The present generation in England can have no conception how closely this description applies to what took place at many an English port before Sir Robert Peel's great changes in the import tariff. The present writer, in landing from a P. & O. steamer at Portsmouth in 1843, after four or five days' quarantine in the Solent, had to go through five to six hours of such treatment as Ibn Jubair describes, and his feelings were very much the same as the Moor's.—[H. Y.]
Ar. takāẓā, dunning or importunity.
This is the date of the Penal Code, as originally submitted to Lord Auckland, by T. B. Macaulay and his colleagues; and in that original form this passage is found as § 283, and in chap. xv. of Offences relating to Religion and Caste.
The passage referred to is probably that where Cosmas relates an adventure of his friend Sopatrus, a trader in Taprobane, or Ceylon, at the king's court. A Persian present brags of the power and wealth of his own monarch. Sopatrus says nothing till the king calls on him for an answer. He appeals to the king to compare the Roman gold denarius (called by Cosmas νόμισμα), and the Persian silver drachma, both of which were at hand, and to judge for himself which suggested the greater monarch. "Now the nomisma was a coin of right good ring and fine ruddy gold, bright in metal and elegant in execution, for such coins are picked on purpose to take thither, whilst the miliaresion (or drachma), to say it in one word, was of silver, and of course bore no comparison with the gold coin," &c. In another passage he says that elephants in Taprobane were sold at from 50 to 100 nomismata and more, which seems to imply that the gold denarii were actually current in Ceylon. See the passages at length in Cathay, &c., pp. clxxix-clxxx.
It will be seen that the Indian cry also appeals to the Prince expressly. It was the good fortune of one of the present writers (A. B.) to have witnessed the call of Haro! brought into serious operation at Jersey.