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Cathay and the Way Thither : vol.2 |
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441 IBN BATUTA'S TRAVELS IN BENGAL AND CHINA.
reign of M. Tughlak, and never afterwards restored (Forbes op. cit.) This quite agrees with the statements of Ibn Batuta.
Kukah is then the still tolerably flourishing port of GOGO on the western
side of the gulf, which has already been indicated as the Caga of Friar Jordanus (sup., p. 228). Lee identified Kukah with Goa, whilst Gildemeister,
more strangely though not without misgiving, and even Defrémery, identify the Kawe of our author with that city. The traveller's repeated allusions to the tides point distinctly to the Gulf of Cambay as the position of all the places hitherto named ; the remarkable rise and fall of the tide there have been celebrated since the date of the Periplus.
The Pagan king Dunkûl or Dungdl, of Kukah, was doubtless one of the " Gohils, Lords of Gogo and Perum, and of thesea-washed province which derived from them its name of Gohilwc r" (Forbes, p. 158), and possibly the last syllable represents this very name Gohil, though I cannot explain the prefix.
SindcLbt'ar or Sandtbiu is a greater difficulty, though named by a variety of geographers, Europeans as well as Arabs. Some needless difficulty has
been created by Abulfeda's confounding it more or less with Sindcn,
which was quite a different place. For the latter lay certainly to the north of Bombay, somewhere near the Gulf of Cambay. Indeed, Rawlinson
(quoted in Madras Journal, xiv, 198) says it has been corrupted into the St. John of modern maps, on the coast of Gujarat. I presume this must be the St. John's Point of Rennell between Daman and Mahim, which would suit the conditions of Sindân well.
The data which Abulfeda himself quotes from travellers show that Sandabur was three days south of Tana, and reached (as Ibn Batuta also
tells us) immediately before Hunawar. Rashid also names it as the first city reached on the Malabar Coast. The Chintabor of the Catalan map, and the Cintabor of the Portulano Mediceo agree with this fairly.
I do not know any European book since the Portuguese discoveries which speaks of Sandabur, but the name appears in Linschoten's map in
the end of the sixteenth century as Cintabor on the coast of the Konkan below Dabul. Possibly this was introduced from an older map without personal knowledge. It disagrees with nearly all the other data.
Ibn Batuta himself speaks of it as the Island of Sandabur, containing thirty-six villages, as being one of the ports from which ships traded to
Aden, and as being about one day's voyage from Hunawar. The last
particular shows that it could not be far from GOA, as Gildemeister has recognised, and I am satisfied that it was substantially identical with
the port of Goa. This notion is supported (1) by its being called by
Ibn Batuta, not merely an island, but an island surrounded by an estuary in which the water was salt at the flood tide but fresh at the ebb, a
description applying only to a Delta island like Goa ; (2) by his mention of its thirty-six villages, for Debarros says that the island of Goa was called by a native name signifying "Thirty Villages"; and (3) by the way in which Sandabur is named in the Turkish book of navigation called the Mohith, translated by V. Hammer in the Bengal Journal. Here there is a section headed "24th Voyage ; from Kwwai Sindabur to Aden." But the original
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