interior also from the latter work, which appears to have some trace of genuine character. Parúr church is probably Pálúr, or Pázhúr, which is one of those ascribed to St. Thomas; for Dr. Buchanan says it bears the name of the Apostle, and “is supposed to be the oldest in Malabar.” (Christ. Res. p. 113.)

[Quilon is “one of the oldest towns on the coast, from whose re-foundation in 1019 A.D., Travancore reckons its era.” (Hunter, Gaz., xi., p. 339.)—H. C.]

How Polo comes to mention Coilum before Comari is a question that will be treated further on, with other misplacements of like kind that occur in succeeding chapters.

Kúblái had a good deal of diplomatic intercourse of his usual kind with Kaulam. De Mailla mentions the arrival at T’swan-chau (or Zayton) in 1282 of envoys from KIULAN, an Indian State, bringing presents of various rarities, including a black ape as big as a man. The Emperor had three times sent thither an officer called Yang Ting-pi (IX. 415). Some rather curious details of these missions are extracted by Pauthier from the Chinese Annals. The royal residence is in these called A-pu-’hota.[4] The king is styled Pinati. I may note that Barbosa also tells us that the King of Kaulam was called Benate-deri (devar?). And Dr. Caldwell’s kindness enables me to explain this title. Pinati or Benate represents Venáḍan, “the Lord of the Venáḍu,” or Venaṭṭu, that being the name of the district to which belonged the family of the old kings of Kollam, and Venáḍan being their regular dynastic name. The Rajas of Travancore who superseded the Kings of Kollam, and inherit their titles, are still poetically styled Venáḍan. (Pauthier, p. 603 seqq.; Ram. I. f. 304.)

NOTE 2.—The brazil-wood of Kaulam appears in the Commercial Handbook of Pegolotti (circa 1340) as Verzino Colombino, and under the same name in that of Giov. d’Uzzano a century later. Pegolotti in one passage details kinds of brazil under the names of Verzino salvatico, dimestico, and columbino. In another passage, where he enters into particulars as to the respective values of different qualities, he names three kinds, as Colomni, Ameri, and Seni, of which the Colomni (or Colombino) was worth a sixth more than the Ameri and three times as much as the Seni. I have already conjectured that Ameri may stand for Lameri referring to Lambri in Sumatra (supra ch. xi., note 1); and perhaps Seni is Sini or Chinese, indicating an article brought to India by the Chinese traders, probably from Siam.

We have seen in the last note that the Kaulam brazil is spoken of by Abulfeda; and Ibn Batuta, in describing his voyage by the back waters from Calicut to Kaulam, says: “All the trees that grow by this river are either cinnamon or brazil trees. They use these for firewood, and we cooked with them throughout our journey.” Friar Odoric makes the same hyperbolic statement: “Here they burn brazil-wood for fuel.”

It has been supposed popularly that the brazil-wood of commerce took its name from the great country so called; but the verzino of the old Italian writers is only a form of the same word, and bresil is in fact the word used by Polo. So Chaucer:—

“Him nedeth not his colour for to dien With brazil, ne with grain of Portingale.” —The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.

The Eastern wood in question is now known in commerce by its Malay name of Sappan (properly Sapang), which again is identical with the Tamil name Sappangi. This word properly means Japan, and seems to have been given to the wood as a supposed product of that region.[5] It is the wood of the Caesalpinia Sapan, and is known in Arabic (and in Hindustani) as Băḳăm. It is a thorny tree, indigenous in Western India from Goa to Trevandrum, and growing luxuriantly in South Malabar. It is extensively used by native dyers, chiefly for common and cheap cloths, and for fine mats. The dye is precipitated dark-brown with iron, and red with alum. It is said, in Western India, to furnish the red powder thrown about on the Hindu feast of the Húli. The tree is both wild and cultivated, and is grown rather extensively by the Mahomedans of Malabar, called Moplahs (Mapillas, see p. 372), whose custom it is to plant a number of seeds at the birth of a daughter. The trees require fourteen or fifteen years to come to maturity, and then become the girl’s dowry.

Though to a great extent superseded by the kindred wood from Pernambuco, the sappan is still a substantial object of importation into England. That American dye-stuff which now bears the name of brazil-wood is believed to be the produce of at least two species of Caesalpinia, but the question seems to partake of the singular obscurity which hangs over the origin of so many useful drugs and dye-stuffs. The variety called Braziletto is from C. bahamensis, a native of the Bahamas.

The name of Brazil has had a curious history. Etymologists refer it to the colour of braise or hot coals, and its first application was to this dye-wood from the far East. Then it was applied to a newly-discovered tract of South America, perhaps because producing a kindred dye-wood in large quantities: finally the original wood is robbed of its name, which is monopolised by that imported from the new country. The Region of Brazil had been originally styled Santa Cruz, and De Barros attributes the change of name to the suggestion of the Evil One, “as if the name of a wood for colouring cloth were of more moment than that of the Wood which imbues the Sacraments with the tincture of Salvation.”

There may perhaps be a doubt if the Land of Brazil derived its name from the dye-wood. For the Isle of Brazil, long before the discovery of America, was a name applied to an imaginary Island in the Atlantic. This island appears in the map of Andrea Bianco and in many others, down at least to Coronelli’s splendid Venetian Atlas (1696); the Irish used to fancy that they could see it from the Isles of Arran; and the legend of this Island of Brazil still persisted among sailors in the last century.[6] The story was no doubt the same as that of the green Island, or Island of Youth, which Mr. Campbell tells us the Hebrideans see to the west of their own Islands. (See Pop. Tales of West Highlands, IV. 163. For previous references, Della Decima, III. 298, 361; IV. 60; I. B. IV. 99; Cathay, p. 77; Note by Dr. H. Gleghorn; Marsh’s ed. of Wedgwood’s Etym. Dict. I. 123; Southey, H. of Brazil, I. 22.)

NOTE 3.—This is the Colombine ginger which appears not unfrequently in mediæval writings. Pegolotti tells us that “ginger is of several sorts, to wit, Belledi, Colombino, and Mecchino. And these names are bestowed from the producing countries, at least this is the case with the Colombino and Mecchino, for the Belledi is produced in many districts of India. The Colombino grows in the Island of Colombo of India, and has a smooth, delicate, ash-coloured rind; whilst the Mecchino comes from the districts about Mecca and is a small kind, hard to cut,” etc. (Della Dec. III. 359.) A century later, in G. da Uzzano, we still find the Colombino and Belladi ginger (IV. 111, 210, etc.). The Baladi is also mentioned by Rashiduddin as an export of Guzerat, and by Barbosa and others as one of Calicut in the beginning of the 16th century. The Mecchino too is mentioned again in that era by a Venetian traveller as grown in the Island of Camran in the Red Sea. Both Columbine (gigembre columbin) and Baladi ginger (gig. baladit) appear among the purchases for King John of France, during his captivity in England. And we gather from his accounts that the price of the former was 13_d._ a pound, and of the latter 12_d._, sums representing three times the amount of silver that they now indicate, with a higher value of silver also, and hence equivalent to about 4_s._ and 4_s._ 4_d._ a pound. The term Baladi (Ar.), Indigenous or “Country” ginger, indicated ordinary qualities of no particular repute. The word Baladi seems to have become naturalised in Spanish with the meaning “of small value.” We have noticed on a former occasion the decay of the demand for pepper in China. Ginger affords a similar example. This spice, so highly prized and so well known throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, I have found to be quite unknown by name and qualities to servants in Palermo of more than average intelligence. (Elliot, I. 67; Ramusio, I. f. 275, v. 323; Dozy and Engelm. pp. 232–233; Douet d’Arcq, p. 218; Philobiblon Soc. Miscellanies, vol. ii. p. 116.)

NOTE 4.—In Bengal Indigo factories artificial heat is employed to promote the drying of the precipitated dye; but this is not essential to the manufacture. Marco’s account, though grotesque in its baldness, does describe the chief features of the manufacture of Indigo by fermentation. The branches are cut and placed stem upwards in the vat till it is three parts full; they are loaded, and then the vat is filled with water. Fermentation soon begins and goes on till in 24 hours the contents of the vat are so hot that the hand cannot be retained in it. This is what Marco ascribes to the sun’s heat. The liquor is then drawn off to another cistern and there agitated; the indigo separates in flakes. A quantity of lime-water then is added, and the blue is allowed to subside. The clear water is drawn off; the sediment is drained, pressed, and cut into small squares, etc. (See Madras Journal, vol. viii. 198.)

Indigo had been introduced into Sicily by the Jews during the time of Frederick II., in the early part of Polo’s century. Jews and Indigo have long vanished from Sicily. The dye is often mentioned in Pegolotti’s Book; the finest quality being termed Indaco Baccadeo, a corruption of Bághdádi. Probably it came from India by way of Baghdad. In the Barcelona Tariffs it appears as Indigo de Bagadel. Another quality often mentioned is Indigo di Golfo. (See Capmany, Memorias, II. App. p. 73.) In the bye-laws of the London Painters’ Guild of the 13th century, quoted by Sir F. Palgrave from the Liber Horne, it is forbidden to paint on gold or silver except with fine (mineral) colours, “e nient de brasil, ne de inde de Baldas, ne de nul autre mauveise couleur.” (The Merchant and the Friar, p. xxiii.) There is now no indigo made or exported at Quilon, but there is still some feeble export of sappanwood, ginger, and pepper. These, and previous particulars as to the present Quilon, I owe to the kindness of Mr. Ballard, British Resident at Trevandrum.

NOTE 5.—Black Tigers and black Leopards are not very rare in Travancore (See Welsh’s Mil. Reminiscences, II. 102.)

NOTE 6.—Probably founded on local or caste customs of marriage, several of which in South India are very peculiar; e.g., see Nelson’s Madura, Pt. II. p. 51.

---------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] The etymology of the name seems to be doubtful. Dr. Caldwell tells me it is an error to connect it (as in the first edition) with the word for a Tank, which is Kuḷam. The apparent meaning of Kollam is “slaughter,” but he thinks the name is best explained as “Palace” or “Royal Residence.”

[2] There is still a Syrian church of St. George at Quilon, and a mosque of some importance;—the representatives at least of those noted above, though no actual trace of antiquity of any kind remains at the place. A vague tradition of extensive trade with China yet survives. The form Columbum is accounted for by an inscription, published by the Prince of Travancore (_Ind. Antiq._ II. 360), which shows that the city was called in Sanskrit Kolamba. May not the real etymology be Sansk. Kolam, “Black Pepper”?

On the suggestion ventured in this note Dr. Caldwell writes:

“I fancy Kôla, a name for pepper in Sanskrit, may be derived from the name of the country Kôlam, North Malabar, which is much more celebrated for its pepper than the country around Quilon. This Kôlam, though resembling Kollam, is really a separate word, and never confounded with the latter by the natives. The prince of Kôlam (North Malabar) is called Kolastri or Kolattiri[A]. Compare also Kôlagiri, the name of a hill in the Sanskrit dictionaries, called also the Kôlla giri. The only possible derivations for the Tamil and Malayalim name of Quilon that I am acquainted with are these: (1.) From Kolu, the ‘Royal Presence’ or presence-chamber, or hall of audience. Kollam might naturally be a derivation of this word; and in confirmation I find that other residences of Malabar kings were also called Kollam, e.g. Kodungalur or Cranganore. (2.) From Kolu, the same word, but with the meaning ‘a height’ or ‘high-ground.’ Hence Kollei, a very common word in Tamil for a ‘dry grain field, a back-yard.’ Kolli is also, in the Tamil poets, said to be the name of a hill in the Chera country, i.e. the Malabar coast. Kôlam in Tamil has not the meaning of pepper; it means ‘beauty,’ and it is said also to mean the fruit of the jujuba. (3.) It might possibly be derived from Kol, to slay;—Kollam, slaughter, or a place where some slaughter happened ... in the absence, however, of any tradition to this effect, this derivation seems improbable.”

[3] Burnell.

[4] The translated passage about ’Apuhota is a little obscure. The name looks like Kapukada, which was the site of a palace north of Calicut (not in Kaulam), the Capucate of the Portuguese.

[5] Dr. Caldwell.Return to passage

[6] Indeed, Humboldt speaks of Brazil Isle as appearing to the west of Ireland in a modern English map—Purdy’s; but I do not know its date. (See Examen, etc., II. 244–245.)Return to passage

---------------------------------------------------------------------- [A] see II. 387.

XXIII. OF THE COUNTRY CALLED COMARI

Comari is a country belonging to India, and there you can see something of the North Star, which we had not been able to see from the Lesser Java thus far. In order to see it you must go some 30 miles out to sea, and then you see it about a cubit above the water.{1}

This is a very wild country, and there are beasts of all kinds there, especially monkeys of such peculiar fashion that you would take them for men! There are also gatpauls{2} in wonderful diversity, with bears, lions, and leopards, in abundance.

NOTE 1.—Kumári is in some versions of the Hindu cosmography the most southerly of the nine divisions of Jambodvipa, the Indian world. Polo’s Comari can only be the country about Cape COMORIN, the κομάρια ἄκρον of Ptolemy, a name derived from the Sanskrit Kumári, “a Virgin,” an appellation of the goddess Durgá. The monthly bathing in her honour, spoken of by the author of the Periplus, is still continued, though now the pilgrims are few. Abulfeda speaks of Rás Kumhări as the limit between Malabar and Ma’bar. Kumări is the Tamul pronunciation of the Sanskrit word and probably Comări was Polo’s pronunciation.

At the beginning of the Portuguese era in India we hear of a small Kingdom of COMORI, the prince of which had succeeded to the kingdom of Kaulam. And this, as Dr. Caldwell points out, must have been the state which is now called Travancore. Kumari has been confounded by some of the Arabian Geographers, or their modern commentators, with Kumár, one of the regions supplying aloes-wood, and which was apparently Khmer or Kamboja. (Caldwell’s Drav. Grammar, p. 67; Gildem. 185; Ram. I. 333.)

The cut that we give is, as far as I know, the first genuine view of Cape Comorin ever published.

[Mr. Talboys Wheeler, in his History of India, vol. iii. (p. 386), says of this tract:

“The region derives its name from a temple which was erected there in honour of Kumárí, ‘the Virgin’; the infant babe who had been exchanged for Krishna, and ascended to heaven at the approach of Kansa.” And in a note:

“Colonel Yule identifies Kumárí with Durgá. This is an error. The temple of Kumárí was erected by Krishna Raja of Narsinga, a zealous patron of the Vaishnavas.”

Mr. Wheeler quotes Faria y Souza, who refers the object of worship to what is meant for this story (II. 394), but I presume from Mr. Wheeler’s mention of the builder of the temple, which does not occur in the Portuguese history, that he has other information. The application of the Virgin title connected with the name of the place, may probably have varied with the ages, and, as there is no time to obtain other evidence, I have removed the words which identified the existing temple with that of Durgá. But my authority for identifying the object of worship, in whose honour the pilgrims bathe monthly at Cape Comorin, with Durgá, is the excellent one of Dr. Caldwell. (See his Dravidian Grammar as quoted in the passage above.) Krishna Raja of whom Mr. Wheeler speaks, reigned after the Portuguese were established in India, but it is not probable that the Krishna stories of that class were even known in the Peninsula (or perhaps anywhere else) in the time of the author of the Periplus, 1450 years before; and ’tis as little likely that the locality owed its name to Yasoda’s Infant, as that it owed it to the Madonna in St. Francis Xavier’s Church that overlooks the Cape.

Fra Paolino, in his unsatisfactory way (Viaggio, p. 68), speaks of Cape Comorin, “which the Indians call Canyamuri, Virginis Promontorium, or simply Comarí or Cumarí ‘a Virgin,’ because they pretend that anciently the goddess Comari ‘the Damsel,’ who is the Indian Diana or Hecate, used to bathe” etc. However, we can discover from his book elsewhere (see pp. 79, 285) that by the Indian Diana he means Párvatí, i.e. Durgá.

Lassen at first[1] identified the Kumárí of the Cape with Párvatí; but afterwards connected the name with a story in the Mahábhárata about certain Apsarases changed into Crocodiles.[2] On the whole there does not seem sufficient ground to deny that Párvatí was the original object of worship at Kumárí, though the name may have lent itself to various legends.]

NOTE 2.—I have not been able to ascertain with any precision what animal is meant by Gat-paul. The term occurs again, coupled with monkeys as here, at p. 240 of the Geog. Text, where, speaking of Abyssinia, it is said: “Il ont gat paulz et autre gat-maimon si divisez,” etc. Gatto maimone, for an ape of some kind, is common in old Italian, the latter part of the term, from the Pers. Maimún, being possibly connected with our Baboon. And that the Gat-paul was also some kind of ape is confirmed by the Spanish Dictionaries. Cobarrubias gives: “Gato-Paus, a kind of tailed monkey. Gato-paus, Gato pablo; perhaps as they call a monkey ‘Martha,’ they may have called this particular monkey ‘Paul,’” etc. (f. 431 v.). So also the Diccion. de la Lengua Castellana comp. por la Real Academia (1783) gives: “Gato Paul, a kind of monkey of a grey colour, black muzzle and very broad tail.” In fact, the word is used by Columbus, who, in his own account of his third voyage, describes a hill on the coast of Paria as covered with a species of Gatos Paulos. (See Navarrete, Fr. ed. III. 21, also 147–148.) It also occurs in Marmol, Desc. General de Affrica, who says that one kind of monkeys has a black face; “y estas comunemente se llaman en España Gatos Paules, las quales se crian en la tierra de los Negros” (I. f. 27). It is worth noting that the revisers of the text adopted by Pauthier have not understood the word. For they substitute for the “Il hi a gat paul si divisez qe ce estoit mervoille” of the Geog. Text, “et si a moult de granz paluz et moult grans pantains à merveilles”—wonderful swamps and marshes! The Pipino Latin has adhered to the correct reading—“Ibi sunt cati qui dicuntur pauli, valde diversi ab aliis.”

---------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Ind. Alt. 1st ed. I. 158.

[2] Id. 564; and 2nd ed. I. 103.Return to passage

XXIV. CONCERNING THE KINGDOM OF ELI

Eli is a kingdom towards the west, about 300 miles from Comari. The people are Idolaters and have a king, and are tributary to nobody; and have a peculiar language. We will tell you particulars about their manners and their products, and you will better understand things now because we are drawing near to places that are not so outlandish.{1}

There is no proper harbour in the country, but there are many great rivers with good estuaries, wide and deep.{2} Pepper and ginger grow there, and other spices in quantities.{3} The King is rich in treasure, but not very strong in forces. The approach to his kingdom however is so strong by nature that no one can attack him, so he is afraid of nobody.

And you must know that if any ship enters their estuary and anchors there, having been bound for some other port, they seize her and plunder the cargo. For they say, “You were bound for somewhere else, and ’tis God has sent you hither to us, so we have a right to all your goods.” And they think it no sin to act thus. And this naughty custom prevails all over these provinces of India, to wit, that if a ship be driven by stress of weather into some other port than that to which it was bound, it is sure to be plundered. But if a ship come bound originally to the place they receive it with all honour and give it due protection.{4} The ships of Manzi and other countries that come hither in summer lay in their cargoes in 6 or 8 days and depart as fast as possible, because there is no harbour other than the river-mouth, a mere roadstead and sandbanks, so that it is perilous to tarry there. The ships of Manzi indeed are not so much afraid of these roadsteads as others are, because they have such huge wooden anchors which hold in all weather.{5}

There are many lions and other wild beasts here and plenty of game, both beast and bird.

NOTE 1.—No city or district is now known by the name of ELY, but the name survives in that of Mount Dely, properly Monte d’ELY, the Yeli-mala of the Malabar people, and called also in the legends of the coast Sapta-shaila, or the Seven Hills. This is the only spur of the Gháts that reaches the sea within the Madras territory. It is an isolated and very conspicuous hill, or cluster of hills, forming a promontory some 16 miles north of Cananore, the first Indian land seen by Vasco da Gama, on that memorable August morning in 1498, and formerly very well known to navigators, though it has been allowed to drop out of some of our most ambitious modern maps. Abulfeda describes it as “a great mountain projecting into the sea, and descried from a great distance, called Ras Haili”; and it appears in Fra Mauro’s map as Cavo de Eli.

Rashiduddin mentions “the country of Hili,” between Manjarúr (Mangalore) and Fandaraina (miswritten in Elliot’s copy Sadarsa). Ibn Batuta speaks of Hili, which he reached on leaving Manjarúr, as “a great and well-built city, situated on a large estuary accessible to great ships. The vessels of China come hither; this, Kaulam, and Kalikut, are the only ports that they enter.” From Hili he proceeds 12 miles further down the coast to Jor-fattan, which probably corresponds to Baliapatan. ELLY appears in the Carta Catalana, and is marked as a Christian city. Nicolo Conti is the last to speak distinctly of the city. Sailing from Cambay, in 20 days he arrived at two cities on the sea-shore, Pacamuria (Faknúr, of Rashid and Firishta, Baccanor of old books, and now Bárkúr, the Malayálim Vákkanúr) and HELLI. But we read that in 1527 Simon de Melo was sent to burn ships in the River of Marabia and at Monte d’Elli.[1] When Da Gama on his second voyage was on his way from Baticala (in Canara) to Cananor, a squall having sprung his mainmast just before reaching Mt. d’Ely, “the captain-major anchored in the Bay of Marabia, because he saw there several Moorish ships, in order to get a mast from them.” It seems clear that this was the bay just behind Mt. d’Ely.

