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Updated: June 22, 2025
Grant has finished his calculations below. He has found for a result that the ship is among the Maldive reefs. He is certain there must be some error in his work, and he sets himself to revise his figures. But the breeze sweeps into the cabin with a faint command from the upper air "Back the main-yard!" and he shrewdly guesses that his calculations are correct.
Vincent, to consider these as the Maldive Islands. In identifying places mentioned by the ancients, we should therefore be guided more by the descriptions they give, than by the locality they assign to them.
In 1607, a fleet was sent to the Maldives by the King of Bengal, in order to carry off the 100 or 120 cannon which the Maldive sovereign owed to the wreck of numerous Portuguese vessels. Pyrard, notwithstanding all the liberty allowed him, and that he had become a landholder, was desirous to behold his beloved Brittany once more.
After having doubled the shoals of La Fortune and Saya de Malha, and passed off the Seychelles, whilst among the atolls to the south of the Maldive Islands, which are level with the surface of the water and covered with bushy trees ending in a cluster of cocoas, they sighted the island of Ceylon and the Coromandel coast, and cast anchor before Pondicherry.
It is principally in the South Seas that their labors are carried on. Near the Maldive Islands they have formed a mass whose volume is equal to the Alps. Around New Caledonia they have built a barrier of reefs four hundred miles in length, and another along the northeast coast of Australia a thousand miles in length.
The first of these travellers is François Pyrard, of Laval. Having embarked in 1601 on board a St. Malo ship to go to the Indies to trade, he was wrecked in the Maldive Archipelago.
If Burton made one mistake, how many should I? So I put the journey off year after year. But this autumn I heard that the Sultan of the Maldive Islands intended to make the pilgrimage. He was a friend of mine. I waited for him at Suez, and he reluctantly consented to take me." "So you went to Mecca," exclaimed Ralston. "Yes; I have just come from Mecca.
The first land we sighted was that of the Maldive Islands, of which there are said to be upwards of forty thousand. They are all of a coral formation, and rise to an elevation not exceeding fourteen feet above the ocean. Generally they are much lower. The sea might easily be sent rolling over them, were they not protected by long coral reefs and sandbanks of a circular form.
In this expedition they were upon the north coast of Jucutan, being the first discovery of New Spain, or Mexico; and they returned thence to Cuba with some samples of gold, and some prisoners. In the year 1518 , Lopez Suares commanded Don John de Silveira to go and make peace with the Maldive islands, which he did accordingly.
The worthy Pyrard relates his shipwreck, the flight of a portion of his companions in captivity in the archipelago, and his long sojourn of seven years upon the Maldive Islands, a stay rendered almost agreeable by the pains which he took to acquire the native language.
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