[144]? “Et sic se ingerunt sicut canes.” This appears to refer to the common rufous kite, abundant all over India. Of this, or a kindred kite, Sir J. E. Tennent says, “The ignoble birds of prey, the kites, keep close by the shore, and hover round the returning boats of the fishermen, to feast on the fry rejected from the nets” (Nat. Hist. of C., p. 246). The action described in the text is quite that of the Indian kite. I recollect seeing one swoop down upon a plate, which a servant was removing from the breakfast table in camp, and carry off the top of a silver muffineer, which however it speedily dropped.
[145] This may be the bird spoken of in the latter part of the next note, but I think it is probably the Kulang (of Bengal), or great crane (Grus cinerea), which does travel at night, with a wailing cry during its flight.
[146] “Ut ego audivi.” Ambiguum est, an ipse episcopus D⸺m loquentem audivisset? Not many years ago, an eccentric gentleman wrote from Sikkim to the secretary of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, stating that, on the snows of the mountains there, were found certain mysterious footsteps, more than thirty or forty paces asunder, which the natives alleged to be Shaitan’s. The writer at the same time offered, if Government would give him leave of absence for a certain period, etc., to go and trace the author of these mysterious vestiges, and thus this strange creature would be discovered without any expense to Government. The notion of catching Shaitan without any expense to Government was a sublime piece of Anglo-Indian tact, but the offer was not accepted. Our author had, however, in view probably the strange cry of the Devil-bird, as it is called in Ceylon. “The Singhalese regard it literally with horror, and its scream by night in the vicinity of a village is bewailed as the harbinger of impending calamity.” “Its ordinary note is a magnificent clear shout, like that of a human being, and which can be heard at a great distance, and has a fine effect in the silence of the closing night. It has another cry like that of a hen just caught; but the sounds which have earned for it its bad name, and which I have heard but once to perfection, are indescribable, the most appalling that can be imagined, and scarcely to be heard without shuddering; I can only compare it to a boy in torture, whose screams are stopped by being strangled.” Mr. Mitford, from whom Sir E. Tennent quotes the last passage, considers it to be a Podargus or night-hawk, rather than the brown owl as others have supposed. (Tennent’s Nat. Hist. of Ceylon, 246-8.)
[147] Champa is the Malay name of the coast of Cambodia, and appears in some form in our maps. Jordanus may have derived his information about those countries from his brother friar, Odoricus, who visited Champa, and mentions the king’s having 10,004 elephants. Late travellers in Cambodia use almost the expression in the text in speaking of the habitual employment of elephants in that country (e.g., see Mr. King, in Jour. Geog. Soc. for 1860, p. 178).
[148] This is evidently drawn from the life. Compare the account of elephant taming in Burma in the Mission to Ava in 1855, pp. 103-5, and the authors there quoted.
[149] The number twelve is only general and conventional. Ibn Batuta says there were twelve kings in Malabar alone, and even a greater number are alluded to by some of the old travellers. It is extremely difficult to trace these kingdoms, both from the looseness of the statements and want of accessible histories of the states of Southern India, and from that absence of any distinction between really substantial monarchies and mere principalities of small account, which may be noticed in Polo and the other travellers of the time as well as in our author.
Telenc, however, he speaks of as a potent and great kingdom. This must have been the kingdom of interior Telingana, called Andra, the capital of which was Warangól, eighty miles north-east of Hyderabad, and which was powerful and extensive at the end of the thirteenth century. It was shortly afterwards invaded by the armies of the king of Delhi; the capital was taken in 1332, and the sovereignty at a later date merged in the Mussulman kingdom of Golkonda.
There does not seem to have been any very great kingdom in the Mahratta country at this time, and perhaps this is the reason why he there speaks of the kingdom, not of the king. The most powerful princes were the rajas of Deogiri (afterwards Daulutabad), of the Yadu family. Their dynasty was subverted by the Mahommedans in 1317. I believe there is no mention of the Mahrattas by the Mussulman historians till just about our author’s time.
Columbum, or Kulam, we have disposed of in the preface. We see here that the kingdom included (part at least of) Mohebar, the Maabar of Marco Polo and of Ibn Batuta, i.e., the southern regions of the Coromandel coast; (see Preface, p. xvi). The name is apparently Arabic (Ma’abar—a ferry), in reference to the passage or ferry to Ceylon. The king, whose name was Lingua, may probably have been connected with the sect of the Lingáyets still existing in Southern India, whose members wear a representation of the Lingam or Sivaite emblem round their necks, and have many peculiar practices. He was certainly a Nair, as appears from what Jordanus has said of the law of succession. And among the rajas of Coorg, who were both Nairs and Lingáyets, we find the name Linga borne by several during the last century. (Compare Markham’s Peru and India; Hamilton’s Hindostan, ii. 288, etc.)
I cannot trace any particulars of a king of Molepoor or Molepatam. But the only pearl fishery on the Indian main is at Tuticorin, about ninety miles north-east of Cape Comorin, and near this there is a place given by Hamilton, called Mooloopetta (= Mooloopatam), which may probably be the seat of the king alluded to. He was most likely the same as the king of Cail, spoken of by Marco Polo; that place being apparently now represented by Coilpatam, a small seaport of Tinnevelly, in this immediate vicinity. This appears from Barbosa, who, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, states precisely that Cail was ninety miles from Cape Comorin, and that it was the seat of a great pearl market and fishery.