That the term baḥrī qūt̤ās is interpreted by Meninski, Erskine, and de Courteille in senses so widely differing as equus maritimus, mountain-cow, and bœuf vert de mer is due, no doubt, to their writing when the qūt̤ās, the yāk, was less well known than it now is.
The word qūt̤ās represents both the yāk itself and its neck-tassel and tail. Hence Meninski explains it by nodus fimbriatus ex cauda seu crinibus equi maritimi. His “sea-horse” appears to render baḥrī qūt̤ās, and is explicable by the circumstance that the same purposes are served by horse-tails and by yāk-tails and tassels, namely, with both, standards are fashioned, horse-equipage is ornamented or perhaps furnished with fly-flappers, and the ordinary hand-fly-flappers are made, i.e. the chowries of Anglo-India.
Erskine’s “mountain-cow” (Memoirs p. 317) may well be due to his munshī’s giving the yāk an alternative name, viz. Kosh-gau (Vigne) or Khāsh-gau (Ney Elias), which appears to mean mountain-cow (cattle, oxen).[2808]
De Courteille’s Dictionary p. 422, explains qūtās (qūt̤ās) as bœuf marin (baḥrī qūt̤ās) and his Mémoires ii, 191, renders Bābur’s baḥrī qūt̤ās by bœuf vert de mer (f. 276, p. 490 and n. 8).
The term baḥrī qūt̤ās could be interpreted with more confidence if one knew where the seemingly Arabic-Turkī compound originated.[2809] Bābur uses it in Hindūstān where the neck-tassel and the tail of the domestic yāk are articles of commerce, and where, as also probably in Kābul, he will have known of the same class of yāk as a saddle-animal and as a beast of burden into Kashmīr and other border-lands of sufficient altitude to allow its survival. A part of its wide Central Asian habitat abutting on Kashmīr is Little Tibet, through which flows the upper Indus and in which tame yāk are largely bred, Skardo being a place specially mentioned by travellers as having them plentifully. This suggests that the term baḥrī qūt̤ās is due to the great river (baḥr) and that those of which Bābur wrote in Hindūstān were from Little Tibet and its great river. But baḥrī may apply to another region where also the domestic yāk abounds, that of the great lakes, inland seas such as Pangong, whence the yāk comes and goes between e.g. Yārkand and the Hindūstān border.
The second suggestion, viz. that “baḥrī qūt̤ās” refers to the habitat of the domestic yāk in lake and marsh lands of high altitude (the wild yāk also but, as Tibetan, it is less likely to be concerned here) has support in Dozy’s account of the baḥrī falcon, a bird mentioned also by Abū’l-faẓl amongst sporting birds (Āyīn-i-akbarī, Blochmann’s trs. p. 295):—“Baḥrī, espèce de faucon le meilleur pour les oiseaux de marais. Ce renseignment explique peut-être l’origine du mot. Marguerite en donne la même etymologie que Tashmend et le Père Guagix. Selon lui ce faucon aurait été appelé ainsi parce qu’il vient de l’autre côté de la mer, mais peut-être dériva-t-il de baḥrī dans le sens de marais, flaque, étang.”
Dr. E. Denison Ross’ Polyglot List of Birds (Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal ii, 289) gives to the Qarā Qīrghāwal (Black pheasant) the synonym “Sea-pheasant”, this being the literal translation of its Chinese name, and quotes from the Manchū-Chinese “Mirror” the remark that this is a black pheasant but called “sea-pheasant” to distinguish it from other black ones.
It may be observed that Bābur writes of the yāk once only and then of the baḥrī qūt̤ās so that there is no warrant from him for taking the term to apply to the wild yāk. His cousin and contemporary Ḥaidar Mīrzā, however, mentions the wild yāk twice and simply as the wild qūt̤ās.
The following are random gleanings about “baḥrī” and the yāk:—
(1) An instance of the use of the Persian equivalent daryā’ī of baḥrī, sea-borne or over-sea, is found in the Akbar-nāma (Bib. Ind. ed. ii, 216) where the African elephant is described as fīl-i-daryā’ī.