IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Cathay and the Way Thither : vol.2 |
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Citation Information
378 RECOLLECTIONS OF TRAVEL IN THE EAST,
one dares take this privilege from the Christians but at the peril of death.1 I spent four days there ; there is an excellent pearl fishery at the place.
•
Now to say something of the monstrous creatures which histories or romances have limned or lied about, and have represented to exist in India. Such be those that St. Augustine speaks. of in the Sixteenth Book De Civitate Dei ; as, for example, that there be some folks who have but one eye in the forehead ; some who have their feet turned the wrong way; some alleged to partake of the nature of both sexes, and to have the right breast like a man's, the left breast
years earlier than Barbosa's voyage, the Syrian Bishop Jaballaha, who had been sent by the Patriarch to take charge of the Indian Christians, reported that the House of St. Thomas had begun to be inhabited by some Christians, who were engaged in restoring it.
The Portuguese have a curious history of the search for the bones of St. Thomas by a deputation sent by the Viceroy Duarte Menezes in 1522, under orders from King John III. The narrative states circumstantially that the Apostle's bones were found, besides those of the king whom he had converted, and an inscription commemorating the building of the church by St. Thomas, etc. The bones were eventually removed to Goa. Yet older tradition in the West asserted positively that Thomas was buried at Edessa.
There are numbers of poor native Christians at Madras now. Most of the men who man the masûla or surf-boats are such. Have they come down from St. Thomas's time, or who are they ? Does anybody know ? (See P. Vincenzo Maria, Viaggi, pp. 132-136; Assemanni, pp. 32 and 450; Linschoten, p. 28 ; Gasparo Balbi, f. 86 ; Kircher, China Illustrata, p. 53; Heber's Journal ; Barbosa in Ramusio, i, f. 315 ; Hamilton's New Account of the E. Indies, 1744, i, 359 ; Fabricius, Collection of Apocryphal books of New Testament (proper title mislaid), pp. 691, 699 ; Reinaud in Mena. de l'Acad. des Insc. (1849) xviii, p. 95; Maffei, Historia Indica, 1. viii; Faria y Sousa's Portuguese Asia, pt. iii, c. 7.)
' One of the old copper grants, which are claimed by the Malabar Christians as the charters of their ancient privileges, contains a passage thus interpreted in the Madras Journal for 1844, p. 119: " We have given as eternal possession to Iravi Corttan, the lord of the town, the brokerage and due customs of all that may be measured by the para, weighed by the balance, stretched by the line, of all that may be counted or carried,... salt, sugar, musk, and lamp-oil, or whatever it be, namely within the river mouth of Codangulor" (Cranganore) etc.
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