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Here he found favour with the emperor Mohammed Inghlak, who appointed him a judge, and sent him on an embassy to China, at first overland, but, as this was found too dangerous a route, he went ultimately from Calicut, via Ceylon, the Maldives, and Sumatra, to Zaitun, then the great port of China.
The inland trade is immense, and is carried on principally by numerous vessels on the canals and rivers. Marco Polo describes porcelain, which was principally made at a place he calls Trigui; it was very low-priced, as eight porcelain dishes might be bought for a Venetian groat: he takes no notice of tea. He supposes the cowries of the Maldives to be a species of white porcelaine.
We did not steer to the Malabar coast, and so to the Gulf of Persia, as was first intended, the east monsoons blowing yet too strong, but we kept more under the African coast, where we had the wind variable till we passed the line, and made the Cape Bassa, in the latitude of four degrees ten minutes; from thence, the monsoons beginning to change to the N.E. and N.N.E., we led it away, with the wind large, to the Maldives, a famous ledge of islands, well known by all the sailors who have gone into those parts of the world; and, leaving these islands a little to the south, we made Cape Comorin, the southernmost land of the coast of Malabar, and went round the isle of Ceylon.
At present a sailing ship going from Bombay to Madras has to make a curve of five thousand miles in order to weather the Maldives and Ceylon. It seems a long course for any vessel drawing over ten feet of water to be obliged to take.
In the course of the day of the 29th of January, the island of Ceylon disappeared under the horizon, and the Nautilus, at a speed of twenty miles an hour, slid into the labyrinth of canals which separate the Maldives from the Laccadives.
In that country there are white falcons; but none of our people have been there to give us any particular information concerning them. This is probably the sea about the Maldives, which, according to the eastern geographers, divides that part of the Indian Ocean from the sea of Delarowi, or the Magnus Sinus of the ancients.
The Indians report that this land of Malabar was covered by the sea of old, which then reached to the foot of the hills, and thence to a hill, where now the islands of the Maldives are found, which were then firm land; and that in after times it destroyed that latter country, and laid bare the country of Malabar, in which are many pleasant and rich cities, dependent upon trade, which they carry on principally with Calicut, which exceeds all cities of our days in riches and in vice.
Even if, eventually, the ark might have gone ashore, with other jetsam and flotsam, on the coasts of Arabia, or of Hindostan, or of the Maldives, or of Madagascar, its return to the "mountains of Ararat" would have been a miracle more stupendous than all the rest. Thus, the last state of the would-be reconcilers of the story of the Deluge with fact is worse than the first.
This gave rise to the trade in tortoise-shell at Point de Galle, where it is still manufactured into articles of ornament by the Moors; but the shell they employ is almost entirely imported from the Maldives.
Voyage aux Indes Orientales, Maldives, Moluccas, et Brésil. Par Fr. Pyrard. Paris, 1619-8vo. These voyages, which occupied the author from 1600 to 1611, are uncommonly well written, accurate, faithful, and circumstantial, especially regarding the Maldives, Cochin, Travancore, and Calicut. There is appended a particular and methodical description of the animals and plants of the East Indies.
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