Indeed the name of Marabia or Máráwí is still preserved in Mádávi or Mádái, corruptly termed Maudoy in some of our maps, a township upon the river which enters the bay about 7 or 8 miles south-east of Mt. d’Ely, and which is called by De Barros the Rio Marabia. Mr. Ballard informs me that he never heard of ruins of importance at Madai, but there is a place on the river just mentioned, and within the Madai township, called Payangádi (“Old Town”), which has the remains of an old fort of the Kolastri (or Kolatiri) Rajas. A palace at Madai (perhaps this fort) is alluded to by Dr. Gundert in the Madras Journal, and a Buddhist Vihara is spoken of in an old Malayalim poem as having existed at the same place. The same paper speaks of “the famous emporium of Cachilpatnam near Mt. d’Ely,” which may have been our city of Hili, as the cities Hili and Marawi were apparently separate though near.[2]

The state of Hílí-Máráwi is also mentioned in the Arabic work on the early history of the Mahomedans in Malabar, called Tuhfat-al-Mujáhidín, and translated by Rowlandson; and as the Prince is there called Kolturee, this would seem to identify him either in family or person with the Raja of Cananor, for that old dynasty always bore the name of Kolatiri.[3]

The Ramusian version of Barbosa is very defective here, but in Stanley’s version (Hak. Soc. East African and Malabar Coasts, p. 149) we find the topography in a passage from a Munich MS. clear enough: “After passing this place” (the river of Nirapura or Nileshwaram) “along the coast is the mountain Dely (of Ely) on the edge of the sea; it is a round mountain, very lofty, in the midst of low land; all the ships of the Moors and Gentiles that navigate in this sea of India sight this mountain when coming from without, and make their reckoning by it; ... after this, at the foot of the mountain to the south, is a town called Marave, very ancient and well off, in which live Moors and Gentiles and Jews; these Jews are of the language of the country; it is a long time that they have dwelt in this place.”

(Stanley’s Correa, Hak. Soc. pp. 145, 312–313; Gildem. p. 185; Elliot, I. 68; I. B. IV. 81; Conti, p. 6; Madras Journal, XIII. No. 31, pp. 14, 99, 102, 104; De Barros, III. 9, cap. 6, and IV. 2, cap. 13; De Couto, IV. 5, cap. 4.)

NOTE 2.—This is from Pauthier’s text, and the map with ch. xxi. illustrates the fact of the many wide rivers. The G. T. has “a good river with a very good estuary” or mouth. The latter word is in the G. T. faces, afterwards more correctly foces, equivalent to fauces. We have seen that Ibn Batuta also speaks of the estuary or inlet at Hili. It may have been either that immediately east of Mount d’Ely, communicating with Kavváyi and the Nileshwaram River, or the Madai River. Neither could be entered by vessels now, but there have been great littoral changes. The land joining Mt. d’Ely to the main is mere alluvium.

NOTE 3.—Barbosa says that throughout the kingdom of Cananor the pepper was of excellent quality, though not in great quantity. There was much ginger, not first-rate, which was called Hely from its growing about Mount d’Ely, with cardamoms (names of which, Elá in Sanskrit, Hel in Persian, I have thought might be connected with that of the hill), mirobolans, cassia fistula, zerumbet, and zedoary. The two last items are two species of curcuma, formerly in much demand as aromatics; the last is, I believe, the setewale of Chaucer:—

“There was eke wexing many a spice, As clowe gilofre and Licorice, Ginger and grein de Paradis, Canell and setewale of pris, And many a spice delitable To eaten when men rise from table.”—R. of the Rose.

The Hely ginger is also mentioned by Conti.

NOTE 4.—This piratical practice is noted by Abdurrazzák also: “In other parts (than Calicut) a strange practice is adopted. When a vessel sets sail for a certain point, and suddenly is driven by a decree of Divine Providence into another roadstead, the inhabitants, under the pretext that the wind has driven it thither, plunder the ship. But at Calicut every ship, whatever place it comes from, or wherever it may be bound, when it puts into this port, is treated like other vessels, and has no trouble of any kind to put up with” (p. 14). In 1673 Sivaji replied to the pleadings of an English embassy, that it was “against the Laws of Conchon” (Ptolemy’s Pirate Coast!) “to restore any ships or goods that were driven ashore.” (Fryer, p. 261.)

NOTE 5.—With regard to the anchors, Pauthier’s text has just the opposite of the G. T. which we have preferred: “Les nefs du Manzi portent si grans ancres de fust, que il seuffrent moult de grans fortunes aus plajes.” De Mailla says the Chinese consider their ironwood anchors to be much better than those of iron, because the latter are subject to strain. (Lett. Edif. XIV. 10.) Capt. Owen has a good word for wooden anchors. (Narr. of Voyages, etc., I. 385.)

---------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] The Town of Monte d’Ely appears (Monte Dil) in Coronelli’s Atlas (1690) from some older source. Mr. Burnell thinks Baliapatan (properly Vaḷarpaṭṭanam) which is still a prosperous Máppila town, on a broad and deep river, must be Hili. I see a little difficulty in this. [Marabia at Monte Dely is often mentioned in Correa, as one of the ports of the Kingdom of Cananor.]

[2] Mr. Burnell thinks _Kachchil_paṭṭanam must be an error (easy in Malayálim) for _Kavvil_paṭṭanam, i.e. Kavváyi (Kanwai in our map).Return to passage

[3] As printed by Rowlandson, the name is corrupt (like many others in the book), being given as Hubaee Murawee. But suspecting what this pointed to, I examined the MS. in the R. A. Society’s Library. The knowledge of the Arabic character was quite sufficient to enable me to trace the name as هيلي ماراوي, Hílí Máráwi. (See Rowlandson, pp. 54, 58–59, and MS. pp. 23 and 26; also Indian Antiquary, III. p. 213.)Return to passage

XXV. CONCERNING THE KINGDOM OF MELIBAR

Melibar is a great kingdom lying towards the west. The people are Idolaters; they have a language of their own, and a king of their own, and pay tribute to nobody.{1}

In this country you see more of the North Star, for it shows two cubits above the water. And you must know that from this kingdom of Melibar, and from another near it called Gozurat, there go forth every year more than a hundred corsair vessels on cruize. These pirates take with them their wives and children, and stay out the whole summer. Their method is to join in fleets of 20 or 30 of these pirate vessels together, and then they form what they call a sea cordon,{2} that is, they drop off till there is an interval of 5 or 6 miles between ship and ship, so that they cover something like an hundred miles of sea, and no merchant ship can escape them. For when any one corsair sights a vessel a signal is made by fire or smoke, and then the whole of them make for this, and seize the merchants and plunder them. After they have plundered them they let them go, saying: “Go along with you and get more gain, and that mayhap will fall to us also!” But now the merchants are aware of this, and go so well manned and armed, and with such great ships, that they don’t fear the corsairs. Still mishaps do befall them at times.{3}

There is in this kingdom a great quantity of pepper, and ginger, and cinnamon, and turbit, and of nuts of India.{4} They also manufacture very delicate and beautiful buckrams. The ships that come from the east bring copper in ballast. They also bring hither cloths of silk and gold, and sendels; also gold and silver, cloves and spikenard, and other fine spices for which there is a demand here, and exchange them for the products of these countries.

Ships come hither from many quarters, but especially from the great province of Manzi.{5} Coarse spices are exported hence both to Manzi and to the west, and that which is carried by the merchants to Aden goes on to Alexandria, but the ships that go in the latter direction are not one to ten of those that go to the eastward; a very notable fact that I have mentioned before.

Now I have told you about the kingdom of Melibar; we shall now proceed and tell you of the kingdom of Gozurat. And you must understand that in speaking of these kingdoms we note only the capitals; there are great numbers of other cities and towns of which we shall say nothing, because it would make too long a story to speak of all.

NOTE 1.—Here is another instance of that confusion which dislocates Polo’s descriptions of the Indian coast; we shall recur to it under ch. xxx.

Malabar is a name given by the Arabs, and varies in its form: Ibn Batuta and Kazwini write it المليبار, al-Malíbár, Edrisi and Abulfeda المنيبار, al-Maníbár, etc., and like variations occur among the old European travellers. The country so-called corresponded to the Kerala of the Brahmans, which in its very widest sense extended from about lat. 15° to Cape Comorin. This, too, seems to be the extension which Abulfeda gives to Malabar, viz., from Hunáwar to Kumhári; Rashiduddin includes Sindábúr, i.e. Goa. But at a later date a point between Mt. d’Ely and Mangalore on the north, and Kaulam on the south, were the limits usually assigned to Malabar.

NOTE 2.—“Il font eschiel en la mer” (G. T.). Eschiel is the equivalent of the Italian schera or schiera, a troop or squadron, and thence applied to order of battle, whether by land or sea.

NOTE 3.—The northern part of Malabar, Canara, and the Konkan, have been nests of pirates from the time of the ancients to a very recent date. Padre Paolino specifies the vicinity of Mt. d’Ely as a special haunt of them in his day, the latter half of last century. Somewhat further north Ibn Batuta fell into their hands, and was stripped to his drawers.

NOTE 4.—There is something to be said about these Malabar spices. The cinnamon of Malabar is what we call cassia, the canella grossa of Conti, the canela brava of the Portuguese. Notices of it will be found in Rheede (I. 107) and in Garcia (f. 26 seqq.). The latter says the Ceylon cinnamon exceeded it in value as 4:1. Uzzano discriminates canella lunga, Salami, and Mabari. The Salami, I have no doubt, is Sailani, Ceylonese; and as we do not hear of any cassia from Mabar, probably the last was Malabar cinnamon.

Turbit: Radex Turpethi is still known in pharmacy, at least in some parts of the Continent and in India, though in England obsolete. It is mentioned in the Pharmacopœia of India (1868) as derived from Ipomœa Turpethum.

But it is worthy of note that Ramusio has cubebs instead of turbit. The former does not seem now to be a product of Western India, though Garcia says that a small quantity grew there, and a Dutch report of 1675 in Valentyn also mentions it as an export of Malabar. (V., Ceylon, p. 243.) There is some ambiguity in statements about it, because its popular name Kábab-chíní seems to be also applied to the cassia bud. Cubeb pepper was much used in the Middle Ages as a spice, and imported into Europe as such. But the importation had long practically ceased, when its medical uses became known during the British occupation of Java, and the demand was renewed.

Budaeus and Salmasius have identified this drug with the κώμακον, which Theophrastus joins with cinnamomum and cassia as an ingredient in aromatic confections. The inducement to this identification was no doubt the singular resemblance which the word bears to the Javanese name of cubeb pepper, viz., Kumukus. If the foundation were a little firmer this would be curious evidence of intercourse and trade with Java in a time earlier than that of Theophrastus, viz., the 4th century B.C.

In the detail of 3 cargoes from Malabar that arrived at Lisbon in September 1504 we find the following proportions: Pepper, 10,000 cantars; cinnamon, 500; cloves, 450; zz. (i.e. zenzaro, ginger), 130; lac and brazil, 750; camphor, 7; cubebs, 191; mace, 2½; spikenard, 3; lign-aloes, 1⅓.

(Buchanan’s Mysore, II. 31, III. 193, and App. p. v.; Garcia, Ital. version, 1576, f. 39–40; Salmas. Exerc. Plin. p. 923; Bud. on Theoph. 1004 and 1010; Archiv. St. Ital., Append. II. p. 19.)

NOTE 5.—We see that Marco speaks of the merchants and ships of Manzi, or Southern China, as frequenting Kaulam, Hili, and now Malabar, of which Calicut was the chief port. This quite coincides with Ibn Batuta, who says those were the three ports of India which the Chinese junks frequented, adding Fandaraina (i.e. Pandarani, or Pantaláni, 16 miles north of Calicut), as a port where they used to moor for the winter when they spent that season in India. By the winter he means the rainy season, as Portuguese writers on India do by the same expression (IV. 81, 88, 96). I have been unable to find anything definite as to the date of the cessation of this Chinese navigation to Malabar, but I believe it may be placed about the beginning of the 15th century. The most distinct allusion to it that I am aware of is in the information of Joseph of Cranganore, in the Novus Orbis (Ed. of 1555, p. 208). He says: “These people of Cathay are men of remarkable energy, and formerly drove a first-rate trade at the city of Calicut. But the King of Calicut having treated them badly, they quitted that city, and returning shortly after inflicted no small slaughter on the people of Calicut, and after that returned no more. After that they began to frequent Mailapetam, a city subject to the king of Narsingha; a region towards the East, ... and there they now drive their trade.” There is also in Gaspar Correa’s account of the Voyages of Da Gama a curious record of a tradition of the arrival in Malabar more than four centuries before of a vast merchant fleet “from the parts of Malacca, and China, and the Lequeos” (Lewchew); many from the company on board had settled in the country and left descendants. In the space of a hundred years none of these remained; but their sumptuous idol temples were still to be seen. (Stanley’s Transl., Hak. Soc., p. 147.)[1] It is probable that both these stories must be referred to those extensive expeditions to the western countries with the object of restoring Chinese influence which were despatched by the Ming Emperor Ch’êng-Tsu (or Yung-lo), about 1406, and one of which seems actually to have brought Ceylon under a partial subjection to China, which endured half a century. (See Tennent, I. 623 seqq.; and Letter of P. Gaubil in J. A. sér. II. tom. x. pp. 327–328.) [“So that at this day there is great memory of them in the ilands Philippinas, and on the cost of Coromande, which is the cost against the kingdome of Norsinga towards the sea of Cengala: whereas is a towne called unto this day the soile of the Chinos, for that they did reedifie and make the same. The like notice and memory is there in the kingdom of Calicut, whereas be many trees and fruits, that the naturals of that countrie do say, were brought thither by the Chinos, when that they were lords and gouernours of that countrie.” (Mendoza, Parke’s transl. p. 71.)] De Barros says that the famous city of Diu was built by one of the Kings of Guzerat whom he calls in one place Dariar Khan, and in another Peruxiah, in memory of victory in a sea-fight with the Chinese who then frequented the Indian shores. It is difficult to identify this King, though he is represented as the father of the famous toxicophagous Sultan Mahmúd Begara (1459–1511). De Barros has many other allusions to Chinese settlements and conquests in India which it is not very easy to account for. Whatever basis of facts there is must probably refer to the expeditions of Ch’êng-Tsu, but not a little probably grew out of the confusion of Jainas and Chinas already alluded to; and to this I incline to refer Correa’s “sumptuous idol-temples.”

There must have been some revival of Chinese trade in the last century, if P. Paolino is correct in speaking of Chinese vessels frequenting Travancore ports for pepper. (De Barros, Dec. II. Liv. ii. cap. 9, and Dec. IV. Liv. v. cap. 3; Paolino, p. 74.)

---------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] It appears from a paper in the Mackenzie MSS. that down to Colonel Mackenzie’s time there was a tribe in Calicut whose ancestors were believed to have been Chinese. (See Taylor’s Catal. Raisonné, III. 664.) And there is a notable passage in Abdurrazzák which says the seafaring population of Calicut were nicknamed Chíní bachagán, “China boys.” (India in XVth Cent. p. 19.)

XXVI. CONCERNING THE KINGDOM OF GOZURAT

Gozurat is a great kingdom. The people are Idolaters and have a peculiar language, and a king of their own, and are tributary to no one. It lies towards the west, and the North Star is here still more conspicuous, showing itself at an altitude of about 6 cubits.{1}

The people are the most desperate pirates in existence, and one of their atrocious practices is this. When they have taken a merchant-vessel they force the merchants to swallow a stuff called Tamarindi mixed in sea-water, which produces a violent purging.{2} This is done in case the merchants, on seeing their danger, should have swallowed their most valuable stones and pearls. And in this way the pirates secure the whole.

In this province of Gozurat there grows much pepper, and ginger, and indigo. They have also a great deal of cotton. Their cotton trees are of very great size, growing full six paces high, and attaining to an age of 20 years. It is to be observed however that, when the trees are so old as that, the cotton is not good to spin, but only to quilt or stuff beds withal. Up to the age of 12 years indeed the trees give good spinning cotton, but from that age to 20 years the produce is inferior.{3}

They dress in this country great numbers of skins of various kinds, goat-skins, ox-skins, buffalo and wild ox-skins, as well as those of unicorns and other animals. In fact so many are dressed every year as to load a number of ships for Arabia and other quarters. They also work here beautiful mats in red and blue leather, exquisitely inlaid with figures of birds and beasts, and skilfully embroidered with gold and silver wire. These are marvellously beautiful things; they are used by the Saracens to sleep upon, and capital they are for that purpose. They also work cushions embroidered with gold, so fine that they are worth six marks of silver a piece, whilst some of those sleeping-mats are worth ten marks.{4}

NOTE 1.—Again we note the topographical confusion. Guzerat is mentioned as if it were a province adjoining Malabar, and before arriving at Tana, Cambay, and Somnath; though in fact it includes those three cities, and Cambay was then its great mart. Wassáf, Polo’s contemporary, perhaps acquaintance, speaks of Gujarat which is commonly called Kambáyat. (Elliot, III. 31.)

NOTE 2.—[“The origin of the name [Tamarina] is curious. It is Ar. tamar-u’l-Hind, ‘date of India,’ or perhaps rather, in Persian form, tamar-i-Hindī. It is possible that the original name may have been thamar, (‘fruit’) of India, rather than tamar, (‘date’).” (Hobson-Jobson.)]

NOTE 3.—The notice of pepper here is hard to explain. But Hiuen Tsang also speaks of Indian pepper and incense (see next chapter) as grown at ’Ochali which seems to be some place on the northern border of Guzerat (II. 161).

Marsden, in regard to the cotton, supposes here some confused introduction of the silk-cotton tree (Bombax or Salmalia, the Semal of Hindustan), but the description would be entirely inapplicable to that great forest tree. It is remarkable that nearly the same statement with regard to Guzerat occurs in Rashiduddin’s sketch of India, as translated in Sir H. Elliot’s History of India (ed. by Professor Dowson, I. 67): “Grapes are produced twice during the year, and the strength of the soil is such that cotton-plants grow like willows and plane-trees, and yield produce ten years running.” An author of later date, from whom extracts are given in the same work, viz., Mahommed Masúm in his History of Sind, describing the wonders of Síwí, says: “In Korzamin and Chhatur, which are districts of Siwi, cotton-plants grow as large as trees, insomuch that men pick the cotton mounted” (p. 237).

These would appear to have been plants of the species of true cotton called by Royle Gossipium arboreum, and sometimes termed G. religiosum, from its being often grown in South India near temples or abodes of devotees; though the latter name has been applied also to the nankeen cotton. That of which we speak is, however, according to Dr. Cleghorn, termed in Mysore Deo kapás, of which G. religiosum would be a proper translation. It is grown in various parts of India, but generally rather for ornament than use. It is stated, however, to be specially used for the manufacture of turbans, and for the Brahmanical thread, and probably afforded the groundwork of the story told by Philostratus of the wild cotton which was used only for the sacred vestments of the Brahmans, and refused to lend itself to other uses. One of Royle’s authorities (Mr. Vaupell) mentions that it was grown near large towns of Eastern Guzerat, and its wool regarded as the finest of any, and only used in delicate muslins. Tod speaks of it in Bikanír, and this kind of cotton appears to be grown also in China, as we gather from a passage in Amyot’s Mémoires (II. 606), which speaks of the “Cotonniers arbres, qui ne devoient être fertiles qu’après un bon nombre d’années.”

The height appears to have been a difficulty with Marsden, who refers to the G. arboreum, but does not admit that it could be intended. Yet I see in the English Cyclopædia that to this species is assigned a height of 15 to 20 feet. Polo’s six paces therefore, even if it means 30 feet as I think, is not a great exaggeration. (Royle, Cult. of Cotton, 144, 145, 152; Eng. Cycl. art. Gossypium.)

NOTE 4.—Embroidered and Inlaid leather-work for bed-covers, palankin mats and the like, is still a great manufacture in Rajkot and other places of Kattiawár in Peninsular Guzerat, as well as in the adjoining region of Sind. (Note from Sir Bartle Frere.) The embroidery of Guzerat is highly commended by Barbosa, Linschoten, and A. Hamilton.

The G. T. adds at the end of this passage: “E qe voz en diroi? Sachíés tout voiremant qe en ceste reingne se labore roiaus dereusse de cuir et plus sotilment que ne fait en tout lo monde, e celz qe sunt de greingnors vailance.”

The two words in Roman type I cannot explain; qu. royaux devises?

XXVII. CONCERNING THE KINGDOM OF TANA

Tana is a great kingdom lying towards the west, a kingdom great both in size and worth. The people are Idolaters, with a language of their own, and a king of their own, and tributary to nobody.{1} No pepper grows there, nor other spices, but plenty of incense; not the white kind however, but brown.{2}

There is much traffic here, and many ships and merchants frequent the place; for there is a great export of leather of various excellent kinds, and also of good buckram and cotton. The merchants in their ships also import various articles, such as gold, silver, copper, and other things in demand.

With the King’s connivance many corsairs launch from this port to plunder merchants. These corsairs have a covenant with the King that he shall get all the horses they capture, and all other plunder shall remain with them. The King does this because he has no horses of his own, whilst many are shipped from abroad towards India; for no ship ever goes thither without horses in addition to other cargo. The practice is naughty and unworthy of a king.

NOTE 1.—The town of THÁNA, on the landward side of the island of Salsette, still exists, about 20 miles from Bombay. The Great Peninsular Railroad here crosses the strait which separates Salsette from the Continent.

The Konkan is no doubt what was intended by the kingdom of Thána. Albiruni speaks of that city as the capital of Konkan; Rashiduddin calls it Konkan-Tána, Ibn Batuta Kúkin-Tána, the last a form which appears in the Carta Catalana as Cucintana. Tieffentaller writes Kokan, and this is said (Cunningham’s Anc. Geog. 553) to be the local pronunciation. Abulfeda speaks of it as a very celebrated place of trade, producing a kind of cloth which was called Tánasi, bamboos, and Tabashír derived from the ashes of the bamboo.

