National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

144   MARCO POLO.   VOL. II. BK. III.

SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE.

XII., pp. 307 seq.

Sir Richard C. TEMPLE, has kindly sent me the following valuable

notes

ANDAMAN AND NICOBAR ISLANDS.

General Note.

Both the Andaman and Nicobar Islands have been very closely

studied by Indian Government officials for about fifty years, and they

and the people occupying them are now thoroughly understood. There

is a considerable literature about them, ethnographical, historical,

geographical, and so on.

I have myself been Chief Commissioner, i.e., Administrator, of both

groups for the Government of India for ten years, 1894-1903, and

went deeply into the subjects connected with them, publishing a good

many papers about them in the Indian Antiquary, Journal of the Royal

Society of Arts, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and else-

where. A general survey of all information to that date concerning the

islands will be found in the Census of India, 190 1, vol. III., which I

wrote ; in this volume there is an extensive bibliography. I also wrote

the Andaman and Nicobar volumes of the Provincial and District

Gazetteers, published in 1909, in which current information about them

was again summarised. The most complete and reliable book on the

subject is E. H. MAN'S Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands,

London, 1883. KLOSS, Andamans and Nicobars, 19021 is a good book.

GERINI'S Researches on Ptolemy's Geography of Eastern Asia, 1909, is

valuable for the present purpose.

The best books on the Nicobars are MAN'S Nicobarese Vocabulary,

published in 1888, and MAN'S Dictionary of the Central Nicobarese

Language, published in 1889. I am still publishing Mr. MAN'S

Dictionary of the South Andaman Language in the Indian Antiquary.

Recent information has so superseded old ideas about both groups

of islands that I suggest several of the notes in the 1903 edition of

Marco Polo be recast in reference to it.

With reference to the Census Report noted above, I may remark

that this was the first Census Report ever made on the Andaman and

Nicobar Islands, and according to the custom of the Government of

India, such a report has to summarise all available information under

4.