This Tawclisi is a great difficulty. The French translators say, " The Isle of Celebes, or rather perhaps Tunkin ; " Dulaurier, " The coast of Camboja, Cochin-China, or Tunkin ; " Lassen, " By this name no place can be meant but Tonkin ; " whilst Walckenaer identifies it with Tawal, a small island adjoining Bachian, one of the Moluccas. This last suggestion seems to have been based on the • name only, and all have been made in connection with the assumption that the Mul-Jawa of our author is Java, which we have seen that it cannot be.
It seems to me impossible that Tawalisi should be Cambodia, Cochin-China, or Tunking, for two conclusive reasons : (1) that the voyage from Mul-Jawa to Tawalisi occupies seventy-one days, and is considered by our traveller's shipmates an unusually good passage ; (2) that the last thirty-seven days of this time are spent on the passage of the Bahr-al-Kcchit, disturbed by neither winds nor waves, a character which in this case we should have to attach to the China Sea, the very metropolis of Typhoons.
But I do not find it easy to get beyond a negative. Indeed, considering that Killa-Karai is the real name of a port in South India, and that Urduja is a name which our author in a former part of his travels has assigned to one of the Queens of Mahomed Uzbek Khan on the Wolga, and has explained to mean in Turkish `Born in the Camp,' whilst the Lady of Tawalisi herself is made to speak not only to the traveller but to her own servants a mixture of Turkish and Persian, a faint suspicion rises that Tawalisi is really to be looked for in that part of the atlas which contains the Marine Surveys of the late Captain Gulliver.
Putting aside this suspicion, no suggestion seems on the whole more probable than that Tawalisi was the kingdom of Soolo or Snittk, N.E. of Borneo. " Owing to some cause or other," says Crawfurd, " there has sprung up in Soolo a civilisation and power far exceeding those of the surrounding islanders. A superior fertility of the soil, and better means of maintaining a numerous and concentrated population, has probably been the main cause of this superiority ; but whatever be the cause, it has enabled this people not only to maintain a paramount authority over the whole Archipelago (i. e. the so-called Soolo Archipelago), but to extend it to Palâwan and to the northern coasts of Borneo and islands adjacent to it." Adopting this view, we should have the Bahr-al-Kahil in the sea between Java Borneo and Celebes, where hurricanes are unknown, and stormy weather is rare. And, the time mentioned by Ibn Batuta, if we suppose it occupied in the voyage from the upper part of the Gulf of
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