As early as the 16th year of the Hijra (A.D. 637) an Arab fleet from Oman made a hostile descent on the Island of Thána, i.e. Salsette. The place (Sri Sthánaka) appears from inscriptions to have been the seat of a Hindu kingdom of the Konkan, in the 11th century. In Polo’s time Thána seems to have been still under a Hindu prince, but it soon afterwards became subject to the Delhi sovereigns; and when visited by Jordanus and by Odoric some thirty years after Polo’s voyage, a Mussulman governor was ruling there, who put to death four Franciscans, the companions of Jordanus. Barbosa gives it the compound name of TANA-MAIAMBU, the latter part being the first indication I know of the name of Bombay (Mambai). It was still a place of many mosques, temples, and gardens, but the trade was small. Pirates still did business from the port, but on a reduced scale. Botero says that there were the remains of an immense city to be seen, and that the town still contained 5000 velvet-weavers (p. 104). Till the Mahrattas took Salsette in 1737, the Portuguese had many fine villas about Thána.

Polo’s dislocation of geographical order here has misled Fra Mauro into placing Tana to the west of Guzerat, though he has a duplicate Tana nearer the correct position.

NOTE 2.—It has often been erroneously supposed that the frankincense (olibanum) of commerce, for which Bombay and the ports which preceded it in Western India have for centuries afforded the chief mart, was an Indian product. But Marco is not making that mistake; he calls the incense of Western India brown, evidently in contrast with the white incense or olibanum, which he afterwards assigns to its true locality (infra. ch. xxxvii., xxxviii.). Nor is Marsden justified in assuming that the brown incense of Tana must needs have been Benzoin imported from Sumatra, though I observe Dr. Birdwood considers that the term Indian Frankincense which occurs in Dioscorides must have included Benzoin. Dioscorides describes the so-called Indian Frankincense as blackish; and Garcia supposes the name merely to refer to the colour, as he says the Arabs often gave the name of Indian to things of a dark colour.

There seems to be no proof that Benzoin was known even to the older Arab writers. Western India supplies a variety of aromatic gum-resins, one of which was probably intended by our traveller:

I. BOSWELLIA THURIFERA of Colebrooke, whose description led to a general belief that this tree produced the Frankincense of commerce. The tree is found in Oudh and Rohilkhand, in Bahár, Central India, Khandesh, and Kattiawár, etc. The gum-resin is used and sold locally as an incense, but is soft and sticky, and is not the olibanum of commerce; nor is it collected for exportation.

The Coromandel Boswellia glabra of Roxburgh is now included (see Dr. Birdwood’s Monograph) as a variety under the B. thurifera. Its gum-resin is a good deal used as incense, in the Tamul regions, under the name of Kundrikam, with which is apparently connected Kundur, one of the Arabic words for olibanum (see ch. xxxviii., note 2).

II. Vateria Indica (Roxb.), producing a gum-resin which when recent is known as Piney Varnish, and when hardened, is sold for export under the names of Indian Copal, White Dammar, and others. Its northern limit of growth is North Canara; but the gum is exported from Bombay. The tree is the Chloroxylon Dupada of Buchanan, and is, I imagine, the Dupu or Incense Tree of Rheede. (Hort. Malab. IV.) The tree is a fine one, and forms beautiful avenues in Malabar and Canara. The Hindus use the resin as an incense, and in Malabar it is also made into candles which burn fragrantly and with little smoke. It is, or was, also used as pitch, and is probably the thus with which Indian vessels, according to Joseph of Cranganore (in Novus Orbis), were payed. Garcia took it for the ancient Cancamum, but this Dr. Birdwood identifies with the next, viz.:—

III. Gardenia lucida (Roxb.). It grows in the Konkan districts, producing a fragrant resin called Dikamáli in India, and by the Arabs Kankham.

IV. Balsamodendron Mukul, growing in Sind, Kattiawár and the Deesa District, and producing the Indian Bdellium, Muḳl of the Arabs and Persians, used as an incense and as a cordial medicine. It is believed to be the Βδέλλα mentioned in the Periplus as exported from the Indus, and also as brought down with Costus through Ozene (Ujjain) to Barygaza (Baroch—see Müller’s Geog. Græc. Minor. I. 287, 293). It is mentioned also (Muḳl) by Albiruni as a special product of Kachh, and is probably the incense of that region alluded to by Hiuen Tsang. (See last chapter, note 3.) It is of a yellow, red, or brownish colour. (Eng. Cyc. art. Bdellium; Dowson’s Elliot, I. 66; Reinaud in J. As. sér. IV. tom. iv. p. 263).

V. Canarium strictum (Roxb.), of the Western Ghats, affording the Black Dammar of Malabar, which when fresh is aromatic and yellow in colour. It abounds in the country adjoining Tana. The natives use it as incense, and call the tree Dhúp (incense) and Gugul (Bdellium).

Besides these resinous substances, the Costus of the Ancients may be mentioned (Sansk. Kushṭh), being still exported from Western India, as well as from Calcutta, to China, under the name of Putchok, to be burnt as incense in Chinese temples. Its identity has been ascertained in our own day by Drs. Royle and Falconer, as the root of a plant which they called Aucklandia Costus. But the identity of the Pucho (which he gives as the Malay name) with Costus was known to Garcia. Alex. Hamilton, at the beginning of last century, calls it Ligna Dulcis (sic), and speaks of it as an export from Sind, as did the author of the Periplus 1600 years earlier.

My own impression is that Muḳl or Bdellium was the brown incense of Polo, especially because we see from Albiruni that this was regarded as a staple export from neighbouring regions. But Dr. Birdwood considers that the Black Dammar of Canarium strictum is in question. (Report on Indian Gum-Resins, by Mr. Dalzell of Bot. Gard. Bombay, 1866; Birdwood’s Bombay Products, 2nd ed. pp. 282, 287, etc.; Drury’s Useful Plants of India, 2nd ed.; Garcia; A. Hamilton, I. 127; Eng. Cyc., art. Putchuk; Buchanan’s Journey, II. 44, 335, etc.)

XXVIII. CONCERNING THE KINGDOM OF CAMBAET

Cambaet is a great kingdom lying further west. The people are Idolaters, and have a language of their own, and a king of their own, and are tributary to nobody.{1}

The North Star is here still more clearly visible; and henceforward the further you go west the higher you see it.

There is a great deal of trade in this country. It produces indigo in great abundance; and they also make much fine buckram. There is also a quantity of cotton which is exported hence to many quarters; and there is a great trade in hides, which are very well dressed; with many other kinds of merchandize too tedious to mention. Merchants come here with many ships and cargoes, but what they chiefly bring is gold, silver, copper [and tutia].

There are no pirates from this country; the inhabitants are good people, and live by their trade and manufactures.

NOTE 1.—CAMBAET is nearer the genuine name of the city than our CAMBAY. Its proper Hindu name was, according to Colonel Tod, Khambavati, “the City of the Pillar.” The inhabitants write it Kambáyat. The ancient city is 3 miles from the existing Cambay, and is now overgrown with jungle. It is spoken of as a flourishing place by Mas’udi, who visited it in A.D. 915. Ibn Batuta speaks of it also as a very fine city, remarkable for the elegance and solidity of its mosques, and houses built by wealthy foreign merchants. Cambeth is mentioned by Polo’s contemporary Marino Sanudo, as one of the two chief Ocean Ports of India; and in the 15th century Conti calls it 14 miles in circuit. It was still in high prosperity in the early part of the 16th century, abounding in commerce and luxury, and one of the greatest Indian marts. Its trade continued considerable in the time of Federici, towards the end of that century; but it has now long disappeared, the local part of it being transferred to Gogo and other ports having deeper water. Its chief or sole industry now is in the preparation of ornamental objects from agates, cornelians, and the like.

The Indigo of Cambay was long a staple export, and is mentioned by Conti, Nikitin, Santo Stefano, Federici, Linschoten, and Abu’l Fazl.

The independence of Cambay ceased a few years after Polo’s visit; for it was taken in the end of the century by the armies of Aláuddín Khilji of Delhi, a king whose name survived in Guzerat down to our own day as Aláuddín Khúní—Bloody Alauddin. (Rás Málá, I. 235.)

XXIX. CONCERNING THE KINGDOM OF SEMENAT

Semenat is a great kingdom towards the west. The people are Idolaters, and have a king and a language of their own, and pay tribute to nobody. They are not corsairs, but live by trade and industry as honest people ought. It is a place of very great trade. They are forsooth cruel Idolaters.{1}

NOTE 1.—SOMNATH is the site of the celebrated Temple on the coast of Sauráshtra, or Peninsular Guzerat, plundered by Mahmúd of Ghazni on his sixteenth expedition to India (A.D. 1023). The term “great kingdom” is part of Polo’s formula. But the place was at this time of some importance as a commercial port, and much visited by the ships of Aden, as Abulfeda tells us. At an earlier date Albiruni speaks of it both as the seat of a great Mahadeo much frequented by Hindu pilgrims, and as a port of call for vessels on their way from Sofala in Africa to China,—a remarkable incidental notice of departed trade and civilisation! He does not give Somnath so good a character as Polo does; for he names it as one of the chief pirate-haunts. And Colonel Tod mentions that the sculptured memorial stones on this coast frequently exhibit the deceased as a pirate in the act of boarding. In fact, piratical habits continued in the islands off the coast of Kattiawár down to our own day.

Properly speaking, three separate things are lumped together as Somnáth: (1) The Port, properly called Veráwal, on a beautiful little bay; (2) the City of Deva-Pattan, Somnáth-Pattan, or Prabhás, occupying a prominence on the south side of the bay, having a massive wall and towers, and many traces of ancient Hindu workmanship, though the vast multitude of tombs around shows the existence of a large Mussulman population at some time; and among these are dates nearly as old as our Traveller’s visit; (3) The famous Temple (or, strictly speaking, the object of worship in that Temple) crowning a projecting rock at the south-west angle of the city, and close to the walls. Portions of columns and sculptured fragments strew the soil around.

Notwithstanding the famous story of Mahmúd and the image stuffed with jewels, there is little doubt that the idol really termed Somnáth (Moon’s Lord) was nothing but a huge columnar emblem of Mahadeo. Hindu authorities mention it as one of the twelve most famous emblems of that kind over India, and Ibn Ásir’s account, the oldest extant narrative of Mahmúd’s expedition, is to the same effect. Every day it was washed with water newly brought from the Ganges. Mahmúd broke it to pieces, and with a fragment a step was made at the entrance of the Jámi’ Mosque at Ghazni.

The temples and idols of Pattan underwent a second visitation at the hands of Aláuddin’s forces a few years after Polo’s visit (1300),[1] and this seems in great measure to have wiped out the memory of Mahmúd. The temple, as it now stands deserted, bears evident tokens of having been converted into a mosque. A good deal of old and remarkable architecture remains, but mixed with Moslem work, and no part of the building as it stands is believed to be a survival from the time of Mahmúd; though part may belong to a reconstruction which was carried out by Raja Bhima Deva of Anhilwara about twenty-five years after Mahmúd’s invasion. It is remarkable that Ibn Ásir speaks of the temple plundered by Mahmúd as “built upon 56 pillars of teak-wood covered with lead.” Is it possible that it was a wooden building?

In connection with this brief chapter on Somnáth we present a faithful representation of those Gates which Lord Ellenborough rendered so celebrated in connection with that name, when he caused them to be removed from the Tomb of Mahmúd, on the retirement of our troops from Kabul in 1842. His intention, as announced in that once famous pæan of his, was to have them carried solemnly to Guzerat, and there restored to the (long desecrated) temple. Calmer reflection prevailed, and the Gates were consigned to the Fort of Agra, where they still remain.

Captain J. D. Cunningham, in his Hist. of the Sikhs (p. 209), says that in 1831, when Sháh Shúja treated with Ranjít Singh for aid to recover his throne, one of the Mahárája’s conditions was the restoration of the Gates to Somnáth. This probably put the scheme into Lord Ellenborough’s head. But a remarkable fact is, that the Sháh reminded Ranjít of a prophecy that foreboded the downfall of the Sikh Empire on the removal of the Ghazni Gates. This is quoted from a report of Captain Wade’s, dated 21st November, 1831. The gates were removed to India in the end of 1842. The “Sikh Empire” practically collapsed with the murder of Sher Singh in September, 1843.

It is not probable that there was any real connection between these Gates, of Saracenic design, carved (it is said) in Himalayan cedar, and the Temple of Somnáth. But tradition did ascribe to them such a connection, and the eccentric prank of a clever man in high place made this widely known. Nor in any case can we regard as alien to the scope of this book the illustration of a work of mediæval Asiatic art, which is quite as remarkable for its own character and indisputable history, as for the questionable origin ascribed to it. (Tod’s Travels, 385, 504; Burgess, Visit to Somnath, etc.; Jacob’s Report on Kattywar, p. 18; Gildemeister, 185; Dowson’s Elliot, II. 468 seqq.; Asiatic Journal, 3rd series, vol. I.).

---------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] So in Elliot, II. 74. But Jacob says there is an inscription of a Mussulman Governor in Pattan of 1297.

XXX. CONCERNING THE KINGDOM OF KESMACORAN

Kesmacoran is a kingdom having a king of its own and a peculiar language. [Some of] the people are Idolaters, [but the most part are Saracens]. They live by merchandize and industry, for they are professed traders, and carry on much traffic by sea and land in all directions. Their food is rice [and corn], flesh and milk, of which they have great store. There is no more to be said about them.{1}

And you must know that this kingdom of Kesmacoran is the last in India as you go towards the west and north-west. You see, from Maabar on, this province is what is called the GREATER INDIA, and it is the best of all the Indies. I have now detailed to you all the kingdoms and provinces and (chief) cities of this India the Greater, that are upon the seaboard; but of those that lie in the interior I have said nothing, because that would make too long a story.{2}

And so now let us proceed, and I will tell you of some of the Indian Islands. And I will begin by two Islands which are called Male and Female.

NOTE 1.—Though M. Pauthier has imagined objections there is no room for doubt that Kesmacoran is the province of MEKRAN, known habitually all over the East as KIJ-MAKRÁN, from the combination with the name of the country of that of its chief town, just as we lately met with a converse combination in Konkan-tana. This was pointed out to Marsden by his illustrious friend Major Rennell. We find the term Kij Makrán used by Ibn Batuta (III. 47); by the Turkish Admiral Sidi ’Ali (J. As., sér. I. tom. ix. 72; and J. A. S. B. V. 463); by Sharifuddin (P. de la Croix, I. 379, II. 417–418); in the famous Sindian Romeo-and-Juliet tale of Sassi and Pannún (Elliot, I. 333); by Pietro della Valle (I. 724, II. 358); by Sir F. Goldsmid (J. R. A. S., N.S., I. 38); and see for other examples, J. A. S. B. VII. 298, 305, 308; VIII. 764; XIV. 158; XVII. pt. ii. 559: XX. 262, 263.

The argument that Mekrán was not a province of India only amounts to saying that Polo has made a mistake. But the fact is that it often was reckoned to belong to India, from ancient down to comparatively modern times. Pliny says: “Many indeed do not reckon the Indus to be the western boundary of India, but include in that term also four satrapies on this side the river, the Gedrosi, the Arachoti, the Arii, and the Parapomisadae (i.e. Mekrán, Kandahar, Herat, and Kabul) ... whilst others class all these together under the name of Ariana” (VI. 23). Arachosia, according to Isidore of Charax, was termed by the Parthians “White India.” Aelian calls Gedrosia a part of India. (Hist. Animal. XVII. 6.) In the 6th century the Nestorian Patriarch Jesujabus, as we have seen (supra, ch. xxii. note 1), considered all to be India from the coast of Persia, i.e. of Fars, beginning from near the Gulf. According to Ibn Khordâdhbeh, the boundary between Persia and India was seven days’ sail from Hormuz and eight from Daibul, or less than half-way from the mouth of the Gulf to the Indus. (J. As. sér. VI. tom. v. 283.) Beladhori speaks of the Arabs in early expeditions as invading Indian territory about the Lake of Sijistan; and Istakhri represents this latter country as bounded on the north and partly on the west by portions of India. Kabul was still reckoned in India. Chach, the last Hindu king of Sind but one, is related to have marched through Mekrán to a river which formed the limit between Mekrán and Kermán. On its banks he planted date-trees, and set up a monument which bore: “This was the boundary of HIND in the time of Chach, the son of Síláij, the son of Basábas.” In the Geography of Bakui we find it stated that “Hind is a great country which begins at the province of Mekrán.” (N. and E. II. 54.) In the map of Marino Sanuto India begins from Hormuz; and it is plain from what Polo says in quitting that city that he considered the next step from it south-eastward would have taken him to India (supra, i. p. 110).

[“The name Mekran has been commonly, but erroneously, derived from Mahi Khoran, i.e. the fish-eaters, or ichthyophagi, which was the title given to the inhabitants of the Beluchi coast-fringe by Arrian. But the word is a Dravidian name, and appears as Makara in the Bṛhat Sanhita of Varaha Mihira in a list of the tribes contiguous to India on the west. It is also the Μακαρήνη of Stephen of Byzantium, and the Makuran of Tabari, and Moses of Chorene. Even were it not a Dravidian name, in no old Aryan dialect could it signify fish-eaters.” (Curzon, Persia, II. p. 261, note.)

“It is to be noted that Kesmacoran is a combination of Kech or Kej and Makrán, and the term is even to-day occasionally used.” (Major P. M. Sykes, Persia, p. 102.)—H. C.]

We may add a Romance definition of India from King Alisaunder:—

“Lordynges, also I fynde, At Mede so bigynneth Ynde: Forsothe ich woot, it stretcheth ferest Of alle the Londes in the Est, And oth the South half sikerlyk, To the cee taketh of Affryk; And the north half to a Mountayne, That is yclepèd Caucasayne.”—L 4824–4831.

It is probable that Polo merely coasted Mekrán; he seems to know nothing of the Indus, and what he says of Mekrán is vague.

NOTE 2.—As Marco now winds up his detail of the Indian coast, it is proper to try to throw some light on his partial derangement of its geography. In the following columns the first shows the real geographical order from east to west of the Indian provinces as named by Polo, and the second shows the order as he puts them. The Italic names are brief and general identifications.

Real order. Polo’s order.

1. Mutfili (Telingana). 1. Mutfili.

{ 2. St. Thomas’s (Madras). 2. St. Thomas’s MAABAR, { 3. Maabar Proper, Kingdom of (Lar, west of do.). including { Sonder Bandi (Tanjore). 3. Maabar proper, or Soli. { 4. Cail (Tinnevelly). 4. Cail.

5. Comari (C. Comorin). 5. Coilum.

MELIBAR, { 6. Coilum (Travancore). 6. Comari. including { 7. Eli (Cananore). 7. Eli.

GUZERAT, { 8. Tana (Bombay). 8. (MELIBAR). or LAR, { 9. Canbaet (Cambay). 9. (GOZURAT). including {10. Semenat (Somnath). 10. Tana.

11. Kesmacoran (Mekran). 11. Canbaet. 12. Semenat. 13. Kesmacoran.

It is difficult to suppose that the fleet carrying the bride of Arghun went out of its way to Maabar, St. Thomas’s, and Telingana. And on the other hand, what is said in chapter xxiii. on Comari, about the North Star not having been visible since they approached the Lesser Java, would have been grossly inaccurate if in the interval the travellers had been north as far as Madras and Motupalle. That passage suggests to me strongly that Comari was the first Indian land made by the fleet on arriving from the Archipelago (exclusive perhaps of Ceylon). Note then that the position of Eli is marked by its distance of 300 miles from Comari, evidently indicating that this was a run made by the traveller on some occasion without an intermediate stoppage. Tana, Cambay, Somnath, would follow naturally as points of call.

In Polo’s order, again, the positions of Comari and Coilum are transposed, whilst Melibar is introduced as if it were a country westward (as Polo views it, northward we should say)[1] of Coilum and Eli, instead of including them, and Gozurat is introduced as a country lying eastward (or southward, as we should say) of Tana, Cambaet, and Semenat, instead of including them, or at least the two latter. Moreover, he names no cities in connection with those two countries.

The following hypothesis, really not a complex one, is the most probable that I can suggest to account for these confusions.

I conceive, then, that Cape Comorin (Comari) was the first Indian land made by the fleet on the homeward voyage, and that Hili, Tana, Cambay, Somnath, were touched at successively as it proceeded towards Persia.

I conceive that in a former voyage to India on the Great Kaan’s business Marco had visited Maabar and Kaulam, and gained partly from actual visits and partly from information the substance of the notices he gives us of Telingana and St. Thomas’s on the one side and of Malabar and Guzerat on the other, and that in combining into one series the results of the information acquired on two different voyages he failed rightly to co-ordinate the material, and thus those dislocations which we have noticed occurred, as they very easily might, in days when maps had practically no existence; to say nothing of the accidents of dictation.

The expression in this passage for “the cities that lie in the interior,” is in the G. T. “celz qe sunt en fra terres”; see I. 43. Pauthier’s text has “celles qui sont en ferme terre,” which is nonsense here.

---------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Abulfeda’s orientation is the same as Polo’s.

Chapter XXXI

DISCOURSETH OF THE TWO ISLANDS CALLED MALE AND FEMALE, AND WHY THEY ARE SO CALLED.

When you leave this kingdom of Kesmacoran, which is on the mainland, you go by sea some 500 miles towards the south; and then you find the two Islands, MALE and FEMALE, lying about 30 miles distant from one another. The people are all baptized Christians, but maintain the ordinances of the Old Testament; thus when their wives are with child they never go near them till their confinement, or for forty days thereafter.

