[442] Travels of Marco Polo, book iii. c. 21, 28.
Odoardo Barbosa, one of the Portuguese adventurers who visited India immediately after the discovery of the passage by the Cape of Good Hope, celebrates “the great quantities of cotton cloths admirably painted, also some white and some striped, held in the highest estimation,” which were made in Bengal[443]. Cæsar Frederick, a Venetian merchant, who travelled in India in 1563, and whose narrative is translated by Hakluyt, describes the extensive traffic carried on between St. Thomé (a port 150 miles from Negapatam) and Pegu, in “bumbast (cotton) cloth of every sort, painted, which is a rare thing, because this kind of cloths show as if they were gilded with divers colors, and the more they are washed, the livelier the colors will become; and there is made such account of this kind of cloth, that a small bale of it will cost 1000 or 2000 ducats[444].”
[443] Ramusio’s “Raccolto delle Navigationi et Viaggi,” tom. i. p. 315.
[444] Hakluyt’s Voyages, vol. ii. p. 366. Edition of 1809.
Tavernier, who, like Marco Polo, Barbosa, and Frederick, was a merchant as well as a traveller, and therefore accustomed to judge of the qualities of goods, and who travelled in the middle of the seventeenth century, says—“The white calicuts,” (calicoes, or rather muslins, so called from the great commercial city of Calicut, whence the Portuguese and Dutch first brought them) “are woven in several places in Bengal and Mogulistan, and are carried to Raioxsary and Baroche[445] to be whitened, because of the large meadows and plenty of lemons that grow thereabouts, for they are never so white as they should be till they are dipped in lemon-water. Some calicuts are made so fine, you can hardly feel them in your hand, and the thread, when spun, is scarce discernible[446].” The same writer says, “There is made at Seconge (in the province of Malwa) a sort of calicut so fine that when a man puts it on, his skin shall appear as plainly through it, as if he was quite naked; but the merchants are not permitted to transport it, for the governor is obliged to send it all to the Great Mogul’s seraglio and the principal lords of the court, to make the sultanesses and noblemen’s wives shifts and garments for the hot weather; and the king and the lords take great pleasure to behold them in these shifts, and see them dance with nothing else upon them[447].” Speaking of the turbans of the Mohammedan Indians, Tavernier says, “The rich have them of so fine cloth, that twenty-five or thirty ells of it put into a turban will not weigh four ounces[448].”
[445] “At the town of Baroche, in Guzerat, Forbes describes the manufacture as being now in nearly the same state as when Arrian’s Periplus was written (about A. D. 100.). He says—”The cotton trade at Baroche is very considerable, and the manufactures of this valuable plant, from the finest muslin to the coarsest sail-cloth, employ thousands of men, women, and children, in the metropolis and the adjacent villages. The cotton clearers and spinners generally reside in the suburbs, or poorahs, of Baroche, which are very extensive. The weavers’ houses are mostly near the shade of tamarind and mango trees, under which, at sun-rise, they fix their looms, and weave a variety of cotton cloth, with very fine baftas and muslins (See [Plate V.]). Surat is more famous for its colored chintzes and piece goods. The Baroche muslins are inferior to those of Bengal and Madras, nor do the painted chintzes of Guzerat equal those of the Coromandel coast.”—Forbes’s Oriental Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 222.
[446] Tavernier’s Travels, contained in Dr. Harris’s Collection of Voyages and Travels, vol. i. p. 811.
[447] Ibid. vol. i. p. 829.
[448] Tavernier’s Travels, Harris’s Collection, vol. i. p. 833.
An English writer, at the end of the seventeenth century, in a remonstrance against the admission of India muslins, for which, he says, the high price of thirty shillings a yard was paid, unintentionally compliments the delicacy of the fabric by stigmatizing it as “only the shadow of a commodity[449].”