[333] “Balasci” are the pink rubies named after the country of their origin, Badakhshi, which was usually known, according to Ibn Batuta, as Al-balaksh (Yule’s Marco Polo, I, p. 169; Heyd, Geschichte des Levante-Handels, 1879, I, p. 582). Badakhshi is Badakhshan, and not a kingdom near Pegu and Bengal, as supposed by Duarte Barbosa (Hakluyt Society’s edition, 1866, p. 212).
[334] The latter part of this sentence is omitted by Ramusio.
[335] Bab el Mandeb.
[336] The Rio dos Bons Signaes, or Zambezi.
[337] Malvasia (Malmsey) is a luscious Greek wine, named after the town of Napoli di Malvasia, in Laconia. The vines were transplanted to Crete, Madeira, and other places.
[338] Ramusio says: “they had a beard between the nose and the mouth, such as is worn by the courtiers at Constantinople, who call it a moustache.”
[339] Ramusio adds: “of Melinde”. The “pilot” here referred to was Gaspar da Gama. See Appendix E.
[340] This information was apparently never asked for. The “strangers” were undoubtedly Chinese. Marco Polo (Yule, I, p. lxvi, and II, pp. 197, 327) already mentions their four-masted vessels. In his time, Chinese vessels regularly visited the west coast of India. The vizor in the guise of a mask, distinctly points to the Chinese, and the sword attached to a spear is a Chinese weapon. Up to the introduction of pig-tails by the Manju, in 1644, the Chinese wore their hair long. A punitive fleet of sixty-two Chinese vessels was sent to Ceylon in 1401. In 1417 an embassy was sent from Mu-ku-tu-su (Magadoxo) to China (Bretschneider, On the Knowledge possessed by the Ancient Chinese of the Arabs, London, 1871), and in 1431 Chinese junks might be seen at Jedda (Hirth, Verhandlungen, Berlin Geographical Society, 1889, p. 46).
During the second half of the fifteenth century the intercourse between China and Malabar seems to have become rare, until at last it ceased altogether (Richthofen, China, I, p. 10, 5).
Ramusio contemptuously suppresses the writer’s speculations about these curious strangers being Germans or Russians.