In the Island however which is called Male, dwell the men alone, without their wives or any other women. Every year when the month of March arrives the men all set out for the other Island, and tarry there for three months, to wit, March, April, May, dwelling with their wives for that space. At the end of those three months they return to their own Island, and pursue their husbandry and trade for the other nine months.

They find on this Island very fine ambergris. They live on flesh and milk and rice. They are capital fishermen, and catch a great quantity of fine large sea-fish, and these they dry, so that all the year they have plenty of food, and also enough to sell to the traders who go thither. They have no chief except a bishop, who is subject to the archbishop of another Island, of which we shall presently speak, called SCOTRA. They have also a peculiar language.

As for the children which their wives bear to them, if they be girls they abide with their mothers; but if they be boys the mothers bring them up till they are fourteen, and then send them to the fathers. Such is the custom of these two Islands. 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.{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 Mekrán 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; (Nabílah, 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 Gesù, 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. (Müller’s Ps. Callisth. 105.) The Mahábhárata celebrates the Amazon country of Ráná Paramitá, where the regulations were much as in Polo’s islands, only male children were put to death, and men if they overstayed a month. (Wheeler’s India, I. 400.)

Hiuen Tsang’s version of the legend agrees with Marco’s in placing the Woman’s Island to the south of Persia. It was called the Kingdom of Western Women. There were none but women to be seen. It was under Folin (the Byzantine Empire), and the ruler thereof sent husbands every year; if boys were born, the law prohibited their being brought up. (Vie et Voyages, p. 268.) Alexander, in Ferdúsi’s poem, visits the City of Women on an island in the sea, where no man was allowed.

The Chinese accounts, dating from the 5th century, of a remote Eastern Land called Fusang, which Neumann fancied to have been Mexico, mention that to the east of that region again there was a Woman’s Island, with the usual particulars. (Lassen, IV. 751.) [Cf. G. Schlegel, Niu Kouo, T’oung Pao, III. pp. 495–510.—H. C.] Oddly enough, Columbus heard the same story of an island called Matityna or Matinino (apparently Martinique) which he sighted on his second voyage. The Indians on board “asserted that it had no inhabitants but women, who at a certain time of the year were visited by the Cannibals (Caribs); if the children born were boys they were brought up and sent to their fathers, if girls they were retained by the mothers. They reported also that these women had certain subterranean caverns in which they took refuge if any one went thither except at the established season,” etc. (P. Martyr in Ramusio, III. 3 v. and see 85.) Similar Amazons are placed by Adam of Bremen on the Baltic Shores, a story there supposed to have originated in a confusion between Gwenland, i.e. Finland, and a land of Cwens or Women.

Mendoza heard of the like in the vicinity of Japan (perhaps the real Fusang story), though he opines judiciously that “this is very doubtful to be beleeved, although I have bin certified by religious men that have talked with persons that within these two yeares have beene at the saide ilands, and have seene the saide women.” (H. of China, II. 301.) Lane quotes a like tale about a horde of Cossacks whose wives were said to live apart on certain islands in the Dnieper. (Arab. Nights, 1859, III. 479.) The same story is related by a missionary in the Lettres Édifiantes of certain unknown islands supposed to lie south of the Marian group. Pauthier, from whom I derive this last instance, draws the conclusion: “On voit que le récit de Marc Pol est loin d’être imaginaire.” Mine from the premises would be different!

Sometimes the fable took another form; in which the women are entirely isolated, as in that which Mela quotes from Hanno (III. 9). So with the Isle of Women which Kazwini and Bakui place to the South of China. They became enceinte by the Wind, or by eating a particular fruit [or by plunging into the sea; cf. Schlegel, l.c.—H. C.], or, as in a Chinese tradition related by Magaillans, by looking at their own faces in a well! The like fable is localised by the Malays in the island of Engano off Sumatra, and was related to Pigafetta of an island under Great Java called Ocoloro, perhaps the same.

(Magail. 76; Gildem. 196; N. et Ex. II. 398; Pigafetta, 173; Marsden’s Sumatra, 1st ed. p. 264.)

XXXII. CONCERNING THE ISLAND OF SCOTRA

When you leave those two Islands and go about 500 miles further towards the south, then you come to an Island called SCOTRA. The people are all baptized Christians; and they have an Archbishop. They have a great deal of ambergris; and plenty also of cotton stuffs and other merchandize; especially great quantities of salt fish of a large and excellent kind. They also eat flesh and milk and rice, for that is their only kind of corn; and they all go naked like the other Indians.

[The ambergris comes from the stomach of the whale, and as it is a great object of trade, the people contrive to take the whales with barbed iron darts, which, once they are fixed in the body, cannot come out again. A long cord is attached to this end, to that a small buoy which floats on the surface, so that when the whale dies they know where to find it. They then draw the body ashore and extract the ambergris from the stomach and the oil from the head.{1}]

There is a great deal of trade there, for many ships come from all quarters with goods to sell to the natives. The merchants also purchase gold there, by which they make a great profit; and all the vessels bound for Aden touch at this Island.

Their Archbishop has nothing to do with the Pope of Rome, but is subject to the great Archbishop who lives at Baudas. He rules over the Bishop of that Island, and over many other Bishops in those regions of the world, just as our Pope does in these.{2}

A multitude of corsairs frequent the Island; they come there and encamp and put up their plunder to sale; and this they do to good profit, for the Christians of the Island purchase it, knowing well that it is Saracen or Pagan gear.{3}

And you must know that in this Island there are the best enchanters in the world. It is true that their Archbishop forbids the practice to the best of his ability; but ’tis all to no purpose, for they insist that their forefathers followed it, and so must they also. I will give you a sample of their enchantments. Thus, if a ship be sailing past with a fair wind and a strong, they will raise a contrary wind and compel her to turn back. In fact they make the wind blow as they list, and produce great tempests and disasters; and other such sorceries they perform, which it will be better to say nothing about in our Book.{4}

NOTE 1.—Mr. Blyth appears to consider that the only whale met with nowadays in the Indian Sea north of the line is a great Rorqual or Balaenoptera, to which he gives the specific name of Indica. (See J. A. S. B. XXVIII. 481.) The text, however (from Ramusio), clearly points to the Spermaceti whale; and Maury’s Whale-Chart consists with this.

“The best ambergris,” says Mas’udi, “is found on the islands and coasts of the Sea of Zinj (Eastern Africa); it is round, of a pale blue, and sometimes as big as an ostrich egg.... These are morsels which have been swallowed by the fish called Awál. When the sea is much agitated it casts up fragments of amber almost like lumps of rock, and the fish swallowing these is choked thereby, and floats on the surface. The men of Zinj, or wherever it be, then come in their canoes, and fall on the creature with harpoons and cables, draw it ashore, cut it up, and extract the ambergris” (I. 134).

Kazwini speaks of whales as often imprisoned by the ebb tide in the channels about Basra. The people harpooned them, and got much oil out of the brain, which they used for lamps, and smearing their ships. This also is clearly the sperm whale. (Ethé, p. 268.)

After having been long doubted, scientific opinion seems to have come back to the opinion that ambergris is an excretion from the whale. “Ambergris is a morbid secretion in the intestines of the cachalot, deriving its origin either from the stomach or biliary ducts, and allied in its nature to gall-stones, ... whilst the masses found floating on the sea are those that have been voided by the whale, or liberated from the dead animal by the process of putrefaction.” (Bennett, Whaling Voyage Round the Globe, 1840, II. 326.)

[“The Pen ts’ao, ch. xliii. fol. 5, mentions ambergris under the name lung sien hiang (dragon’s saliva perfume), and describes it as a sweet-scented product, which is obtained from the south-western sea. It is greasy, and at first yellowish white; when dry, it forms pieces of a yellowish black colour. In spring whole herds of dragons swim in that sea, and vomit it out. Others say that it is found in the belly of a large fish. This description also doubtless points to ambergris, which in reality is a pathological secretion of the intestines of the spermaceti whale (Physeter macrocephalus), a large cetaceous animal. The best ambergris is collected on the Arabian coast. In the Ming shi (ch. cccxxvi.) lung sien hiang is mentioned as a product of Bu-la-wa (Brava, on the east coast of Africa), and an-ba-rh (evidently also ambergris) amongst the products of Dsu-fa-rh (Dsahfar, on the south coast of Arabia).” (Bretschneider, Med. Res. I. p. 152, note.)—H. C.]

NOTE 2.—Scotra probably represented the usual pronunciation of the name SOCOTRA, which has been hypothetically traced to a Sanskrit original, Dvípa-Sukhádhára, “the Island Abode of Bliss,” from which (contracted Diuskadra) the Greeks made “the island of Dioscorides.”

So much painful interest attaches to the history of a people once Christian, but now degenerated almost to savagery, that some detail maybe permitted on this subject.

The Periplus calls the island very large, but desolate; ... the inhabitants were few, and dwelt on the north side. They were of foreign origin, being a mixture of Arabs, Indians, and Greeks, who had come thither in search of gain.... The island was under the king of the Incense Country.... Traders came from Muza (near Mocha) and sometimes from Limyrica and Barygaza (Malabar and Guzerat), bringing rice, wheat, and Indian muslins, with female slaves, which had a ready sale. Cosmas (6th century) says there was in the island a bishop, appointed from Persia. The inhabitants spoke Greek, having been originally settled there by the Ptolemies. “There are clergy there also, ordained and sent from Persia to minister among the people of the island, and a multitude of Christians. We sailed past the island, but did not land. I met, however, with people from it who were on their way to Ethiopia, and they spoke Greek.”

The ecclesiastical historian Nicephorus Callistus seems to allude to the people of Socotra, when he says that among the nations visited by the missionary Theophilus, in the time of Constantius, were “the Assyrians on the verge of the outer ocean towards the East ... whom Alexander the Great, after driving them from Syria, sent thither to settle, and to this day they keep their mother tongue, though all of the blackest, through the power of the sun’s rays.” The Arab voyagers of the 9th century say that the island was colonised with Greeks by Alexander the Great, in order to promote the culture of the Socotrine aloes; when the other Greeks adopted Christianity these did likewise, and they had continued to retain their profession of it. The colonising by Alexander is probably a fable, but invented to account for facts.

[Edrisi says (Jaubert’s transl. pp. 47, seqq.) that the chief produce of Socotra is aloes, and that most of the inhabitants of this island are Christians; for this reason: when Alexander had subjugated Porus, his master Aristotle gave him the advice to seek after the island producing aloes; after his conquest of India, Alexander remembered the advice, and on his return journey from the Sea of India to the Sea of Oman, he stopped at Socotra, which he greatly admired for its fertility and the pleasantness of its climate. Acting on the advice of Aristotle, Alexander removed the inhabitants from their island, and established in their place a colony of Ionians, to whom he entrusted the care of cultivating aloes. These Greeks were converted when the Christian religion was preached to them, and their descendants have remained Christians.—H. C.]

In the list of the metropolitan Sees of the Nestorian Church we find one called Kotrobah, which is supposed to stand for Socotra. According to Edrisi, Kotrobah was an island inhabited by Christians; he speaks of Socotra separately, but no island suits his description of Kotrobah but Socotra itself; and I suspect that we have here geography in duplicate, no uncommon circumstance. There is an epistle extant from the Nestorian Patriarch Jesujabus (A.D. 650–660), ad Episcopos Catarensium, which Assemani interprets of the Christians in Socotra and the adjacent coasts of Arabia (III. 133).[1] Abulfeda says the people of Socotra were Nestorian Christians and pirates. Nicolo Conti, in the first half of the 15th century, spent two months on the island (Sechutera). He says it was for the most part inhabited by Nestorian Christians.

[Professor W. R. Smith, in a letter to Sir H. Yule, dated Cambridge, 15th June, 1886, writes: “The authorities for Kotrobah seem to be (1) Edrisi, (2) the list of Nestorian Bishops in Assemani. There is no trace of such a name anywhere else that I can find. But there is a place called Ḳaṭar about which most of the Arab Geographers know very little, but which is mentioned in poetry. Bekri, who seems best informed, says that it lay between Bahrain and Oman.... Iṣṭakhri and Ibn Ḥaukal speak of the Ḳaṭar pirates. Their collective name is the Ḳaṭaríya.”]

Some indications point rather to a connection of the island’s Christianity with the Jacobite or Abyssinian Church. Thus they practised circumcision, as mentioned by Maffei in noticing the proceedings of Alboquerque at Socotra. De Barros calls them Jacobite Christians of the Abyssinian stock. Barbosa speaks of them as an olive-coloured people, Christian only in name, having neither baptism nor Christian knowledge, and having for many years lost all acquaintance with the Gospel. Andrea Corsali calls them Christian shepherds of Ethiopian race, like Abyssinians. They lived on dates, milk, and butter; some rice was imported. They had churches like mosques, but with altars in Christian fashion.

When Francis Xavier visited the island there were still distinct traces of the Church. The people reverenced the cross, placing it on their altars, and hanging it round their necks. Every village had its minister, whom they called Kashís (Ar. for a Christian Presbyter), to whom they paid tithe. No man could read. The Kashís repeated prayers antiphonetically in a forgotten tongue, which De Barros calls Chaldee, frequently scattering incense; a word like Alleluia often recurred. For bells they used wooden rattles. They assembled in their churches four times a day, and held St. Thomas in great veneration. The Kashíses married, but were very abstemious. They had two Lents, and then fasted strictly from meat, milk, and fish.

The last vestiges of Christianity in Socotra, so far as we know, are those traced by P. Vincenzo, the Carmelite, who visited the island after the middle of the 17th century. The people still retained a profession of Christianity, but without any knowledge, and with a strange jumble of rites; sacrificing to the moon; circumcising; abominating wine and pork. They had churches which they called Moquame (Ar. Maḳám, “Locus, Statio”?), dark, low, and dirty, daily anointed with butter. On the altar was a cross and a candle. The cross was regarded with ignorant reverence, and carried in processions. They assembled in their churches three times in the day, and three times in the night, and in their worship burned much incense, etc. The priests were called Odambo, elected and consecrated by the people, and changed every year. Of baptism and other sacraments they had no knowledge.

There were two races: one, black with crisp hair; the other, less black, of better aspect, and with straight hair. Each family had a cave in which they deposited their dead. They cultivated a few palms, and kept flocks; had no money, no writing, and kept tale of their flocks by bags of stones. They often committed suicide in age, sickness, or defeat. When rain failed they selected a victim by lot, and placing him within a circle, addressed prayers to the moon. If without success they cut off the poor wretch’s hands. They had many who practised sorcery. The women were all called Maria, which the author regarded as a relic of Christianity; this De Barros also notices a century earlier.

Now, not a trace of former Christianity can be discovered—unless it be in the name of one of the villages on the coast, Colesseeah, which looks as if it faintly commemorated both the ancient religion and the ancient language (ἐκκλησία). The remains of one building, traditionally a place of worship, were shown to Wellsted; he could find nothing to connect it with Christianity.

The social state of the people is much as Father Vincenzo described it; lower it could scarcely be. Mahomedanism is now the universal profession. The people of the interior are still of distinct race, with curly hair, Indian complexion, regular features. The coast people are a mongrel body, of Arab and other descent. Probably in old times the case was similar, and the civilisation and Greek may have been confined to the littoral foreigners. (Müller’s Geog. Gr. Minores, I. pp. 280–281; Relations, I. 139–140; Cathay, clxxi., ccxlv., 169; Conti, 20; Maffei, lib. III.; Büsching, IV. 278; Faria, I. 117–118; Ram. I. f. 181 v. and 292; Jarric, Thes. Rer. Indic. I. 108–109; P. Vinc. 132, 442; J. R. G. S. V. 129 seqq.)

NOTE 3.—As far back as the 10th century Socotra was a noted haunt of pirates. Mas’udi says: “Socotra is one of the stations frequented by the Indian corsairs called Bawárij, which chase the Arab ships bound for India and China, just as the Greek galleys chase the Mussulmans in the sea of Rúm along the coasts of Syria and Egypt” (III. 37). The Bawárij were corsairs of Kach’h and Guzerat, so called from using a kind of war-vessel called Bárja. (Elliot, I. 65.) Ibn Batuta tells a story of a friend of his, the Shaikh Sa’íd, superior of a convent at Mecca, who had been to India and got large presents at the court of Delhi. With a comrade called Hajji Washl, who was also carrying a large sum to buy horses, “when they arrived at the island of Socotra ... they were attacked by Indian corsairs with a great number of vessels.... The corsairs took everything out of the ship, and then left it to the crew with its tackle, so that they were able to reach Aden.” Ibn Batuta’s remark on this illustrates what Polo has said of the Malabar pirates, in ch. xxv. supra: “The custom of these pirates is not to kill or drown anybody when the actual fighting is over. They take all the property of the passengers, and then let them go whither they will with their vessel” (I. 362–363).

NOTE 4.—We have seen that P. Vincenzo alludes to the sorceries of the people; and De Barros also speaks of the feiticeria or witchcraft by which the women drew ships to the island, and did other marvels (u.s.).

---------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] [Assemani, in his corrections (III. p. 362), gives up Socotra in favour of Bactria.]

XXXIII. CONCERNING THE ISLAND OF MADEIGASCAR

Madeigascar is an Island towards the south, about a thousand miles from Scotra. The people are all Saracens, adoring Mahommet. They have four Esheks, i.e. four Elders, who are said to govern the whole Island. And you must know that it is a most noble and beautiful Island, and one of the greatest in the world, for it is about 4000 miles in compass. The people live by trade and handicrafts.

In this Island, and in another beyond it called ZANGHIBAR, about which we shall tell you afterwards, there are more elephants than in any country in the world. The amount of traffic in elephants’ teeth in these two Islands is something astonishing.

In this Island they eat no flesh but that of camels; and of these they kill an incredible number daily. They say it is the best and wholesomest of all flesh; and so they eat of it all the year round.{1}

They have in this Island many trees of red sanders, of excellent quality; in fact, all their forests consist of it.{2} They have also a quantity of ambergris, for whales are abundant in that sea, and they catch numbers of them; and so are Oil-heads, which are a huge kind of fish, which also produce ambergris like the whale.{3} There are numbers of leopards, bears, and lions in the country, and other wild beasts in abundance. Many traders, and many ships go thither with cloths of gold and silk, and many other kinds of goods, and drive a profitable trade.

You must know that this Island lies so far south that ships cannot go further south or visit other Islands in that direction, except this one, and that other of which we have to tell you, called Zanghibar. This is because the sea-current runs so strong towards the south that the ships which should attempt it never would get back again. Indeed, the ships of Maabar which visit this Island of Madeigascar, and that other of Zanghibar, arrive thither with marvellous speed, for great as the distance is they accomplish it in 20 days, whilst the return voyage takes them more than 3 months. This (I say) is because of the strong current running south, which continues with such singular force and in the same direction at all seasons.{4}

’Tis said that in those other Islands to the south, which the ships are unable to visit because this strong current prevents their return, is found the bird Gryphon, which appears there at certain seasons. The description given of it is however entirely different from what our stories and pictures make it. For persons who had been there and had seen it told Messer Marco Polo that it was for all the world like an eagle, but one indeed of enormous size; so big in fact that its wings covered an extent of 30 paces, and its quills were 12 paces long, and thick in proportion. And it is so strong that it will seize an elephant in its talons and carry him high into the air, and drop him so that he is smashed to pieces; having so killed him the bird gryphon swoops down on him and eats him at leisure. The people of those isles call the bird Ruc, and it has no other name.{5} So I wot not if this be the real gryphon, or if there be another manner of bird as great. But this I can tell you for certain, that they are not half lion and half bird as our stories do relate; but enormous as they be they are fashioned just like an eagle.

The Great Kaan sent to those parts to enquire about these curious matters, and the story was told by those who went thither. He also sent to procure the release of an envoy of his who had been despatched thither, and had been detained; so both those envoys had many wonderful things to tell the Great Kaan about those strange islands, and about the birds I have mentioned. [They brought (as I heard) to the Great Kaan a feather of the said Ruc, which was stated to measure 90 spans, whilst the quill part was two palms in circumference, a marvellous object! The Great Kaan was delighted with it, and gave great presents to those who brought it.{6}] They also brought two boars’ tusks, which weighed more than 14 lbs. a-piece; and you may gather how big the boar must have been that had teeth like that! They related indeed that there were some of those boars as big as a great buffalo. There are also numbers of giraffes and wild asses; and in fact a marvellous number of wild beasts of strange aspect.{7}

NOTE 1.—Marco is, I believe, the first writer European or Asiatic, who unambiguously speaks of MADAGASCAR; but his information about it was very incorrect in many particulars. There are no elephants nor camels in the island, nor any leopards, bears, or lions.

Indeed, I have no doubt that Marco, combining information from different sources, made some confusion between Makdashau (Magadoxo) and Madagascar, and that particulars belonging to both are mixed up here. This accounts for Zanghibar being placed entirely beyond Madagascar, for the entirely Mahomedan character given to the population, for the hippopotamus-teeth and staple trade in ivory, as well as for the lions, elephants, and other beasts. But above all the camel-killing indicates Sumáli Land and Magadoxo as the real locality of part of the information. Says Ibn Batuta: “After leaving Zaila we sailed on the sea for 15 days, and arrived at Makdashau, an extremely large town. The natives keep camels in great numbers, and they slaughter several hundreds daily” (II. 181). The slaughter of camels for food is still a Sumáli practice. (See J. R. G. S. VI. 28, and XIX. 55.) Perhaps the Shaikhs (Esceqe) also belong to the same quarter, for the Arab traveller says that the Sultan of Makdashau had no higher title than Shaikh (183); and Brava, a neighbouring settlement, was governed by 12 shaikhs. (De Barros, I. viii. 4.) Indeed, this kind of local oligarchy still prevails on that coast.

