PALLADIUS, a Greek of the lower empire, to whom is ascribed an account of the nations of India, written in the fifth century[3], adverts to this peculiarity of construction, and connects it with the phenomenon which forms so striking an incident in one of the tales in the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. In the story of the "Three Royal Mendicants," the "Third Calender," as he is called in the old translation, relates to the ladies of Bagdad, in whose house he is entertained, how he and his companions lost their course, when sailing in the Indian Ocean, and found themselves in the vicinity of "the mountain of loadstone towards which the current carried them with violence, and when the ships approached it they fell asunder, and the nails and everything that was of iron flew from them towards the loadstone."
1: DELAURIER, Études sur la "Relation des voyages faits par les Arabes et les Persans dans l'Inde." Journ. Asiat. tom. xlix. p. 137. See also MALTE BRUN, Hist. de Géogr. tom. i. p. 409, with the references to the Periplus Mar. Erythr., Strabo, Procopius, &c. GIBBON, Decl. and Fall, vol. v. ch. xl.
2: Boats thus sewn together existed at an early period on the coast of Arabia as well as of Ceylon. Odoric of Friuli saw them at Ormus in the fourteenth century (Hakluyt, vol. ii. p. 35); and the construction of ships without iron was not peculiar to the Indian seas, as Homer mentions that the boat built by Ulysses was put together with woolen pegs, [Greek: gomphoisin], instead of bolts. Odys. v. 249.
3: The tract alluded to is usually known as tne treatise de Moribus Brachmanorum, and ascribed to St. Ambrose. For an account of it see [Vol. I. Pt. v. ch. i. p. 538.]
The learned commentator, LANE, says that several Arab writers describe this mountain of loadstone, and amongst others he instances El Caswini, who lived in the latter half of the thirteenth century.[1] EDRISI, the Arab geographer, likewise alludes to it; but the invention belongs to an earlier age, and Palladius, in describing Ceylon, says that the magnetic rock is in the adjacent islands called Maniolæ (Maldives?), and that ships coming within the sphere of its influence are irresistibly drawn towards it, and lose all power of progress except in its direction. Hence it is essential, he adds, that vessels sailing for Ceylon should be fastened with wooden instead of iron bolts.[2]
1: LANE'S Arabian Nights, vol. i. ch. iii, p. 72, p. 242.
2: [Greek: "Esti de idikôs ta diaperônta ploia eis ekeinên tên megalên nêson aneu sidêrou epiouriois xylinois kataskeuasmena">[—PALLADIUS, in Pseudo-Callisthenes, lib. iii. c. vii. But the fable of the loadstone mountain is older than either the Arabian sailors or the Greeks of the lower empire. Aristotle speaks of a magnetic mountain on the coast of India, and Pliny repeats the story, adding that "si sint clavi in calciamentis, vestigia avelli in altero non posse in altero sisti."—Lib. ii. c. 98, lib. xxxvi. c. 25. Ptolemy recounts a similar fable in his geography. Klaproth, in his Lettre sur la Boussole, says that this romantic belief was first communicated to the West from China. "Les anciens auteurs Chinois parlent aussi de montagnes magnétiques de la mer méridionale sur les côtes de Tonquin et de la Cochin Chine; et disent que si les vaisseaux étrangers qui sont garnis de plaques de fer s'en approchent ils y sont arrètés et aucun d'eux ne peut passer par ces endroits."—KLAPROTH, Lett. v. p. 117, quoted by SANTAREM, Essai sur l'Histo. de Cosmogr., vol. i. p. 182.
Another peculiarity of the native craft on the west coast of Ceylon is their construction with a prow at each extremity, a characteristic which belongs also to the Massoula boats of Madras, as well as to others on the south of India. It is a curious illustration of the abiding nature of local usages when originating in necessities and utility, that STRABO, in describing the boats in which the traffic was carried on between Taprobane and the continent, says they were "built with prows at each end, but without holds or keels."[1]