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| 0204 |
Southern Tibet : vol.1 |
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OCR Text
CHAPTER XVI.
EAST INDIAN TRAVELLERS IN THE SIXTEENTH AND
SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES.
A long time should elapse before the Europeans, Andrade, Grueber and
Dorville, Desideri and Freyre, and the Capuchin Missionaries visited Tibet. And
with some reason Andrade could be said to have discovered the mysterious country,
for at this time nobody seems to have remembered the vague information brought
back by Odoric. Nor had the wonderful tales of Plano Carpini, Rubruck and Marco
Polo made any deep impression in Europe, and Tibet had indeed to be rediscovered.
The name of the country, however, was sometimes, though very rarely, men-
tioned by travellers who visited India even before Andrade's journey, though they
did not know where it was situated any more than did the Arabian geographers.
So much the more attention was attracted by the source of one of the three
rivers, which are the object of this historical account, namely, the Indus, and gener-
ally in connection with speculations regarding the source of the Ganges. The follow-
ing representatives of the great class of East India travellers will give an idea of the
knowledge about the countries just north of India as possessed by Europe in the
second half of the 16th and the first half of the 17th century. All the information
they were able to gather was founded on hearsay, and therefore from a geographical
point of view of very little value.
When Anthony Jenkinson, in 1558, visited the western parts of Central
Asia, he only heard that the Oxus had its sources on the mountains of »Paraponisus» in
India, and in Bokhara he met merchants who came from »the furthest parts of India,
even from the country of Bengala, & the river Ganges»;¹ and amongst the notes
Richard Johnson, a year later, gathered of different roads from Russia to Cathay,
we find one, given by a Tartarian merchant in Bokhara that twenty days' journey
from Cathay was a country, »where liveth the beast that beareth the best Muske»,²
a statement in which we feel, as it were, a smell of distant Tibet.
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