We may add that both Makdashau and Brava are briefly described in the Annals of the Ming Dynasty. The former, Mu-ku-tu-su, lies on the sea, 20 days from Siao-Kolan (Quilon?), a barren mountainous country of wide extent, where it sometimes does not rain for years. In 1427 a mission came from this place to China. Pu-la-wa (Brava, properly Baráwa) adjoins the former, and is also on the sea. It produces olibanum, myrrh, and ambergris; and among animals elephants, camels, rhinoceroses, spotted animals like asses, etc.[1]

It is, however, true that there are traces of a considerable amount of ancient Arab colonisation on the shores of Madagascar. Arab descent is ascribed to a class of the people of the province of Matitánana on the east coast, in lat. 21°–23° south, and the Arabic writing is in use there. The people of the St. Mary’s Isle of our maps off the east coast, in lat. 17°, also call themselves the children of Ibrahim, and the island Nusi-Ibrahim. And on the north-west coast, at Bambeluka Bay, Captain Owen found a large Arab population, whose forefathers had been settled there from time immemorial. The number of tombs here and in Magambo Bay showed that the Arab population had once been much greater. The government of this settlement, till conquered by Radama, was vested in three persons: one a Malagash, the second an Arab, the third as guardian of strangers; a fact also suggestive of Polo’s four sheikhs (Ellis, I. 131; Owen, II. 102, 132. See also Sonnerat, II. 56.) Though the Arabs were in the habit of navigating to Sofala, in about lat. 20° south, in the time of Mas’udi (beginning of 10th century), and must have then known Madagascar, there is no intelligible indication of it in any of their geographies that have been translated.[2]

[M. Alfred Grandidier, in his Hist. de la Géog. de Madagascar, p. 31, comes to the conclusion that Marco Polo has given a very exact description of Magadoxo, but that he did not know the island of Madagascar. He adds in a note that Yule has shown that the description of Madeigascar refers partly to Magadoxo, but that notwithstanding he (Yule) believed that Polo spoke of Madagascar when the Venetian traveller does not. I must say that I do not see any reason why Yule’s theory should not be accepted.

M. G. Ferrand, formerly French Agent at Fort Dauphin, has devoted ch. ix. (pp. 83–90) of the second part of his valuable work Les Musulmans à Madagascar (Paris, 1893), to the “Etymology of Madagascar.” He believes that M. Polo really means the great African Island. I mention from his book that M. Guët (Origines de l’île Bourbon, 1888) brings the Carthaginians to Madagascar, and derives the name of this island from Madax-Aschtoret or Madax-Astarté, which signifies Isle of Astarté and Isle of Tanit! Mr. I. Taylor (The origin of the name ‘Madagascar,’ in Antananarivo Annual, 1891) gives also some fancy etymologies; it is needless to mention them. M. Ferrand himself thinks that very likely Madagascar simply means Country of the Malagash (Malgaches), and is only a bad transcription of the Arabic Madagasbar.—H. C.]

NOTE 2.—There is, or used to be, a trade in sandal-wood from Madagascar. (See Owen, II. 99.) In the map of S. Lorenzo (or Madagascar) in the Isole of Porcacchi (1576), a map evidently founded on fact, I observe near the middle of the Island: quivi sono boschi di sandari rossi.

NOTE 3.—“The coast of this province” (Ivongo, the N.E. of the Island) “abounds with whales, and during a certain period of the year Antongil Bay is a favourite resort for whalers of all nations. The inhabitants of Titingue are remarkably expert in spearing the whales from their slight canoes.” (Lloyd in J. R. G. S. XX. 56.) A description of the whale-catching process practised by the Islanders of St. Mary’s, or Nusi Ibrahim, is given in the Quinta Pars Indiae Orientalis of De Bry, p. 9. Owen gives a similar account (I. 170).

The word which I have rendered Oil-heads is Capdoilles or Capdols, representing Capidoglio, the appropriate name still applied in Italy to the Spermaceti whale. The Vocab. Ital. Univ. quotes Ariosto (VII. 36):—

—“I Capidogli co’ vecchi marini Vengon turbati dal lor pigro sonno.”

The Spermaceti-whale is described under this name by Rondeletius, but from his cut it is clear he had not seen the animal.

NOTE 4.—De Barros, after describing the dangers of the Channel of Mozambique, adds: “And as the Moors of this coast of Zanguebar make their voyages in ships and sambuks sewn with coir, instead of being nailed like ours, and thus strong enough to bear the force of the cold seas of the region about the Cape of Good Hope, ... they never dared to attempt the exploration of the regions to the westward of the Cape of Currents, although they greatly desired to do so.” (Dec. I. viii. 4; and see also IV. i. 12.) Kazwini says of the Ocean, quoting Al Biruni: “Then it extends to the sea known as that of Berbera, and stretches from Aden to the furthest extremity of Zanjibar; beyond this goes no vessel on account of the great current. Then it extends to what are called the Mountains of the Moon, whence spring the sources of the Nile of Egypt, and thence to Western Sudan, to the Spanish Countries and the (Western) Ocean.” There has been recent controversy between Captain A. D. Taylor and Commodore Jansen of the Dutch navy, regarding the Mozambique currents, and (incidentally) Polo’s accuracy. The currents in the Mozambique Channel vary with the monsoons, but from Cape Corrientes southward along the coast runs the permanent Lagullas current, and Polo’s statement requires but little correction. (Ethé pp. 214–215; see also Barbosa in Ram. I. 288; Owen, I. 269; Stanley’s Correa, p. 261; J. R. G. S. II. 91; Fra Mauro in Zurla, p. 61; see also Reinaud’s Abulfeda, vol. i. pp. 15–16; and Ocean Highways, August to November, 1873.)

NOTE 5.—The fable of the RUKH was old and widely spread, like that of the Male and Female Islands, and, just as in that case, one accidental circumstance or another would give it a local habitation, now here now there. The Garuda of the Hindus, the Simurgh of the old Persians, the ’Angka of the Arabs, the Bar Yuchre of the Rabbinical legends, the Gryps of the Greeks, were probably all versions of the same original fable.

Bochart quotes a bitter Arabic proverb which says, “Good-Faith, the Ghul, and the Gryphon (’Angka) are three names of things that exist nowhere.” And Mas’udi, after having said that whatever country he visited he always found that the people believed these monstrous creatures to exist in regions as remote as possible from their own, observes: “It is not that our reason absolutely rejects the possibility of the existence of the Nesnás (see vol. i. p. 206) or of the ’Angka, and other beings of that rare and wondrous order; for there is nothing in their existence incompatible with the Divine Power; but we decline to believe in them because their existence has not been manifested to us on any irrefragable authority.”

The circumstance which for the time localized the Rukh in the direction of Madagascar was perhaps some rumour of the great fossil Aepyornis and its colossal eggs, found in that island. According to Geoffroy St. Hilaire, the Malagashes assert that the bird which laid those great eggs still exists, that it has an immense power of flight, and preys upon the greater quadrupeds. Indeed the continued existence of the bird has been alleged as late as 1861 and 1863!

On the great map of Fra Mauro (1459) near the extreme point of Africa which he calls Cavo de Diab, and which is suggestive of the Cape of Good Hope, but was really perhaps Cape Corrientes, there is a rubric inscribed with the following remarkable story: “About the year of Our Lord 1420 a ship or junk of India in crossing the Indian Sea was driven by way of the Islands of Men and Women beyond the Cape of Diab, and carried between the Green Islands and the Darkness in a westerly and south-westerly direction for 40 days, without seeing anything but sky and sea, during which time they made to the best of their judgment 2000 miles. The gale then ceasing they turned back, and were seventy days in getting to the aforesaid Cape Diab. The ship having touched on the coast to supply its wants, the mariners beheld there the egg of a certain bird called Chrocho, which egg was as big as a butt.[3] And the bigness of the bird is such that between the extremities of the wings is said to be 60 paces. They say too that it carries away an elephant or any other great animal with the greatest ease, and does great injury to the inhabitants of the country, and is most rapid in its flight.”

G.-St. Hilaire considered the Aepyornis to be of the Ostrich family; Prince C. Buonaparte classed it with the Inepti or Dodos; Duvernay of Valenciennes with aquatic birds! There was clearly therefore room for difference of opinion, and Professor Bianconi of Bologna, who has written much on the subject, concludes that it was most probably a bird of the vulture family. This would go far, he urges, to justify Polo’s account of the Ruc as a bird of prey, though the story of its lifting any large animal could have had no foundation, as the feet of the vulture kind are unfit for such efforts. Humboldt describes the habit of the condor of the Andes as that of worrying, wearying, and frightening its four-footed prey until it drops; sometimes the condor drives its victim over a precipice.

Bianconi concludes that on the same scale of proportion as the condor’s, the great quills of the Aepyornis would be about 10 feet long, and the spread of the wings about 32 feet, whilst the height of the bird would be at least four times that of the condor. These are indeed little more than conjectures. And I must add that in Professor Owen’s opinion there is no reasonable doubt that the Aepyornis was a bird allied to the Ostriches.

We gave, in the first edition of this work, a drawing of the great Aepyornis egg in the British Museum of its true size, as the nearest approach we could make to an illustration of the Rukh from nature. The actual contents of this egg will be about 2·35 gallons, which may be compared with Fra Mauro’s anfora! Except in this matter of size, his story of the ship and the egg may be true.

A passage from Temple’s Travels in Peru has been quoted as exhibiting exaggeration in the description of the condor surpassing anything that can be laid to Polo’s charge here; but that is, in fact, only somewhat heavy banter directed against our traveller’s own narrative. (See Travels in Various Parts of Peru, 1830, II. 414–417.)

Recently fossil bones have been found in New Zealand, which seem to bring us a step nearer to the realization of the Rukh. Dr. Haast discovered in a swamp at Glenmark in the province of Otago, along with remains of the Dinornis or Moa, some bones (femur, ungual phalanges, and rib) of a gigantic bird which he pronounces to be a bird of prey, apparently allied to the Harriers, and calls Harpagornis. He supposes it to have preyed upon the Moa, and as that fowl is calculated to have been 10 feet and upwards in height, we are not so very far from the elephant-devouring Rukh. (See Comptes Rendus, Ac. des Sciences 1872, p. 1782; and Ibis, October 1872, p. 433.) This discovery may possibly throw a new light on the traditions of the New Zealanders. For Professor Owen, in first describing the Dinornis in 1839, mentioned that the natives had a tradition that the bones belonged to a bird of the eagle kind. (See Eng. Cyc. Nat. Hist. sub. v. Dinornis.) And Sir Geo. Grey appears to have read a paper, 23rd October 1872,[4] which was the description by a Maori of the Hokiol, an extinct gigantic bird of prey of which that people have traditions come down from their ancestors, said to have been a black hawk of great size, as large as the Moa.

I have to thank Mr. Arthur Grote for a few words more on that most interesting subject, the discovery of a real fossil Ruc in New Zealand. He informs me (under date 4th December 1874) that Professor Owen is now working on the huge bones sent home by Dr. Haast, “and is convinced that they belonged to a bird of prey, probably (as Dr. Haast suggested) a Harrier, double the weight of the Moa, and quite capable therefore of preying on the young of that species. Indeed, he is disposed to attribute the extinction of the Harpagornis to that of the Moa, which was the only victim in the country which could supply it with a sufficiency of food.”

One is tempted to add that if the Moa or Dinornis of New Zealand had its Harpagornis scourge, the still greater Aepyornis of Madagascar may have had a proportionate tyrant, whose bones (and quills?) time may bring to light. And the description given by Sir Douglas Forsyth on page 542, of the action of the Golden Eagle of Kashgar in dealing with a wild boar, illustrates how such a bird as our imagined Harpagornis Aepyornithōn might master the larger pachydermata, even the elephant himself, without having to treat him precisely as the Persian drawing at p. 415 represents.

Sindbad’s adventures with the Rukh are too well known for quotation. A variety of stories of the same tenor hitherto unpublished, have been collected by M. Marcel Devic from an Arabic work of the 10th century on the “Marvels of Hind,” by an author who professes only to repeat the narratives of merchants and mariners whom he had questioned. A specimen of these will be found under Note 6. The story takes a peculiar form in the Travels of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela. He heard that when ships were in danger of being lost in the stormy sea that led to China the sailors were wont to sew themselves up in hides, and so when cast upon the surface they were snatched up by great eagles called gryphons, which carried their supposed prey ashore, etc. It is curious that this very story occurs in a Latin poem stated to be at least as old as the beginning of the 13th century, which relates the romantic adventures of a certain Duke Ernest of Bavaria; whilst the story embodies more than one other adventure belonging to the History of Sindbad.[5] The Duke and his comrades, navigating in some unknown ramification of the Euxine, fall within the fatal attraction of the Magnet Mountain. Hurried by this augmenting force, their ship is described as crashing through the rotten forest of masts already drawn to their doom:—

“Et ferit impulsus majoris verbere montem Quam si diplosas impingat machina turres.”

There they starve, and the dead are deposited on the lofty poop to be carried away by the daily visits of the gryphons:—

——“Quae grifae membra leonis Et pennas aquilae simulantes unguibus atris Tollentes miseranda suis dant prandia pullis.”

When only the Duke and six others survive, the wisest of the party suggests the scheme which Rabbi Benjamin has related:—

——“Quaeramus tergora, et armis Vestiti prius, optatis volvamur in illis, Ut nos tollentes mentita cadavera Grifae Pullis objiciant, a queis facientibus armis Et cute dissutâ, nos, si volet, Ille Deorum Optimus eripiet.”

Which scheme is successfully carried out. The wanderers then make a raft on which they embark on a river which plunges into a cavern in the heart of a mountain; and after a time they emerge in the country of Arimaspia inhabited by the Cyclopes; and so on. The Gryphon story also appears in the romance of Huon de Bordeaux, as well as in the tale called ‘Hasan of el-Basrah’ in Lane’s Version of the Arabian Nights.

It is in the China Seas that Ibn Batuta beheld the Rukh, first like a mountain in the sea where no mountain should be, and then “when the sun rose,” says he, “we saw the mountain aloft in the air, and the clear sky between it and the sea. We were in astonishment at this, and I observed that the sailors were weeping and bidding each other adieu, so I called out, ‘What is the matter?’ They replied, ‘What we took for a mountain is “the Rukh.” If it sees us, it will send us to destruction.’ It was then some 10 miles from the junk. But God Almighty was gracious unto us, and sent us a fair wind, which turned us from the direction in which the Rukh was; so we did not see him well enough to take cognizance of his real shape.” In this story we have evidently a case of abnormal refraction, causing an island to appear suspended in the air.[6]

The Archipelago was perhaps the legitimate habitat of the Rukh, before circumstances localised it in the direction of Madagascar. In the Indian Sea, says Kazwini, is a bird of size so vast that when it is dead men take the half of its bill and make a ship of it! And there too Pigafetta heard of this bird, under its Hindu name of Garuda, so big that it could fly away with an elephant.[7] Kazwini also says that the ’Angka carries off an elephant as a hawk flies off with a mouse; his flight is like the loud thunder. Whilom he dwelt near the haunts of men, and wrought them great mischief. But once on a time it had carried off a bride in her bridal array, and Hamd Allah, the Prophet of those days, invoked a curse upon the bird. Wherefore the Lord banished it to an inaccessible Island in the Encircling Ocean.

The Simurgh or ’Angka, dwelling behind veils of Light and Darkness on the inaccessible summits of Caucasus, is in Persian mysticism an emblem of the Almighty.

In Northern Siberia the people have a firm belief in the former existence of birds of colossal size, suggested apparently by the fossil bones of great pachyderms which are so abundant there. And the compressed sabre-like horns of Rhinoceros tichorinus are constantly called, even by Russian merchants, birds’ claws. Some of the native tribes fancy the vaulted skull of the same rhinoceros to be the bird’s head, and the leg-bones of other pachyderms to be its quills; and they relate that their forefathers used to fight wonderful battles with this bird. Erman ingeniously suggests that the Herodotean story of the Gryphons, from under which the Arimaspians drew their gold, grew out of the legends about these fossils.

I may add that the name of our rook in chess is taken from that of this same bird; though first perverted from (Sansk.) rath, a chariot.

Some Eastern authors make the Rukh an enormous beast instead of a bird. (See J. R. A. S. XIII. 64, and Elliot, II. 203.) A Spanish author of the 16th century seems to take the same view of the Gryphon, but he is prudently vague in describing it, which he does among the animals of Africa: “The Grifo which some call CAMELLO PARDAL ... is called by the Arabs Yfrit (!), and is made just in that fashion in which we see it painted in pictures.” (Marmol, Descripcion General de Africa, Granada, 1573, I. f. 30.) The Zorafa is described as a different beast, which it certainly is!

(Bochart, Hierozoica, II. 852 seqq.; Mas’udi, IV. 16; Mem. dell’Acad. dell’Instit. di Bologna, III. 174 seqq., V. 112 seqq.; Zurla on Fra Mauro, p. 62; Lane’s Arabian Nights, Notes on Sindbad; Benj. of Tudela, p. 117; De Varia Fortuna Ernesti Bavariae Ducis, in Thesaurus Novus Anecdotorum of Martene and Durand, vol. III. col. 353 seqq.; I. B. IV. 305; Gildem. p. 220; Pigafetta, p. 174; Major’s Prince Henry, p. 311; Erman, II. 88; Garcin de Tassy, La Poésie philos. etc., chez les Persans, 30 seqq.)

[In a letter to Sir Henry Yule, dated 24th March 1887, Sir (then Dr.) John Kirk writes: “I was speaking with the present Sultan of Zanzibar, Seyyed Barghash, about the great bird which the natives say exists, and in doing so I laughed at the idea. His Highness turned serious and said that indeed he believed it to be quite true that a great bird visited the Udoe country, and that it caused a great shadow to fall upon the country; he added that it let fall at times large rocks. Of course he did not pretend to know these things from his own experience, for he has never been inland, but he considered he had ample grounds to believe these stones from what he had been told of those who travelled. The Udoe country lies north of the River Wami opposite the island of Zanzibar and about two days going inland. The people are jealous of strangers and practise cannibalism in war. They are therefore little visited, and although near the coast we know little of them. The only members of their tribe I have known have been converted to Islam, and not disposed to say much of their native customs, being ashamed of them, while secretly still believing in them. The only thing I noticed was an idea that the tribe came originally from the West, from about Manyema; now the people of that part are cannibals, and cannibalism is almost unknown except among the Wadoe, nearer the east coast. It is also singular that the other story of a gigantic bird comes from near Manyema and that the whalebone that was passed off at Zanzibar as the wing of a bird, came, they said, from Tanganyika. As to rocks falling in East Africa, I think their idea might easily arise from the fall of meteoric stones.”]

[M. Alfred Grandidier (Hist. de la Géog. de Madagascar, p. 31) thinks that the Rukh is but an image; it is a personification of water-spouts, cyclones, and typhoons.—H. C.]

NOTE 6.—Sir Thomas Brown says that if any man will say he desires before belief to behold such a creature as is the Rukh in Paulus Venetus, for his own part he will not be angry with his incredulity. But M. Pauthier is of more liberal belief; for he considers that, after all, the dimensions which Marco assigns to the wings and quills of the Rukh are not so extravagant that we should refuse to admit their possibility.

Ludolf will furnish him with corroborative evidence, that of Padre Bolivar, a Jesuit, as communicated to Thévenot; the assigned position will suit well enough with Marco’s report: “The bird condor differs in size in different parts of the world. The greater species was seen by many of the Portuguese in their expedition against the Kingdoms of Sofala and Cuama and the Land of the Caffres from Monomotapa to the Kingdom of Angola and the Mountains of Teroa. In some countries I have myself seen the wing-feathers of that enormous fowl, although the bird itself I never beheld. The feather in question, as could be deduced from its form, was one of the middle ones, and it was 28 palms in length and three in breadth. The quill part, from the root to the extremity, was five palms in length, of the thickness of an average man’s arm, and of extreme strength and hardness. [M. Alfred Grandidier (Hist. de la Géog. de Madagascar, p. 25) thinks that the quill part of this feather was one of the bamboo shoots formerly brought to Yemen to be used as water-jars and called there feathers of Rukh, the Arabs looking upon these bamboo shoots as the quill part of the feathers of the Rukh.—H. C.] The fibres of the feather were equal in length and closely fitted, so that they could scarcely be parted without some exertion of force; and they were jet black, whilst the quill part was white. Those who had seen the bird stated that it was bigger than the bulk of a couple of elephants, and that hitherto nobody had succeeded in killing one. It rises to the clouds with such extraordinary swiftness that it seems scarcely to stir its wings. In form it is like an eagle. But although its size and swiftness are so extraordinary, it has much trouble in procuring food, on account of the density of the forests with which all that region is clothed. Its own dwelling is in cold and desolate tracts such as the Mountains of Teroa, i.e. of the Moon; and in the valleys of that range it shows itself at certain periods. Its black feathers are held in very high estimation, and it is with the greatest difficulty that one can be got from the natives, for one such serves to fan ten people, and to keep off the terrible heat from them, as well as the wasps and flies” (Ludolf, Hist. Aethiop. Comment. p. 164.)

Abu Mahomed, of Spain, relates that a merchant arrived in Barbary who had lived long among the Chinese. He had with him the quill of a chick Rukh, and this held nine skins of water. He related the story of how he came by this,—a story nearly the same as one of Sindbad’s about the Rukh’s egg. (Bochart, II. 854.)

