From their compilations, however, it appears that the information concerning Ceylon collected by the Macedonian explorers of India, was both meagre and erroneous. ONESICRITUS, as he is quoted by Strabo and Pliny, propagated exaggerated statements as to the dimensions of the island[1] and the number of herbivorous cetacea[2] found in its seas; the elephants he described as far surpassing those of continental India both in courage and in size.[3]
1: These early errors as to the and position of Ceylon will be found explained elsewhere. See [Vol. I. P. 1. ch. i. p. 81.]
2: STRABO, xv. p. 691. The animal referred to by the informants of Onesicritus was the dugong, whose form and attitudes gave rise to the fabled mermaid. See Ælian, lib. xvi. ch. xviii., who says it has the face of a woman and spines that resemble hair.
3: PLINY, lib. vi. ch. 24.
MEGASTHENES, twenty years after the death of Alexander the Great, was accredited as an ambassador from Seleucus Nicator to the court of Sandracottus, or Chandra-Gupta, the King of the Prasii, from whose country Ceylon had been colonised two centuries before by the expedition under Wijayo.[1] It was, perhaps, from the latter circumstance and the communication subsequently maintained between the insular colony and the mother country, that Megasthenes, who never visited any part of India south of the Ganges, and who was, probably, the first European who ever beheld that renowned river[1], was nevertheless enabled to collect many particulars relative to the interior of Ceylon. He described it as being divided by a river (the Mahawelli-ganga?) into two sections, one infested by wild beasts and elephants, the other producing gold and gems, and inhabited by a people whom he called Palæogoni[2], a hellenized form of Pali-Putra, "the sons of the Pali," the first Prasian colonists.
1: See [Vol. I. P. III. ch. iii. p. 336.]
2: ROBEBTSON'S Ancient India, sec. ii.
3: SCHWANBECK'S Megasthenes, Fragm. xviii.; SOLINUS POLYHISTOR, lii. 3; PLINY, lvi. ch. 24. ÆLIAN, in compiling his Natura Animalium, has introduced the story told by MEGASTHENES, and quoted by STRABO, of cetaceous animals in the seas of Ceylon with heads resembling oxen and lions; and this justifies the conjecture that other portions of the same work referring to the island may have been simultaneously borrowed from the same source. SCHWANBECK, apparently on this ground, has included among the Fragmenta incerta those passages from ÆLIAN, lib, xvi. ch. 17, 18, in which he says, and truly, that in Taprobane there were no cities, but from five to seven hundred villages built of wood, thatched with reeds, and occasionally covered with the shells of large tortoises. The sea coast then as now was densely covered with palm-trees (evidently coco-nut and Palmyra), and the forests contained elephants so superior to those of India that they were shipped in large vessels and sold to the King of Calinga (Northern Circars). The island, he says, is so large that "those in the maritime districts never hunted in the interior, and those in the interior had never seen the sea."
Such was the scanty knowledge regarding India communicated to Europe by those who had followed the footsteps of conquest into that remote region; and although eighteen centuries elapsed from the death of Alexander the Great before another European power sought to establish its dominion in the East, a new passion had been early implanted, the cultivation of which was in the highest degree favourable to the acquisition and diffusion of geographical knowledge. In an age before the birth of history[1], the adventurous Phoenicians, issuing from the Red Sea, in their ships, had reached the shores of India, and centuries afterwards their experienced seamen piloted the fleets of Solomon in search of the luxuries of the East.[2]
1: A compendious account of the early trade between India and the countries bordering on the Mediterranean will be found in PARDESSUS's Collection des Lois Maritimes antérieures au XVIII^e siècle, tom. i. p. 9.