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from the latter circumstance and the communication subsequently maintained between the insular colony and the mother country, that Megasthenes, who never visited any part of India south of the Ganges, and who was, probably, the first European who ever beheld that renowned river 1, was nevertheless enabled to collect many particulars relative to the interior of Ceylon. He described it as being divided by a river (the Mahawelli-ganga?) into two sections, one infested by wild beasts and elephants, the other producing gold and gems, and inhabited by a people whom he called Palæogoni 2, a hellenized form of Pali-Putra," the sons of the Pali," the first Prasian colonists.

Such was the scanty knowledge regarding India communicated to Europe by those who had followed the footsteps of conquest into that remote region; and although eighteen centuries elapsed from the death of Alexander the Great before another European power sought to establish its dominion in the East, a new passion had been early implanted, the cultivation of which was in the highest degree favourable to the acquisition and diffusion of geographical knowledge. In an age before the birth of history 3, the adventurous Phoenicians, issuing from the Red Sea, in their ships,

ii.

1 ROBERTSON's Ancient India, sec.

2 SCHWANBECK'S Megasthenes, Fragm. xviii.; SOLINUS POLYHISTOR, liii. 3; PLINY, lvi. ch. 24. ELIAN, in compiling his Natura Animalium, has introduced the story told by MEGASTHENES, and quoted by by STRABO, of cetaceous animals in the seas of Ceylon with heads resembling oxen and lions; and this justifies the conjecture that other portions of the same work referring to the island may have been simultaneously borrowed from the same source. SCHWANBECK, apparently on this ground, has included among the Fragmenta incerta those passages from LIAN, lib. xvi. ch. 17, 18, in which he says,

VOL. I.

and truly, that in Taprobane there were no cities, but from five to seven hundred villages built of wood, thatched with reeds, and occasionally covered with the shells of large tortoises. The sea coast then as now was densely covered with palm-trees (evidently coco-nut and Palmyra), and the forests contained elephants so superior to those of India that they were shipped in large vessels and sold to the King of Calinga (Northern Circars). The island, he says, is so large that "those in the maritime districts never hunted in the interior, and those in the interior had never seen the sea."

00

A compendious account of the early trade between India and the

had reached the shores of India, and centuries afterwards their experienced seamen piloted the fleets of Solomon in search of the luxuries of the East.1

Egypt, under the Ptolemies, became the seat of that opulent trade which it had been the aim of Alexander the Great to divert to it from Syria. Berenice was built on the Red Sea, as an emporium for the ships engaged in Indian voyages, and Alexandria excelled Tyre in the magnitude and success of her mercantile operations.

The conquest of Egypt by Augustus, so far from checking, served to communicate a fresh impulse to the intercourse with India, whence all that was costly and rare was collected in wanton profusion, to minister to the luxury of Rome. A bold discovery of the same period imparted an entirely new character to the navigation of the Indian Ocean. The previous impediment to trade had been the necessity of carrying it on in small vessels, that crept cautiously along the windings of the shore, the crews being too ignorant and too timid to face the dangers of the open sea. But the courage

of an individual at length solved the difficulty, and dissipated the alarm. Hippalus, a seaman in the reign of Claudius, observing the steady prevalence of the monsoons, which blew over the Indian Ocean alternately from east to west, dared to trust himself to their in

subsequent chapter descriptive of that ancient emporium. See also Note A at the end of this chapter.

countries bordering on the Mediter- | Point de Galle will be found in a ranean will be found in PARDESSUS's Collection des Lois Maritimes antérieures au XVIIIe siècle, tom. i. p. 9. 1 It has been conjectured, and not without reason, that it may possibly have been from Ceylon and certainly from Southern India that the fleets of Solomon were returning when "once in every three years came the ships of Tarshish, bringing gold and silver, ivory, apes, and peacocks."I Kings, x. 22, II Chron. xx. 21. An exposition of the reasons for believing that the site of Tarshish may be recognised in the modern

2 Arabic "maussam." I believe the root belongs to a dialect of India, and signifies "seasons." VINCENT fixes the discovery of the monsoons by Hippalus about the year A.D. 47, although it admits of no doubt that the periodical prevalence of the winds must have been known long before, if not partially taken advantage of by the seamen of Arabia and India.Periplus, &c., vol. ii. pp. 24—57.

fluence, and departing from the coast of Arabia, he stretched fearlessly across the unknown deep, and was carried by the winds to Muziris, a port on the coast of Malabar, the modern Mangalore.

An exploit so adventurous and so triumphant, rendered Hippalus the Columbus of his age, and his countrymen, to perpetuate his renown, called the winds which he had mastered by his name. His discovery gave a new direction to navigation, it altered the dimensions and build of the ships frequenting those seas 2, and imparted so great an impulse to trade, that within a very brief period it became a subject of apprehension at Rome, lest the empire should be drained of its specie to maintain the commerce with India. Silver to the value of nearly a million and a half sterling, being annually required to pay for the spices, gems, pearls, and silks, imported through Egypt. An extensive acquainsea-coast of India, and

tance was now acquired with the the great work of Pliny, compiled less than fifty years after the discovery of Hippalus, serves to attest the additional knowledge regarding Ceylon which had been collected during the interval.