Another story of a seaman wrecked on the coast of Africa is among those collected by M. Marcel Devic. By a hut that stood in the middle of a field of rice and durra there was a trough. “A man came up leading a pair of oxen, laden with 12 skins of water, and emptied these into the trough. I drew near to drink, and found the trough to be polished like a steel blade, quite different from either glass or pottery. ‘It is the hollow of a quill,’ said the man. I would not believe a word of the sort, until, after rubbing it inside and outside, I found it to be transparent, and to retain the traces of the barbs.” (Comptes Rendus, etc., ut supra; and Livre des Merveilles de l’Inde, p. 99.)

Fr. Jordanus also says: “In this India Tertia (Eastern Africa) are certain birds which are called Roc, so big that they easily carry an elephant up into the air. I have seen a certain person who said that he had seen one of those birds, one wing only of which stretched to a length of 80 palms” (p. 42).

The Japanese Encyclopædia states that in the country of the Tsengsz’ (Zinjis) in the South-West Ocean, there is a bird called pheng, which in its flight eclipses the sun. It can swallow a camel; and its quills are used for water-casks. This was probably got from the Arabs. (J. As., sér. 2, tom. xii. 235–236.)

I should note that the Geog. Text in the first passage where the feathers are spoken of says: “e ce qe je en vi voz dirai en autre leu, por ce qe il convient ensi faire à nostre livre,”—“that which I have seen of them I will tell you elsewhere, as it suits the arrangement of our book.” No such other detail is found in that text, but we have in Ramusio this passage about the quill brought to the Great Kaan, and I suspect that the phrase, “as I have heard,” is an interpolation, and that Polo is here telling ce qe il en vit. What are we to make of the story? I have sometimes thought that possibly some vegetable production, such as a great frond of the Ravenala, may have been cooked to pass as a Rukh’s quill. [See App. L.]

NOTE 7.—The giraffes are an error. The Eng. Cyc. says that wild asses and zebras (?) do exist in Madagascar, but I cannot trace authority for this.

The great boar’s teeth were indubitably hippopotamus-teeth, which form a considerable article of export from Zanzibar[8] (not Madagascar). Burton speaks of their reaching 12 lbs in weight. And Cosmas tells us: “The hippopotamus I have not seen indeed, but I had some great teeth of his that weighed thirteen pounds, which I sold here (in Alexandria). And I have seen many such teeth in Ethiopia and in Egypt.” (See J. R. G. S. XXIX. 444; Cathay, p. clxxv.)

---------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Bretschneider, On the knowledge possessed by the Ancient Chinese of the Arabs, etc. London, 1871, p. 21.

[2] Mas’udi speaks of an island Ḳanbălú, well cultivated and populous, one or two days from the Zinj coast, and the object of voyages from Oman, from which it was about 500 parasangs distant. It was conquered by the Arabs, who captured the whole Zinj population of the island, about the beginning of the Abasside Dynasty (circa A.D. 750). Barbier de Meynard thinks this may be Madagascar. I suspect it rather to be Pemba. (See Prairies d’Or, I. 205, 232, and III. 31.)Return to passage

[3] “De la grandeza de una bota d’anfora.” The lowest estimate that I find of the Venetian anfora makes it equal to about 108 imperial gallons, a little less than the English butt. This seems intended. The ancient amphora would be more reasonable, being only 5·66 gallons.Return to passage

[4] The friend who noted this for me, omitted to name the Society.Return to passage

[5] I got the indication of this poem, I think, in Bochart. But I have since observed that its coincidences with Sindbad are briefly noticed by Mr. Lane (ed. 1859, III. 78) from an article in the “Foreign Quarterly Review.”Return to passage

[6] An intelligent writer, speaking of such effects on the same sea, says: “The boats floating on a calm sea, at a distance from the ship, were magnified to a great size; the crew standing up in them appeared as masts or trees, and their arms in motion as the wings of windmills; whilst the surrounding islands (especially at their low and tapered extremities) seemed to be suspended in the air, some feet above the ocean’s level.” (Bennett’s Whaling Voyage, II. 71–72.)Return to passage

[7] An epithet of the Garuda is Gajakúrmásin, “elephant-cum-tortoise-devourer,” because said to have swallowed both when engaged in a contest with each other.Return to passage

[8] The name as pronounced seems to have been Zangibár (hard g), which polite Arabic changed into Zanjibár, whence the Portuguese made Zanzibar.Return to passage

Chapter XXXIV

CONCERNING THE ISLAND OF ZANGHIBAR. A WORD ON INDIA IN GENERAL.

Zanghibar is a great and noble Island, with a compass of some 2000 miles.{1} The people are all Idolaters, and have a king and a language of their own, and pay tribute to nobody. They are both tall and stout, but not tall in proportion to their stoutness, for if they were, being so stout and brawny, they would be absolutely like giants; and they are so strong that they will carry for four men and eat for five.

They are all black, and go stark naked, with only a little covering for decency. Their hair is as black as pepper, and so frizzly that even with water you can scarcely straighten it. And their mouths are so large, their noses so turned up, their lips so thick, their eyes so big and bloodshot, that they look like very devils; they are in fact so hideously ugly that the world has nothing to show more horrible.

Elephants are produced in this country in wonderful profusion. There are also lions that are black and quite different from ours. And their sheep and wethers are all exactly alike in colour; the body all white and the head black; no other kind of sheep is found there, you may rest assured.{2} They have also many giraffes. This is a beautiful creature, and I must give you a description of it. Its body is short and somewhat sloped to the rear, for its hind legs are short whilst the fore-legs and the neck are both very long, and thus its head stands about three paces from the ground. The head is small, and the animal is not at all mischievous. Its colour is all red and white in round spots, and it is really a beautiful object.{3}

** The women of this Island are the ugliest in the world, with their great mouths and big eyes and thick noses; their breasts too are four times bigger than those of any other women; a very disgusting sight.

The people live on rice and flesh and milk and dates; and they make wine of dates and of rice and of good spices and sugar. There is a great deal of trade, and many merchants and vessels go thither. But the staple trade of the Island is in elephants’ teeth, which are very abundant; and they have also much ambergris, as whales are plentiful.{4}

They have among them excellent and valiant warriors, and have little fear of death. They have no horses, but fight mounted on camels and elephants. On the latter they set wooden castles which carry from ten to sixteen persons, armed with lances, swords, and stones, so that they fight to great purpose from these castles. They wear no armour, but carry only a shield of hide, besides their swords and lances, and so a marvellous number of them fall in battle. When they are going to take an elephant into battle they ply him well with their wine, so that he is made half drunk. They do this because the drink makes him more fierce and bold, and of more service in battle.{5}

As there is no more to say on this subject I will go on to tell you about the Great Province of ABASH, which constitutes the MIDDLE INDIA;—but I must first say something about India in general.

You must understand that in speaking of the Indian Islands we have described only the most noble provinces and kingdoms among them; for no man on earth could give you a true account of the whole of the Islands of India. Still, what I have described are the best, and as it were the Flower of the Indies. For the greater part of the other Indian Islands that I have omitted are subject to those that I have described. It is a fact that in this Sea of India there are 12,700 Islands, inhabited and uninhabited, according to the charts and documents of experienced mariners who navigate that Indian Sea.{6}

INDIA THE GREATER is that which extends from Maabar to Kesmacoran; and it contains 13 great kingdoms, of which we have described ten. These are all on the mainland.

INDIA THE LESSER extends from the Province of Champa to Mutfili, and contains eight great kingdoms. These are likewise all on the mainland. And neither of these numbers includes the Islands, among which also there are very numerous kingdoms, as I have told you.{7}

NOTE 1.—ZANGIBAR, “the Region of the Blacks,” known to the ancients as Zingis and Zingium. The name was applied by the Arabs, according to De Barros, to the whole stretch of coast from the Kilimanchi River, which seems to be the Jubb, to Cape Corrientes beyond the Southern Tropic, i.e. as far as Arab traffic extended; Burton says now from the Jubb to Cape Delgado. According to Abulfeda, the King of Zinjis dwelt at Mombasa. In recent times the name is by Europeans almost appropriated to the Island on which resides the Sultan of the Maskat family, to whom Sir B. Frere lately went as envoy. Our author’s “Island” has no reference to this; it is an error simply.

Our traveller’s information is here, I think, certainly at second hand, though no doubt he had seen the negroes whom he describes with such disgust, and apparently the sheep and the giraffes.

NOTE 2.—These sheep are common at Aden, whither they are imported from the opposite African coast. They have hair like smooth goats, no wool. Varthema also describes them (p. 87). In the Cairo Museum, among ornaments found in the mummy-pits, there is a little figure of one of these sheep, the head and neck in some blue stone and the body in white agate. (Note by Author of the sketch on next page.)

NOTE 3.—A giraffe—made into a seraph by the Italians—had been frequently seen in Italy in the early part of the century, there being one in the train of the Emperor Frederic II. Another was sent by Bibars to the Imperial Court in 1261, and several to Barka Khan at Sarai in 1263; whilst the King of Nubia was bound by treaty in 1275 to deliver to the Sultan three elephants, three giraffes, and five she-panthers. (Kington, I. 471; Makrizi, I. 216; II. 106, 108.) The giraffe is sometimes wrought in the patterns of mediæval Saracenic damasks, and in Sicilian ones imitated from the former. Of these there are examples in the Kensington Collection.

I here omit a passage about the elephant. It recounts an old and long-persistent fable, exploded by Sir T. Brown, and indeed before him by the sensible Garcia de Orta.

NOTE 4.—The port of Zanzibar is probably the chief ivory mart in the world. Ambergris is mentioned by Burton among miscellaneous exports, but it is not now of any consequence. Owen speaks of it as brought for sale at Delagoa Bay in the south.

NOTE 5.—Mas’udi more correctly says: “The country abounds with wild elephants, but you don’t find a single tame one. The Zinjes employ them neither in war nor otherwise, and if they hunt them ’tis only to kill them” (III. 7). It is difficult to conceive how Marco could have got so much false information. The only beast of burden in Zanzibar, at least north of Mozambique, is the ass. His particulars seem jumbled from various parts of Africa. The camel-riders suggest the Bejas of the Red Sea coast, of whom there were in Mas’udi’s time 30,000 warriors so mounted, and armed with lances and bucklers (III. 34). The elephant stories may have arisen from the occasional use of these animals by the Kings of Abyssinia. (See Note 4 to next chapter.)

NOTE 6.—An approximation to 12,000 as a round number seems to have been habitually used in reference to the Indian Islands; John of Montecorvino says they are many more than 12,000; Jordanus had heard that there were 10,000 inhabited. Linschoten says some estimated the Maldives at 11,100. And we learn from Pyrard de Laval that the Sultan of the Maldives called himself Ibrahim Sultan of Thirteen Atollons (or coral groups) and of 12,000 Islands! This is probably the origin of the proverbial number. Ibn Batuta, in his excellent account of the Maldives, estimates them at only about 2000. But Captain Owen, commenting on Pyrard, says that he believes the actual number of islands to be treble or fourfold of 12,000. (P. de Laval in Charton, IV. 255; I. B. IV. 40; J. R. G. S. II. 84.)

NOTE 7.—The term “India” became very vague from an early date. In fact, Alcuin divides the whole world into three parts, Europe, Africa, and India. Hence it was necessary to discriminate different Indias, but there is very little agreement among different authors as to this discrimination.

The earliest use that I can find of the terms India Major and Minor is in the Liber Junioris Philosophi published by Hudson, and which is believed to be translated from a lost Greek original of the middle of the 4th century. In this author India Minor adjoins Persia. So it does with Friar Jordanus. His India Minor appears to embrace Sind (possibly Mekran), and the western coast exclusive of Malabar. India Major extends from Malabar indefinitely eastward. His India Tertia is Zanjibar. The Three Indies appear in a map contained in a MS. by Guido Pisanus, written in 1118. Conti divides India into three: (1) From Persia to the Indus (i.e. Mekran and Sind); (2) From the Indus to the Ganges; (3) All that is beyond Ganges (Indo-China and China).

In a map of Andrea Bianco at Venice (No. 12) the divisions are—(1) India Minor, extending westward to the Persian Gulf; (2) India Media, “containing 14 regions and 12 nations;” and (3) India Superior, containing 8 regions and 24 nations.

Marino Sanuto places immediately east of the Persian Gulf “India Minor quae et Ethiopia.”

John Marignolli again has three Indias: (1) Manzi or India Maxima (S. China); (2) Mynibar (Malabar); (3) Maabar. The last two with Guzerat are Abulfeda’s divisions, exclusive of Sind.

We see that there was a traditional tendency to make out Three Indies, but little concord as to their identity. With regard to the expressions Greater and Lesser India, I would recall attention to what has been said about Greater and Lesser Java (supra, chap. ix. note 1). Greater India was originally intended, I imagine, for the real India, what our maps call Hindustan. And the threefold division, with its inclination to place one of the Indies in Africa, I think may have originated with the Arab Hind, Sind, and Zinj. I may add that our vernacular expression “the Indies” is itself a vestige of the twofold or threefold division of which we have been speaking.

The partition of the Indies made by King Sebastian of Portugal in 1571, when he constituted his eastern possessions into three governments, recalled the old division into Three Indias. The first, INDIA, extending from Cape Gardafui to Ceylon, stood in a general way for Polo’s India Major; the second MONOMOTAPA, from Gardafui to Cape Corrientes (India Tertia of Jordanus); the third MALACCA, from Pegu to China (India Minor). (Faria y Souza, II. 319.)

Polo’s knowledge of India, as a whole, is so little exact that it is too indefinite a problem to consider which are the three kingdoms that he has not described. The ten which he has described appear to be—(1) Maabar, (2) Coilum, (3) Comari, (4) Eli, (5) Malabar, (6) Guzerat, (7) Tana, (8) Canbaet, (9) Semenat, (10) Kesmacoran. On the one hand, this distribution in itself contains serious misapprehensions, as we have seen, and on the other there must have been many dozens of kingdoms in India Major instead of 13, if such states as Comari, Hili, and Somnath were to be separately counted. Probably it was a common saying that there were 12 kings in India, and the fact of his having himself described so many, which he knew did not nearly embrace the whole, may have made Polo convert this into 13. Jordanus says: “In this Greater India are 12 idolatrous kings and more;” but his Greater India is much more extensive than Polo’s. Those which he names are Molebar (probably the kingdom of the Zamorin of Calicut), Singuyli (Cranganor), Columbum (Quilon), Molephatan (on the east coast, uncertain, see above pp. 333, 391), and Sylen (Ceylon), Java, three or four kings, Telenc (Polo’s Mutfili), Maratha (Deogir), Batigala (in Canara), and in Champa (apparently put for all Indo-China) many kings. According to Firishta there were about a dozen important principalities in India at the time of the Mahomedan conquest of which he mentions eleven, viz.: (1) Kanauj, (2) Mírat (or Delhi), (3) Mahávan (Mathra), (4) Lahore, (5) Malwa, (6) Guzerat, (7) Ajmir, (8) Gwalior, (9) Kalinjar, (10) Multán, (11) Ujjain. (Ritter, V. 535.) This omits Bengal, Orissa, and all the Deccan. Twelve is a round number which constantly occurs in such statements. Ibn Batuta tells us there were 12 princes in Malabar alone. Chinghiz, in Sanang-Setzen, speaks of his vow to subdue the twelve kings of the human race (91). Certain figures in a temple at Anhilwara in Guzerat are said by local tradition to be the effigies of the twelve great kings of Europe. (Todd’s Travels, p. 107.) The King of Arakan used to take the title of “Lord of the 12 provinces of Bengal” (Reinaud, Inde, p. 139.)

The Masálak-al-Absár of Shihabuddin Dimishki, written some forty years after Polo’s book, gives a list of the provinces (twice twelve in number) into which India was then considered to be divided. It runs—(1) Delhi, (2) Deogír, (3) Multán, (4) Kehran (Kohrám, in Sirhind Division of Province of Delhi?), (5) Sámán (Samána, N.W. of Delhi?), (6) Siwastán (Sehwán), (7) Ujah (Uchh), (8) Hási (Hansi), (9) Sarsati (Sirsa), (10) Ma’bar, (11) Tiling, (12) Gujerat, (13) Badáún, (14) Audh, (15) Kanauj, (16) Laknaoti (Upper Bengal), (17) Bahár, (18) Karráh (in the Doáb), (19) Maláwa, (Málwa), (20) Lahaur, (21) Kálánúr (in the Bári Doáb, above Lahore), (22) Jájnagar (according to Elphinstone, Tipura in Bengal), (23) Tilinj (a repetition or error), (24) Dursamand (Dwara Samudra, the kingdom of the Belláls in Mysore). Neither Malabar nor Orissa is accounted for. (See Not. et Ext. XIII. 170). Another list, given by the historian Zíá-uddín Barni some years later, embraces again only twelve provinces. These are (1) Delhi, (2) Gujerat, (3) Málwah, (4) Deogír, (5) Tiling, (6) Kampilah (in the Doáb, between Koil and Farakhábád), (7) Dur Samandar, (8) Ma’bar, (9) Tirhut, (10) Lakhnaoti, (11) Satgánw, (12) Sunárgánw (these two last forming the Western and Eastern portions of Lower Bengal).[1]

---------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] E. Thomas, Chronicles of the Pathán Kings of Delhi, p. 203.

Chapter XXXV

TREATING OF THE GREAT PROVINCE OF ABASH WHICH IS MIDDLE INDIA, AND IS ON THE MAINLAND.

Abash is a very great Province, and you must know that it constitutes the MIDDLE INDIA; and it is on the mainland. There are in it six great Kings with six great Kingdoms; and of these six Kings there are three that are Christians and three that are Saracens; but the greatest of all the six is a Christian, and all the others are subject to him.{1}

The Christians in this country bear three marks on the face;{2} one from the forehead to the middle of the nose, and one on either cheek. These marks are made with a hot iron, and form part of their baptism; for after that they have been baptised with water, these three marks are made, partly as a token of gentility, and partly as the completion of their baptism. There are also Jews in the country, and these bear two marks, one on either cheek; and the Saracens have but one, to wit, on the forehead extending halfway down the nose.

The Great King lives in the middle of the country, the Saracens towards Aden. St. Thomas the Apostle preached in this region, and after he had converted the people he went away to the province of Maabar, where he died; and there his body lies, as I have told you in a former place.

The people here are excellent soldiers, and they go on horseback, for they have horses in plenty. Well they may; for they are in daily war with the Soldan of ADEN, and with the Nubians, and a variety of other nations.{3} I will tell you a famous story of what befel in the year of Christ, 1288.

You must know that this Christian King, who is the Lord of the Province of Abash, declared his intention to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem to adore the Holy Sepulchre of Our Lord God Jesus Christ the Saviour. But his Barons said that for him to go in person would be to run too great a risk; and they recommended him to send some bishop or prelate in his stead. So the King assented to the counsel which his Barons gave, and despatched a certain Bishop of his, a man of very holy life. The Bishop then departed and travelled by land and by sea till he arrived at the Holy Sepulchre, and there he paid it such honour as Christian man is bound to do, and presented a great offering on the part of his King who had sent him in his own stead.

And when he had done all that behoved him, he set out again and travelled day by day till he got to Aden. Now that is a Kingdom wherein Christians are held in great detestation, for the people are all Saracens, and their enemies unto the death. So when the Soldan of Aden heard that this man was a Christian and a Bishop, and an envoy of the Great King of Abash, he had him seized and demanded of him if he were a Christian? To this the Bishop replied that he was a Christian indeed. The Soldan then told him that unless he would turn to the Law of Mahommet he should work him great shame and dishonour. The Bishop answered that they might kill him ere he would deny his Creator.

When the Soldan heard that he waxed wroth, and ordered that the Bishop should be circumcised. So they took and circumcised him after the manner of the Saracens. And then the Soldan told him that he had been thus put to shame in despite to the King his master. And so they let him go.

The Bishop was sorely cut to the heart for the shame that had been wrought him, but he took comfort because it had befallen him in holding fast by the Law of Our Lord Jesus Christ; and the Lord God would recompense his soul in the world to come.

So when he was healed he set out and travelled by land and by sea till he reached the King his Lord in the Kingdom of Abash. And when the King beheld him, he welcomed him with great joy and gladness. And he asked him all about the Holy Sepulchre; and the Bishop related all about it truly, the King listening the while as to a most holy matter in all faith. But when the Bishop had told all about Jerusalem, he then related the outrage done on him by the Soldan of Aden in the King’s despite. Great was the King’s wrath and grief when he heard that; and it so disturbed him that he was like to die of vexation. And at length his words waxed so loud that all those round about could hear what he was saying. He vowed that he would never wear crown or hold kingdom if he took not such condign vengeance on the Soldan of Aden that all the world should ring therewithal, even until the insult had been well and thoroughly redressed.

And what shall I say of it? He straightway caused the array of his horse and foot to be mustered, and great numbers of elephants with castles to be prepared to accompany them;{4} and when all was ready he set out with his army and advanced till he entered the Kingdom of Aden in great force. The Kings of this province of Aden were well aware of the King’s advance against them, and went to encounter him at the strongest pass on their frontier, with a great force of armed men, in order to bar the enemy from entering their territory. When the King arrived at this strong pass where the Saracens had taken post, a battle began, fierce and fell on both sides, for they were very bitter against each other. But it came to pass, as it pleased our Lord God Jesus Christ, that the Kings of the Saracens, who were three in number, could not stand against the Christians, for they are not such good soldiers as the Christians are. So the Saracens were defeated, and a marvellous number of them slain, and the King of Abash entered the Kingdom of Aden with all his host. The Saracens made various sallies on them in the narrow defiles, but it availed nothing; they were always beaten and slain. And when the King had greatly wasted and destroyed the kingdom of his enemy, and had remained in it more than a month with all his host, continually slaying the Saracens, and ravaging their lands (so that great numbers of them perished), he thought it time to return to his own kingdom, which he could now do with great honour. Indeed he could tarry no longer, nor could he, as he was aware, do more injury to the enemy; for he would have had to force a way by still stronger passes, where, in the narrow defiles, a handful of men might cause him heavy loss. So he quitted the enemy’s Kingdom of Aden and began to retire. And he with his host got back to their own country of Abash in great triumph and rejoicing; for he had well avenged the shame cast on him and on his Bishop for his sake. For they had slain so many Saracens, and so wasted and harried the land, that ’twas something to be astonished at. And in sooth ’twas a deed well done! For it is not to be borne that the dogs of Saracens should lord it over good Christian people! Now you have heard the story.{5}

I have still some particulars to tell you of the same province. It abounds greatly in all kinds of victual; and the people live on flesh and rice and milk and sesame. They have plenty of elephants, not that they are bred in the country, but they are brought from the Islands of the other India. They have however many giraffes, which are produced in the country; besides bears, leopards, lions in abundance, and many other passing strange beasts. They have also numerous wild asses; and cocks and hens the most beautiful that exist, and many other kind of birds. For instance, they have ostriches that are nearly as big as asses; and plenty of beautiful parrots, with apes of sundry kinds, and baboons and other monkeys that have countenances all but human.{6}

There are numerous cities and villages in this province of Abash, and many merchants; for there is much trade to be done there. The people also manufacture very fine buckrams and other cloths of cotton.

There is no more to say on the subject; so now let us go forward and tell you of the province of Aden.

NOTE 1.—Abash (Abasce) is a close enough representation of the Arabic Ḥabsh or Ḥabash, i.e. Abyssinia. He gives as an alternative title Middle India. I am not aware that the term India is applied to Abyssinia by any Oriental (Arabic or Persian) writer, and one feels curious to know where our Traveller got the appellation. We find nearly the same application of the term in Benjamin of Tudela:

“Eight days from thence is Middle India, which is Aden, and in Scripture Eden in Thelasar. This country is very mountainous, and contains many independent Jews who are not subject to the power of the Gentiles, but possess cities and fortresses on the summits of the mountains, from whence they descend into the country of Maatum, with which they are at war. Maatum, called also Nubia, is a Christian kingdom and the inhabitants are called Nubians,” etc. (p. 117). Here the Rabbi seems to transfer Aden to the west of the Red Sea (as Polo also seems to do in this chapter); for the Jews warring against Nubian Christians must be sought in the Falasha strongholds among the mountains of Abyssinia. His Middle India is therefore the same as Polo’s or nearly so. In Jordanus, as already mentioned, we have India Tertia, which combines some characters of Abyssinia and Zanjibar, but is distinguished from the Ethiopia of Prester John, which adjoins it.

But for the occurrence of the name in R. Benjamin I should have supposed the use of it to have been of European origin and current at most among Oriental Christians and Frank merchants. The European confusion of India and Ethiopia comes down from Virgil’s time, who brings the Nile from India. And Servius (4th century) commenting on a more ambiguous passage—

——“_Sola India nigrum Fert ebenum_,”

says explicitly “Indiam omnem plagam Æthiopiæ accipimus.” Procopius brings the Nile into Egypt ἐξ Ἰνδῶν; and the Ecclesiastical Historians Sozomen and Socrates (I take these citations, like the last, from Ludolf), in relating the conversion of the Abyssinians by Frumentius, speak of them only as of the Ἰνδῶν τῶν ἐνδοτέρω, “Interior Indians,” a phrase intended to imply remoter, but which might perhaps give rise to the term Middle India. Thus Cosmas says of China: “ἧς ἐνδοτέρω, there is no other country”; and Nicolo Conti calls the Chinese Interiores Indi, which Mr. Winter Jones misrenders “natives of Central India.”[1] St. Epiphanius (end of 4th century) says India was formerly divided into nine kingdoms, viz., those of the (1) Alabastri, (2) Homeritae, (3) Azumiti, and Dulites, (4) Bugaei, (5) Taiani, (6) Isabeni, and so on, several of which are manifestly provinces subject to Abyssinia.[2] Roger Bacon speaks of the “Ethiopes de Nubiâ et ultimi illi qui vocantur Indi, propter approximationem ad Indiam.” The term India Minor is applied to some Ethiopic region in a letter which Matthew Paris gives under 1237. And this confusion which prevailed more or less till the 16th century was at the bottom of that other confusion, whatever be its exact history, between Prester John in remote Asia, and Prester John in Abyssinia. In fact the narrative by Damian de Goës of the Embassy from the King of Abyssinia to Portugal in 1513, which was printed at Antwerp in 1532, bears the title “Legatio Magni Indorum Imperatoris,” etc. (Ludolf, Comment. p. 2 and 75–76; Epiph. de Gemmis, etc., p. 15; R. Bacon, Opus Majus, p. 148; Matt. Paris, p. 372.)

Wadding gives a letter from the Pope (Alex. II.) under date 3rd Sept. 1329, addressed to the Emperor of Ethiopia, to inform him of the appointment of a Bishop of Diagorgan. As this place is the capital of a district near Tabriz (Dehi-Khorkhán); the papal geography looks a little hazy.

NOTE 2.—The allegation against the Abyssinian Christians, sometimes extended to the whole Jacobite Church, that they accompanied the rite of Baptism by branding with a hot iron on the face, is pretty old and persistent.

The letter quoted from Matt. Paris in the preceding note relates of the Jacobite Christians “who occupy the kingdoms between Nubia and India,” that some of them brand the foreheads of their children before Baptism with a hot iron (p. 302). A quaint Low-German account of the East, in a MS. of the 14th century, tells of the Christians of India that when a Bishop ordains a priest he fires him with a sharp and hot iron from the forehead down the nose, and the scar of this wound abides till the day of his death. And this they do for a token that the Holy Ghost came on the Apostles with fire. Frescobaldi says those called the Christians of the Girdle were the sect which baptized by branding on the head and temples. Clavijo says there is such a sect among the Christians of India, but they are despised by the rest. Barbosa, speaking of the Abyssinians, has this passage: “According to what is said, their baptism is threefold, viz., by blood, by fire, and by water. For they use circumcision like the Jews, they brand on the forehead with a hot iron, and they baptize with water like Catholic Christians.” The respectable Pierre Belon speaks of the Christians of Prester John, called Abyssinians, as baptized with fire and branded in three places, i.e. between the eyes and on either cheek. Linschoten repeats the like, and one of his plates is entitled Habitus Abissinorum quibus loco Baptismatis frons inuritur. Ariosto, referring to the Emperor of Ethiopia, has:—

“_Gli è, s’io non piglio errore, in questo loco Ove al battesimo loro usano il fuoco._”

As late as 1819 the traveller Dupré published the same statement about the Jacobites generally. And so sober and learned a man as Assemani, himself an Oriental, says: “Æthiopes vero, seu Abissini, praeter circumcisionem adhibent etiam ferrum candens, quo pueris notam inurunt.”

Yet Ludolf’s Abyssinian friend, Abba Gregory, denied that there was any such practice among them. Ludolf says it is the custom of various African tribes, both Pagan and Mussulman, to cauterize their children in the veins of the temples, in order to inure them against colds, and that this, being practised by some Abyssinians, was taken for a religious rite. In spite of the terms “Pagan and Mussulman,” I suspect that Herodotus was the authority for this practice. He states that many of the nomad Libyans, when their children reached the age of four, used to burn the veins at the top of the head with a flock of wool; others burned the veins about the temples. And this they did, he says, to prevent their being troubled with rheum in after life.

Indeed Andrea Corsali denies that the branding had aught to do with baptism, “but only to observe Solomon’s custom of marking his slaves, the King of Ethiopia claiming to be descended from him.” And it is remarkable that Salt mentions that most of the people of Dixan had a cross marked (i.e. branded) on the breast, right arm, or forehead. This he elsewhere explains as a mark of their attachment to the ancient metropolitan church of Axum, and he supposes that such a practice may have originated the stories of fire-baptism. And we find it stated in Marino Sanudo that “some of the Jacobites and Syrians who had crosses branded on them said this was done for the destruction of the Pagans, and out of reverence to the Holy Rood.” Matthew Paris, commenting on the letter quoted above, says that many of the Jacobites before baptism brand their children on the forehead with a hot iron, whilst others brand a cross upon the cheeks or temples. He had seen such marks also on the arms of both Jacobites and Syrians who dwelt among the Saracens. It is clear, from Salt, that such branding was practised by many Abyssinians, and that to a recent date, though it may have been entirely detached from baptism. A similar practice is followed at Dwárika and Koteswar (on the old Indus mouth, now called Lakpat River), where the Hindu pilgrims to these sacred sites are branded with the mark of the god.

(Orient und Occident, Göttingen, 1862, I. 453; Frescob. 114; Clavijo, 163; Ramus. I. f. 290, v., f. 184; Marin. Sanud. 185, and Bk. iii. pt. viii. ch. iv.; Clusius, Exotica, pt. ii. p. 142; Orland. Fur. XXXIII. st. 102; Voyage en Perse, dans les Années 1807–1809; Assemani, II. c.; Ludolf, iii. 6, § 41; Salt, in Valentia’s Trav. II. p. 505, and his Second Journey, French Tr., II. 219; M. Paris, p. 373; J. R. A. S. I. 42.)

NOTE 3.—It is pretty clear from what follows (as Marsden and others have noted) that the narrative requires us to conceive of the Sultan of Aden as dominant over the territory between Abyssinia and the sea, or what was in former days called ADEL, between which and Aden confusion seems to have been made. I have noticed in Note 1 the appearance of this confusion in R. Benjamin; and I may add that also in the Map of Marino Sanudo Aden is represented on the western shore of the Red Sea. But is it not possible that in the origin of the Mahomedan States of Adel the Sultan of Aden had some power over them? For we find in the account of the correspondence between the King of Abyssinia and Sultan Bibars, quoted in the next Note but one, that the Abyssinian letters and presents for Egypt were sent to the Sultan of Yemen or Aden to be forwarded.

NOTE 4.—This passage is not authoritative enough to justify us in believing that the mediæval Abyssinians or Nubians did use elephants in war, for Marco has already erred in ascribing that practice to the Blacks of Zanjibar.

There can indeed be no doubt that elephants from the countries on the west of the Red Sea were caught and tamed and used for war, systematically and on a great scale, by the second and third Ptolemies, and the latter (Euergetes) has commemorated this, and his own use of Troglodytic and Ethiopic elephants, and the fact of their encountering the elephants of India, in the Adulitic Inscription recorded by Cosmas.

This author however, who wrote about A.D. 545, and had been at the Court of Axum, then in its greatest prosperity, says distinctly: “The Ethiopians do not understand the art of taming elephants; but if their King should want one or two for show they catch them young, and bring them up in captivity.” Hence, when we find a few years later (A.D. 570) that there was one great elephant, and some say thirteen elephants,[3] employed in the army which Abraha, the Abyssinian Ruler of Yemen led against Mecca, an expedition famous in Arabian history as the War of the Elephant, we are disposed to believe that these must have been elephants imported from India. There is indeed a notable statement quoted by Ritter, which if trustworthy would lead to another conclusion: “Already in the 20th year of the Hijra (A.D. 641) had the Nubas and Bejas hastened to the help of the Greek Christians of Oxyrhynchus (Bahnasa of the Arabs) ... against the first invasion of the Mahommedans, and according to the exaggerated representations of the Arabian Annalists, the army which they brought consisted of 50,000 men and 1300 war-elephants.”[4] The Nubians certainly must have tamed elephants on some scale down to a late period in the Middle Ages, for elephants,—in one case three annually,—formed a frequent part of the tribute paid by Nubia to the Mahomedan sovereigns of Egypt at least to the end of the 13th century; but the passage quoted is too isolated to be accepted without corroboration. The only approach to such a corroboration that I know of is a statement by Poggio in the matter appended to his account of Conti’s Travels. He there repeats some information derived from the Abyssinian envoys who visited Pope Eugenius IV. about 1440, and one of his notes is: “They have elephants very large and in great numbers; some kept for ostentation or pleasure, some as useful in war. They are hunted; the old ones killed, the young ones taken and tamed.” But the facts on which this was founded probably amounted to no more than what Cosmas had stated. I believe no trustworthy authority since the Portuguese discoveries confirms the use of the elephant in Abyssinia;[5] and Ludolf, whose information was excellent, distinctly says that the Abyssinians did not tame them. (Cathay, p. clxxxi.; Quat., Mém. sur l’Égypte, II. 98, 113; India in XVth Century, 37; Ludolf, I. 10, 32; Armandi, H. Militaire des Éléphants, p. 548.)

NOTE 5.—To the 10th century at least the whole coast country of the Red Sea, from near Berbera probably to Suákin, was still subject to Abyssinia. At this time we hear only of “Musalman families” residing in Zaila’ and the other ports, and tributary to the Christians (see Mas’udi, III. 34).

According to Bruce’s abstract of the Abyssinian chronicles, the royal line was superseded in the 10th century by Falasha Jews, then by other Christian families, and three centuries of weakness and disorder succeeded. In 1268, according to Bruce’s chronology, Icon Amlac of the House of Solomon, which had continued to rule in Shoa, regained the empire, and was followed by seven other princes whose reigns come down to 1312. The history of this period is very obscure, but Bruce gathers that it was marked by civil wars, during which the Mahomedan communities that had by this time grown up in the coast-country became powerful and expelled the Abyssinians from the sea-ports. Inland provinces of the low country also, such as Ifat and Dawaro, had fallen under Mahomedan governors, whose allegiance to the Negush, if not renounced, had become nominal.

One of the principal Mahomedan communities was called Adel, the name, according to modern explanation, of the tribes now called Danákíl. The capital of the Sultan of Adel was, according to Bruce at Aussa, some distance inland from the port of Zaila’, which also belonged to Adel.

Amda Zion, who succeeded to the Abyssinian throne, according to Bruce’s chronology, in 1312, two or three years later, provoked by the Governor of Ifat, who had robbed and murdered one of his Mahomedan agents in the Lowlands, descended on Ifat, inflicted severe chastisement on the offenders, and removed the governor. A confederacy was then formed against the Abyssinian King by several of the Mahomedan States or chieftainships, among which Adel is conspicuous. Bruce gives a long and detailed account of Amda Zion’s resolute and successful campaigns against this confederacy. It bears a strong general resemblance to Marco’s narrative, always excepting the story of the Bishop, of which Bruce has no trace, and always admitting that our traveller has confounded Aden with Adel.

But the chronology is obviously in the way of identification of the histories. Marco could not have related in 1298 events that did not occur till 1315–16. Mr. Salt however, in his version of the chronology, not only puts the accession of Amda Zion eleven years earlier than Bruce, but even then has so little confidence in its accuracy, and is so much disposed to identify the histories, that he suggests that the Abyssinian dates should be carried back further still by some 20 years, on the authority of the narrative in our text. M. Pauthier takes a like view.

I was for some time much disposed to do likewise, but after examining the subject more minutely, I am obliged to reject this view, and to abide by Bruce’s Chronology. To elucidate this I must exhibit the whole list of the Abyssinian Kings from the restoration of the line of Solomon to the middle of the 16th century, at which period Bruce finds a check to the chronology in the record of a solar eclipse. The chronologies have been extracted independently by Bruce, Rüppell, and Salt; the latter using a different version of the Annals from the other two. I set down all three.

-------------------------------+--------+------------------------------ BRUCE. | RÜPPEL.| SALT. ------------+--------+---------|--------|-----------+--------+--------- Reigns. |Duration| Dates. |Duration| Reigns. |Duration| Dates. | of | | of | | of | | reign. | | reign. | | reign. | ------------|--------|---------|--------|-----------|--------|--------- | Years. | | Years. | | Years. | Icon Amlac | 15 |1268–1283| 15 | .. .. | 14 |1255–1269 Igba Zion | 9 |1283–1292| 9 |Woudem Arad| 15 |1269–1284 Bahar Segued|} | | |Kudma Asgud| | Tzenaff „ |} | | |Asfa „ | 3 |1284–1287 Jan „ |} 5 |1292–1297| 5 |Sinfa „ | | Hazeb Araad |} | | |Bar „ | 5 |1287–1292 Kedem Segued|} | | |Igba Zion | 9 |1292–1301 Wedem Arad | 15 |1297–1312| 15 | .. .. | .. | .. Amda Zion | 30 |1312–1342| 30 | .. .. | 30 |1301–1331 Saif Arad | 28 |1342–1370| 28 | .. .. | 28 |1331–1359 Wedem Asferi| 10 |1370–1380| 10 | .. .. | 10 |1359–1369 David II | 29 |1380–1409| 29 | .. .. | 32 |1369–1401 Theodorus | 3 |1409–1412| 3 | .. .. | 1 |1401–1402 Isaac | 17 |1412–1429| 15 | .. .. | 15 |1402–1417 Andreas | 0⁷⁄₁₂| 1429 | 0⁷⁄₁₂| .. .. | 7 |1417–1424 Haseb Nanya | 4 |1429–1433| 4 | .. .. | 5 |1424–1429 Sarwe Yasus |} 1¹⁄₁₂|1433–1434| 1 | .. .. | 5 |1429–1434 Ameda Yasus |} | | | | | Zara Jacob | 34 |1434–1468| 34⅙ | .. .. | 34 |1434–1468 Beda Mariam | 10 |1468–1478| 10 | .. .. | 10 |1468–1478 Iskander |} 17 |1478–1495| 17⁷⁄₁₂| .. .. | 16 |1478–1494 Ameda Zion |} | | | | | Naod | 13 |1495–1508| 13 | .. .. | 13 |1494–1507 David III | 32 |1508–1540| 32 | .. .. | 32 |1507–1536 Claudius | .. | 1540 | .. | .. .. | .. | .. ------------+--------+---------+--------+-----------+--------+---------

Bruce checks his chronology by an eclipse which took place in 1553, and which the Abyssinian chronicle assigns to the 13th year of Claudius. This alone would be scarcely satisfactory as a basis for the retrospective control of reigns extending through nearly three centuries; but we find some other checks.

Thus in Quatremère’s Makrizi we find a correspondence between Sultan Bibars and the King of Habasha, or of Amhara, Maḥar AMLÁK, which occurred in A.H. 672 or 673, i.e. A.D. 1273–1274. This would fall within the reign of Icon AMLAK according to Bruce’s chronology, but not according to Salt’s, and à fortiori not according to any chronology throwing the reigns further back still.

In Quatremère’s Égypte we find another notice of a letter which came to the Sultan of Egypt from the King of Abyssinia, IAKBA SIUN, in Ramadhan 689, i.e. in the end of A.D. 1289.

Again, this is perfectly consistent with Bruce’s order and dates, but not with Salt’s.

The same work contains a notice of an inroad on the Mussulman territory of Assuan by David (II.), the son of Saif Arad, in the year 783 (A.D. 1381–1382).

In Rink’s translation of a work of Makrizi’s it is stated that this same King David died in A.H. 812, i.e. A.D. 1409; that he was succeeded by Theodorus, whose reign was very brief, and he again by Isaac, who died in Dhulkada 833, i.e. July–August 1430. These dates are in close or substantial agreement with Bruce’s chronology, but not at all with Salt’s or any chronology throwing the reigns further back. Makrizi goes on to say that Isaac was succeeded by Andreas, who reigned only four months, and then by Hazbana, who died in Ramadhan 834, i.e. May–June 1431. This last date does not agree, but we are now justified in suspecting an error in the Hijra date,[6] whilst the 4 months’ reign ascribed to Andreas shows that Salt again is wrong in extending it to 7 years, and Bruce presumably right in making it 7 months.

These coincidences seem to me sufficient to maintain the substantial accuracy of Bruce’s chronology, and to be fatal to the identification of Marco’s story with that of the wars of Amda Zion. The general identity in the duration of reigns as given by Rüppell shows that Bruce did not tamper with these. It is remarkable that in Makrizi’s report of the letter of Igba Zion in 1289 (the very year when according to the text this anti-Mahomedan war was going on), that Prince tells the Sultan that he is a protector of the Mahomedans in Abyssinia, acting in that respect quite differently from his Father who had been so hostile to them.

I suspect therefore that Icon Amlak must have been the true hero of Marco’s story, and that the date must be thrown back, probably to 1278.

Rüppell is at a loss to understand where Bruce got the long story of Amda Zion’s heroic deeds, which enters into extraordinary detail, embracing speeches after the manner of the Roman historians and the like, and occupies some 60 pages in the French edition of Bruce which I have been using. The German traveller could find no trace of this story in any of the versions of the Abyssinian chronicle which he consulted, nor was it known to a learned Abyssinian whom he names. Bruce himself says that the story, which he has “a little abridged and accommodated to our manner of writing, was derived from a work written in very pure Gheez, in Shoa, under the reign of Zara Jacob”; and though it is possible that his amplifications outweigh his abridgments, we cannot doubt that he had an original groundwork for his narrative.