Pliny, writing in the first century, puts aside the fabulous tales previously circulated concerning the island; he gives due credit to the truer accounts of Onesicritus and Megasthenes, and refers to the later

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tured, but without any justifiable grounds, to be laid in Ceylon; and which is strangely incorporated with the authentic work of DIODORUS SICULUS, written in the age of Augustus. DIODORUS professes to give it as an account of the recent discovery of an island to which it refers; a fact sufficiently demonstrative of its inapplicability to Ceylon, the existence of which had been known to the Greeks three hundred years before. It is the story of a merchant made captive by pirates and carried to Ethiopia, where, in compliance with a solemn rite, he and a com

works of ERATOSTHENES and ARTEMIDORUS1 the geographers, as to its position, its dimensions, its cities, its natural productions, and as to the ignorance of navigation exhibited by its inhabitants. All this, he says, was recorded by former writers, but it had fallen to his lot to collect information from natives of Ceylon who had visited Rome during his own time under singular circumstances. A ship had been despatched to the coast of Arabia to collect the Red Sea revenues, but having been caught by the monsoon it was carried to Hippuros, the modern Kudra-mali, in the north-west of Ceylon, near the pearl banks of Manaar. Here the officer in command was courteously received by the king, who, struck with admiration of the Romans and eager to form an alliance with them, despatched an embassy to Italy, consisting of a Raja and suite of three persons.

panion were exposed in a boat, which, after a voyage of four months, was wafted to one of the Fortunate Islands, in the Southern Sea, where he resided seven years, whence having been expelled, he made his way to Palibothra, on the Ganges, and thence returned to Greece. In the pretended account of this island given by JAMBULUS I cannot discover a single attribute sufficient to identify it with Ceylon. On the contrary, the traits which he narrates of the country and its inhabitants, when they are not manifest inventions, are obviously borrowed from the descriptions of the continent of India, given by CTESIAS and MEGASTHENES. PRINSEP, in his learned analysis of the Sanchi Inscription, shows that what JAMBULUS says of the alphabet of his island agrees minutely with the character and symbols on the ancient Buddhist lats of Central India.Journ. Asiat. Soc. Ben., vol. vi. p. 476. WILFORD, in his Essay on the Sacred Isles of the West, Asiat. Res. x. 150, enumerates the statements of JAMBULUS which might possibly apply to Sumatra, but certainly not to Ceylon, an opinion in which he had been anticipated by RAMUSIO, vol. i.

p. 176. LASSEN, in his Indische Al-
terthumskunde, vol. iii. p. 270, assigns
his reasons for believing that Bali, to
the east of Java, must be the island
in which JAMBULUS laid the scene of
his adventures.-DIODORUS SICULUS,
lib. ii. ch. lv., &c. An attempt has
also been made to establish an iden-
tity between Ceylon and the island
of Panchæa,which Diodorus describes
in the Indian Sea, between Arabia
and Gedrosia (lib. v. 41, &c.); but
the effort has been unsuccessful. See
GROVER'S Voice from Stonehenge, P.
i. 95.
P.

PLINY, lib. xxii. ch. liii. iv. ch. xxiv. vii. ch. ii.

2 "Legatos quatuor misit principe eorum Rachia."-PLINY, lib. vi. c. 24. This passage is generally understood to indicate four ambassadors, of whom the principal was one named Rachias. CASIE CHITTY, in a learned paper on the early History of Jaffna, offers another conjecture that "Rachia may mean Arachia, a Singhalese designation of rank which exists to the present day; and in support of his hypothesis he instances the coincidence that "at a later period a similar functionary was despatched by the King Bhuwaneka-Bahu VIII.

The Singhalese king of whom this is recorded was probably Chanda-Mukha-Siwa, who ascended the throne A.D. 44, and was deposed and assassinated by his brother A.D. 52. He signalised his reign by the construction of one of those gigantic tanks which still form the wonders of the island. From his envoys Pliny learned that Ceylon then contained five hundred towns (or more properly villages), of which the chief was Palæsimunda, the residence of the sovereign, with a population of two hundred thousand souls.

They spoke of a lake called Megisba, of vast magnitude, and giving rise to two rivers, one flowing by the capital and the other northwards, towards the continent of India, which was most likely an exaggerated account of some of the great tanks, possibly that of Tissa Weva, in the vicinity of Anarajapoora. They described the coral which abounds in the Gulf of Manaar; and spoke of marble, with colours like the shell of the tortoise; of pearls and precious stones; of the luxuri

as ambassador to the court of Lisbon." -Journal Ceylon Asiat. Soc., p. 74, 1848. The event to which he refers is recorded in the Rajavali: it is stated that the king of Cotta, about the year 1540, "caused a figure of the prince his grandson to be made of gold, and sent the same under the care of Sallappoo Arachy, to be delivered to the King of Portugal. The Arachy having arrived and delivered the presents to the King of Portugal, obtained the promise of great assistance," &c.— Rajavali, p. 286. See also VALENTYN, Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indien, ch. ví.; TURNOUR'S Epitome, p. 49; RIBEYRO's History, trans. by Lee, ch. v. But as the embassy sent to the Emperor Claudius would necessarily have been deputed by one of the kings of the Wijayan dynasty, it is more than probable that the rank of the envoy was Indian rather than Singhalese, and that "Rachia" means raja rather than arachy.

It may, however, be observed that Rackha is a name of some renown in Singhalese annals. Rackha was the general whom Prakrama Bahu sent to reduce the south of Ceylon when in arms in the 12th century (Mahawanso, ch. lxxiii.); and it is also the name of one of the heroes of the Paramas.-WILFORD,As. Res., vol. ix.

p. 41.

1 Mahawanso, ch. xxx. p. 218; TURNOUR'S Epitome, p. 21; AMMIANUS MARCELLINUS mentions another embassy which arrived from Ceylon in the reign of the Emperor Julian, 1. xx. c. 7, and which consequently must have been despatched by the king Upa-tissa II. I have elsewhere remarked, that it was in this century that the Singhalese appear to have first commenced the practice of sending frequent embassies to distant countries, and especially to China. (See chapter on the Knowledge of Ceylon possessed by the Chinese.)

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