The work of Makrizi already quoted speaks of seven kingdoms in Zaila’ (here used for the Mahomedan low country) originally tributary to the Hati (or Negush) of Amhara, viz., Aufat,[7] Dawaro, Arababni, Hadiah, Shirha, Bali, Darah. Of these Ifat, Dawaro, and Hadiah repeatedly occur in Bruce’s story of the war. Bruce also tells us that Amda Zion, when he removed Hakeddin, the Governor of Ifat, who had murdered his agent, replaced him by his brother Sabreddin. Now we find in Makrizi that about A.H. 700, the reigning governor of Aufat under the Hati was Sabreddin Mahomed Valahui; and that it was ’Ali, the son of this Sabreddin, who first threw off allegiance to the Abyssinian King, then Saif Arad (son of Amda Zion). The latter displaces ’Ali and gives the government to his son Ahmed. After various vicissitudes Hakeddin, the son of Ahmed, obtains the mastery in Aufat, defeats Saif Arad completely, and founds a city in Shoa called Vahal, which superseded Aufat or Ifat. Here the Sabreddin of Makrizi appears to be identical with Amda Zion’s governor in Bruce’s story, whilst the Hakeddins belong to two different generations of the same family. But Makrizi does not notice the wars of Amda Zion any more than the Abyssinian Chronicles notice the campaign recorded by Marco Polo.

(Bruce, vol. III. and vol. IV., pp. 23–90, and Salt’s Second Journey to Abyssinia, II. 270, etc.; both these are quoted from French versions which are alone available to me, the former by Castera, Londres, 1790, the latter by P. Henry, Paris, 1816; Fr. Th. Rink, Al Macrisi, Hist. Rerum Islamiticarum in Abyssinia, etc., Lugd. Bat. 1798; Rüppell, Dissert. on Abyss. Hist. and Chronology in his work on that country; Quat. Makr. II. 122–123; Quat. Mém. sur l’Égypte, II. 268, 276.)

NOTE 6.—The last words run in the G. T.: “Il ont singles de plosors maineres. Il ont gat paulz (see note 2, ch. xxiii. supra), et autre gat maimon si devisez qe pou s’en faut de tiel hi a qe ne senblent a vix d’omes.” The beautiful cocks and hens are, I suppose, Guinea fowl.

[We read in the Si Shi ki: “There is (in Western Asia) a large bird, above 10 feet high, with feet like a camel, and of bluish-grey colour. When it runs it flaps the wings. It eats fire, and its eggs are of the size of a sheng (a certain measure for grain).” (Bretschneider, Med. Res., I. pp. 143–144.) Dr. Bretschneider gives a long note on the ostrich, called in Persian shutur-murg (camel-bird), from which we gather the following information: “The ostrich, although found only in the desert of Africa and Western Asia, was known to the Chinese in early times, since their first intercourse with the countries of the far west. In the History of the Han (T’sien Han shu, ch. xcvi.) it is stated that the Emperor Wu-ti, B.C. 140–86, first sent an embassy to An-si, a country of Western Asia, which, according to the description given of it, can only be identified with ancient Parthia, the empire of the dynasty of the Arsacides. In this country, the Chinese chronicler records, a large bird from 8 to 9 feet high is found, the feet, the breast, and the neck of which make it resemble the camel. It eats barley. The name of this bird is ta ma tsio (the bird of the great horse). It is further stated that subsequently the ruler of An-si sent an embassy to the Chinese emperor, and brought as a present the eggs of this great bird. In the Hou Han shu, ch. cxviii., an embassy from An-si is mentioned again in A.D. 101. They brought as presents a lion and a large bird. In the History of the Weí Dynasty, A.D. 386–558, where for the first time the name of Po-sz’ occurs, used to designate Persia, it is recorded that in that country there is a large bird resembling a camel and laying eggs of large size. It has wings and cannot fly far. It eats grass and flesh, and swallows men. In the History of the T’ang (618–907) the camel-bird is again mentioned as a bird of Persia. It is also stated there that the ruler of T’u-huo-lo (Tokharestan) sent a camel-bird to the Chinese emperor. The Chinese materia medica, Pen ts’ao Kang mu, written in the 16th century, gives (ch. xlix.) a good description of the ostrich, compiled from ancient authors. It is said, amongst other things, to eat copper, iron, stones, etc., and to have only two claws on its feet. Its legs are so strong that it can dangerously wound a man by jerking. It can run 300 li a day. Its native countries are A-dan (Aden) Dju-bo (on the Eastern African coast). A rude but tolerably exact drawing of the camel-bird in the Pen-ts’ao proves that the ostrich was well known to the Chinese in ancient times, and that they paid great attention to it. In the History of the Ming Dynasty, ch. cccxxvi., the country of Hu-lu-mo-sz’ (Hormuz on the Persian Gulf) is mentioned as producing ostriches.”—H. C.]

---------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Reinaud (Abulf. I. 81) says the word Interior applied by the Arabs to a country, is the equivalent of citerior, whilst by exterior they mean ulterior. But the truth is just the reverse, even in the case before him, where Bolghár-al-Dakhila, ‘Bulgari Interiores,’ are the Volga Bulgars. So also the Arabs called Armenia on the Araxes Interior, Armenia on Lake Van Exterior (St. Martin, I. 31).

[2] Thus (2) the Homeritae of Yemen, (3) the people of Axum, and Adulis or Zulla, (5) the Bugaei or Bejahs of the Red Sea coast, (6) Taiani or Tiamo, appear in Salt’s Axum Inscription as subject to the King of Axum in the middle of the 4th century.Return to passage

[3] Muir’s Life of Mahomet, I. cclxiii.Return to passage

[4] Ritter, Africa, p. 605. The statement appears to be taken from Burckhardt’s Nubia, but the reference is not quite clear. There is nothing about this army in Quatremère’s Mém. sur la Nubie. (Mém. sur l’Égypte, vol. ii.)Return to passage

[5] Armandi indeed quotes a statement in support of such use from a Spaniard, Marmol, who travelled (he says) in Abyssinia in the beginning of the 16th century. But the author in question, already quoted at pp. 368 and 407, was no traveller, only a compiler; and the passage cited by Armandi is evidently made up from the statement in Poggio and from what our traveller has said about Zanjibar. (Supra, p. 422. See Marmol, Desc. de Affrica, I. f. 27, v.)Return to passage

[6] 834 for 836.Return to passage

[7] On Aufat, see De Sacy, Chrestom. Arabe, I. 457.Return to passage

XXXVI. CONCERNING THE PROVINCE OF ADEN

You must know that in the province of ADEN there is a Prince who is called the Soldan. The people are all Saracens and adorers of Mahommet, and have a great hatred of Christians. There are many towns and villages in the country.

This Aden is the port to which many of the ships of India come with their cargoes; and from this haven the merchants carry the goods a distance of seven days further in small vessels. At the end of those seven days they land the goods and load them on camels, and so carry them a land journey of 30 days. This brings them to the river of ALEXANDRIA, and by it they descend to the latter city. It is by this way through Aden that the Saracens of Alexandria receive all their stores of pepper and other spicery; and there is no other route equally good and convenient by which these goods could reach that place.{1}

And you must know that the Soldan of Aden receives a large amount in duties from the ships that traffic between India and his country, importing different kinds of goods; and from the exports also he gets a revenue, for there are despatched from the port of Aden to India a very large number of Arab chargers, and palfreys, and stout nags adapted for all work, which are a source of great profit to those who export them. {2} For horses fetch very high prices in India, there being none bred there, as I have told you before; insomuch that a charger will sell there for 100 marks of silver and more. On these also the Soldan of Aden receives heavy payments in port charges, so that ’tis said he is one of the richest princes in the world.{3}

And it is a fact that when the Soldan of Babylon went against the city of Acre and took it, this Soldan of Aden sent to his assistance 30,000 horsemen and full 40,000 camels, to the great help of the Saracens and the grievous injury of the Christians. He did this a great deal more for the hate he bears the Christians than for any love he bears the Soldan of Babylon; for these two do hate one another heartily.{4}

Now we will have done with the Soldan of Aden, and I will tell you of a city which is subject to Aden, called Esher.

NOTE 1.—This is from Pauthier’s text, which is here superior to the G. T. The latter has: “They put the goods in small vessels, which proceed on a river about seven days.” Ram. has, “in other smaller vessels, with which they make a voyage on a gulf of the sea for 20 days, more or less, as the weather may be. On reaching a certain port they load the goods on camels, and carry them a 30 days’ journey by land to the River Nile, where they embark them in small vessels called Zerms, and in these descend the current to Cairo, and thence by an artificial cut, called Calizene, to Alexandria.” The last looks as if it had been edited; Polo never uses the name Cairo. The canal, the predecessor of the Mahmúdíah, is also called Il Caligine in the journey of Simon Sigoli (Frescobaldi, p. 168). Brunetto Latini, too, discoursing of the Nile, says:—

“Così serva su’ filo, Ed è chiamato Nilo. D’un su’ ramo si dice, Ch’è chiamato Calice.” —Tesoretto, pp. 81–82.

Also in the Sfera of Dati:—

——“Chiamasi il Caligine Egion e Nilo, e non si sa l’origine.” P. 9.

The word is (Ar.) Khalíj, applied in one of its senses specially to the canals drawn from the full Nile. The port on the Red Sea would be either Suákin or Aidháb; the 30 days’ journey seems to point to the former. Polo’s contemporary, Marino Sanudo, gives the following account of the transit, omitting entirely the Red Sea navigation, though his line correctly represented would apparently go by Kosseir: “The fourth haven is called AHADEN, and stands on a certain little island joining, as it were, to the main, in the land of the Saracens. The spices and other goods from India are landed there, loaded on camels, and so carried by a journey of nine days to a place on the River Nile, called Chus (Kús, the ancient Cos below Luqsor), where they are put into boats and conveyed in 15 days to Babylon. But in the month of October and thereabouts the river rises to such an extent that the spices, etc., continue to descend the stream from Babylon and enter a certain long canal, and so are conveyed over the 200 miles between Babylon and Alexandria.” (Bk. I. pt. i. ch. i.)

Makrizi relates that up to A.H. 725 (1325), from time immemorial the Indian ships had discharged at Aden, but in that year the exactions of the Sultan induced a shipmaster to pass on into the Red Sea, and eventually the trade came to Jidda. (See De Sacy, Chrest. Arabe, II. 556.)

✛Aden is mentioned (A-dan) in ch. cccxxxvi. of the Ming History as having sent an embassy to China in 1427. These embassies were subsequently often repeated. The country, which lay 22 days’ voyage west of Kuli (supposed Calicut, but perhaps Káyal), was devoid of grass or trees. (Bretschneider, Med. Res., II. pp. 305–306.)

[Ma-huan (transl. by Phillips) writes (J. R. A. S., April 1896): “In the nineteenth year of Yung-lo (1422) an Imperial Envoy, the eunuch Li, was sent from China to this country with a letter and presents to the King. On his arrival he was most honourably received, and was met by the king on landing and conducted by him to his palace.”—H. C.]

NOTE 2.—The words describing the horses are (P.’s text): “de bons destriers Arrabins et chevaux et grans roncins à ij selles.” The meaning seems to be what I have expressed in the text, fit either for saddle or pack-saddle.

[Roncins à deux selles. Littré’s great Dictionary supplies an apt illustration of this phrase. A contemporary Eloge de Charles VII. says: “Jamais il chevauchoit mule ne haquenée, mais un bas cheval trotier entre deux selles” (a cob?).]

In one application the Deux selles of the old riding-schools were the two styles of riding, called in Spanish Montar á la Gineta and Montar á la Brida. The latter stands for the old French style, with heavy bit and saddle, and long stirrups just reached by the toes; the former the Moorish style, with short stirrups and lighter bit. But the phrase would also seem to have meant saddle and pack-saddle. Thus Cobarruvias explains the phrase Hombre de dos sillas, “Conviene saber de la gineta y brida, ser de silla y albarda (pack-saddle), servir de todo,” and we find the converse expression, No ser para silla ni para albarda, good for nothing.

But for an example of the exact phrase of the French text I am indebted to P. della Valle. Speaking of the Persian horses, he says: “Few of them are of any great height, and you seldom see thoroughbreds among them; probably because here they have no liking for such and don’t seek to breed them. For the most part they are of that very useful style that we call horses for both saddles (che noi chiamiamo da due selle),” etc. (See Cobarruvias, under Silla and Brida; Dicc. de la Lengua Castellana por la Real Academia Española, under Silla, Gineta, Brida; P. della Valle, Let. XV. da Sciraz, § 3, vol. ii, p. 240.)

NOTE 3.—The supposed confusion between Adel and Aden does not affect this chapter.

The “Soldan of Aden” was the Sultan of Yemen, whose chief residence was at Ta’izz, North-East of Mokha. The prince reigning in Polo’s day was Malik Muzaffar Shamsuddín Abu’l Mahasen Yusuf. His father, Malik Mansúr, a retainer of the Ayubite Dynasty, had been sent by Saladin as Wazir to Yemen, with his brother Malik Muazzam Turan Shah. After the death of the latter, and of his successor, the Wazir assumed the government and became the founder of a dynasty. Aden was the chief port of his dominions. It had been a seat of direct trade with China in the early centuries of Islam.

Ibn Batuta speaks of it thus correctly: “It is enclosed by mountains, and you can enter by one side only. It is a large town, but has neither corn nor trees, nor fresh water, except from reservoirs made to catch the rain-water; for other drinking water is at a great distance from the town. The Arabs often prevent the townspeople coming to fetch it until the latter have come to terms with them, and paid them a bribe in money or cloths. The heat at Aden is great. It is the port frequented by the people from India, and great ships come thither from Kunbáyat, Tána, Kaulam, Ḳaliḳúṭ, Fandaráina, Sháliát, Manjarúr, Fákanúr, Hinaur, Sindábúr,[1] etc. There are Indian merchants residing in the city, and Egyptian merchants as well.”

The tanks of which the Moor speaks had been buried by débris; of late years they have been cleared and repaired. They are grand works. They are said to have been formerly 50 in number, with a capacity of 30 million gallons.

[Illustration: Attempted Escalade of ADEN, by the Portuguese under ALBOQUERQUE, in 1513.

(Reduced Facsimile of a large Contemporary Wood-Engraving, in the Map Department of the BRITISH MUSEUM, supposed to have been executed at Antwerp).

Size of the Original (in 6 Sheets) 42½ Inches by 19⅛ Inches.

This cut, from a sketch by Dr. Kirk, gives an excellent idea of Aden as seen by a ship approaching from India. The large plate again, reduced from a grand and probably unique contemporary wood-engraving of great size, shows the impression that the city made upon European eyes in the beginning of the 16th century. It will seem absurd, especially to those who knew Aden in the early days of our occupation, and no doubt some of the details are extravagant, but the general impression is quite consonant with that derived from the description of De Barros and Andrea Corsali: “In site and aspect from the seaward,” says the former, “the city forms a beautiful object, for besides the part which lies along the shore with its fine walls and towers, its many public buildings and rows of houses rising aloft in many stories, with terraced roofs, you have all that ridge of mountain facing the sea and presenting to its very summit a striking picture of the operations of Nature, and still more of the industry of man.” This historian says that the prosperity of Aden increased on the arrival of the Portuguese in those seas, for the Mussulman traders from Jidda and the Red Sea ports now dreaded these western corsairs, and made Aden an entrepôt, instead of passing it by as they used to do in days of unobstructed navigation. This prosperity, however, must have been of very brief duration. Corsali’s account of Aden (in 1517) is excellent, but too long for extract. (Makrizi, IV. 26–27; Playfair, H. of Yemen, p. 7; Ibn Batuta, II. 177; De Barros, II. vii. 8; Ram. I. f. 182.)

NOTE 4.—I have not been able to trace any other special notice of the part taken by the Sultan of Yemen in the capture of Acre by the Mameluke Sultan, Malik Ashraf Khalil, in 1291. Ibn Ferat, quoted by Reinaud, says that the Sultan sent into all the provinces the most urgent orders for the supply of troops and machines; and there gathered from all sides the warriors of Damascus, of Hamath, and the rest of Syria, of Egypt, and of Arabia. (Michaud, Bibl. des Croisades, 1829, IV. 569.)

“I once” (says Joinville) “rehearsed to the Legate two cases of sin that a priest of mine had been telling me of, and he answered me thus: ‘No man knows as much of the heinous sins that are done in Acre as I do; and it cannot be but God will take vengeance on them, in such a way that the city of Acre shall be washed in the blood of its inhabitants, and that another people shall come to occupy after them.’ The good man’s prophecy hath come true in part, for of a truth the city hath been washed in the blood of its inhabitants, but those to replace them are not yet come: may God send them good when it pleases Him!” (p. 192).

---------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] All ports of Western India: Pandarani, Shalia (near Calicut), Mangalore, Baccanore, Onore, Goa.

XXXVII. CONCERNING THE CITY OF ESHER

Esher is a great city lying in a north-westerly direction from the last, and 400 miles distant from the Port of Aden. It has a king, who is subject to the Soldan of Aden. He has a number of towns and villages under him, and administers his territory well and justly.

The people are Saracens. The place has a very good haven, wherefore many ships from India come thither with various cargoes; and they export many good chargers thence to India.{1}

A great deal of white incense grows in this country, and brings in a great revenue to the Prince; for no one dares sell it to any one else; and whilst he takes it from the people at 10 livres of gold for the hundredweight, he sells it to the merchants at 60 livres, so his profit is immense.{2}

Dates also grow very abundantly here. The people have no corn but rice, and very little of that; but plenty is brought from abroad, for it sells here at a good profit. They have fish in great profusion, and notably plenty of tunny of large size; so plentiful indeed that you may buy two big ones for a Venice groat of silver. The natives live on meat and rice and fish. They have no wine of the vine, but they make good wine from sugar, from rice, and from dates also.

And I must tell you another very strange thing. You must know that their sheep have no ears, but where the ear ought to be they have a little horn! They are pretty little beasts.{3}

And I must not omit to tell you that all their cattle, including horses, oxen, and camels, live upon small fish and nought besides, for ’tis all they get to eat. You see in all this country there is no grass or forage of any kind; it is the driest country on the face of the earth. The fish which are given to the cattle are very small, and during March, April, and May, are caught in such quantities as would astonish you. They are then dried and stored, and the beasts are fed on them from year’s end to year’s end. The cattle will also readily eat these fish all alive and just out of the water.{4}

The people here have likewise many other kinds of fish of large size and good quality, exceedingly cheap; these they cut in pieces of about a pound each, and dry them in the sun, and then store them, and eat them all the year through, like so much biscuit.{5}

NOTE 1.—Shiḥr or Sheḥr, with the article, ES-SHEḤR, still exists on the Arabian coast, as a town and district about 330 m. east of Aden. In 1839 Captain Haines described the modern town as extending in a scattered manner for a mile along the shore, the population about 6000, and the trade considerable, producing duties to the amount of 5000_l._ a year. It was then the residence of the Sultan of the Hamúm tribe of Arabs. There is only an open roadstead for anchorage. Perhaps, however, the old city is to be looked for about ten miles to the westward, where there is another place bearing the same name, “once a thriving town, but now a desolate group of houses with an old fort, formerly the residence of the chief of the Kaṣaidi tribe.” (J. R. G. S. IX. 151–152.) Sheḥr is spoken of by Barbosa (Xaer in Lisbon ed.; Pecher in Ramusio; Xeher in Stanley; in the two last misplaced to the east of Dhofar): “It is a very large place, and there is a great traffic in goods imported by the Moors of Cambaia, Chaul, Dabul, Batticala, and the cities of Malabar, such as cotton-stuffs ... strings of garnets, and many other stones of inferior value; also much rice and sugar, and spices of all sorts, with coco-nuts; ... their money they invest in horses for India, which are here very large and good. Every one of them is worth in India 500 or 600 ducats.” (Ram. f. 292.) The name Sheḥr in some of the Oriental geographies, includes the whole coast up to Omán.

NOTE 2.—The hills of the Sheḥr and Dhafár districts were the great source of produce of the Arabian frankincense. Barbosa says of Sheḥr: “They carry away much incense, which is produced at this place and in the interior; ... it is exported hence all over the world, and here it is used to pay ships with, for on the spot it is worth only 150 farthings the hundredweight.” See note 2, ch. xxvii. supra; and next chapter, note 2.

NOTE 3.—This was no doubt a breed of four-horned sheep, and Polo, or his informant, took the lower pair of horns for abnormal ears. Probably the breed exists, but we have little information on details in reference to this coast. The Rev. G. P. Badger, D.C.L., writes: “There are sheep on the eastern coast of Arabia, and as high up as Mohammerah on the Shatt-al-Arab, with very small ears indeed; so small as to be almost imperceptible at first sight near the projecting horns. I saw one at Mohammerah having six horns.” And another friend, Mr. Arthur Grote, tells me he had for some time at Calcutta a 4-horned sheep from Aden.

NOTE 4.—This custom holds more or less on all the Arabian coast from Sheḥr to the Persian Gulf, and on the coast east of the Gulf also. Edrisi mentions it at Sheḥr (printed Shajr, I. 152), and the Admiral Sidi ’Ali says: “On the coast of Shehr, men and animals all live on fish” (J. A. S. B. V. 461). Ibn Batuta tells the same of Dhafár, the subject of next chapter: “The fish consist for the most part of sardines, which are here of the fattest. The surprising thing is that all kinds of cattle are fed on these sardines, and sheep likewise. I have never seen anything like that elsewhere” (II. 197). Compare Strabo’s account of the Ichthyophagi on the coast of Mekran (XV. 11), and the like account in the life of Apollonius of Tyana (III. 56).

[Burton, quoted by Yule, says (Sind Revisited, 1877, I. p. 33): “The whole of the coast, including that of Mekrán, the land of the Máhi Khárán or Ichthyophagi.” Yule adds: “I have seen this suggested also elsewhere. It seems a highly probable etymology.” See note, p. 402.—H. C.]

NOTE 5.—At Hásik, east of Dhafár, Ibn Batuta says: “The people here live on a kind of fish called Al-Lukham, resembling that called the sea-dog. They cut it in slices and strips, dry it in the sun, salt it, and feed on it. Their houses are made with fish-bones, and their roofs with camel-hides” (II. 214).