I will give you a sample
of their enchantments. Thus, if a ship be sailing past with a fair wind
and a strong, they will raise a contrary wind and compel her to turn back.
In fact they make the wind blow as they list, and produce great tempests
and disasters; and other such sorceries they perform, which it will be
better to say nothing about in our Book.[NOTE 4]
NOTE 1. - Mr. Blyth appears to consider that the only whale met with
nowadays in the Indian Sea north of the line is a great Rorqual or
Balaenoptera, to which he gives the specific name of Indica. (See
J.A.S.B. XXVIII. 481.) The text, however (from Ramusio), clearly points
to the Spermaceti whale; and Maury's Whale-Chart consists with this.
"The best ambergris," says Mas'udi, "is found on the islands and coasts of
the Sea of Zinj (Eastern Africa); it is round, of a pale blue, and
sometimes as big as an ostrich egg.... These are morsels which have been
swallowed by the fish called Awal. When the sea is much agitated it
casts up fragments of amber almost like lumps of rock, and the fish
swallowing these is choked thereby, and floats on the surface. The men of
Zinj, or wherever it be, then come in their canoes, and fall on the
creature with harpoons and cables, draw it ashore, cut it up, and extract
the ambergris" (I. 134).
Kazwini speaks of whales as often imprisoned by the ebb tide in the
channels about Basra. The people harpooned them, and got much oil out of
the brain, which they used for lamps, and smearing their ships. This also
is clearly the sperm whale. (Ethe, p. 268.)
After having been long doubted, scientific opinion seems to have come back
to the opinion that ambergris is an excretion from the whale. "Ambergris
is a morbid secretion in the intestines of the cachalot, deriving its
origin either from the stomach or biliary ducts, and allied in its nature
to gall-stones, ... whilst the masses found floating on the sea are those
that have been voided by the whale, or liberated from the dead animal by
the process of putrefaction." (Bennett, Whaling Voyage Round the Globe,
1840, II. 326.)
["The Pen ts'ao, ch. xliii. fol. 5, mentions ambergris under the name
lung sien hiang (dragon's saliva perfume), and describes it as a
sweet-scented product, which is obtained from the south-western sea. It is
greasy, and at first yellowish white; when dry, it forms pieces of a
yellowish black colour. In spring whole herds of dragons swim in that sea,
and vomit it out. Others say that it is found in the belly of a large fish.
This description also doubtless points to ambergris, which in reality is a
pathological secretion of the intestines of the spermaceti whale (Physeter
macrocephalus), a large cetaceous animal. The best ambergris is collected
on the Arabian coast. In the Ming shi (ch. cccxxvi.) lung sien hiang is
mentioned as a product of Bu-la-wa (Brava on the east coast of Africa),
and an-ba-rh (evidently also ambergris) amongst the products of
Dsu-fa-rh (Dsahfar, on the south coast of Arabia)." (Bretschneider,
Med. Res. I. p. 152, note.) - H.C.]
NOTE 2. - Scotra probably represented the usual pronunciation of the name
SOCOTRA, which has been hypothetically traced to a Sanskrit original,
Dvipa-Sukhadhara, "the Island Abode of Bliss," from which (contracted
Diuskadra) the Greeks made "the island of Dioscorides."
So much painful interest attaches to the history of a people once
Christian, but now degenerated almost to savagery, that some detail maybe
permitted on this subject.
The Periplus calls the island very large, but desolate; ... the
inhabitants were few, and dwelt on the north side. They were of foreign
origin, being a mixture of Arabs, Indians, and Greeks, who had come
thither in search of gain.... The island was under the king of the Incense
Country.... Traders came from Muza (near Mocha) and sometimes from
Limyrica and Barygaza (Malabar and Guzerat), bringing rice, wheat, and
Indian muslins, with female slaves, which had a ready sale. Cosmas (6th
century) says there was in the island a bishop, appointed from Persia. The
inhabitants spoke Greek, having been originally settled there by the
Ptolemies. "There are clergy there also, ordained and sent from Persia to
minister among the people of the island, and a multitude of Christians. We
sailed past the island, but did not land. I met, however, with people from
it who were on their way to Ethiopia, and they spoke Greek."
The ecclesiastical historian Nicephorus Callistus seems to allude to the
people of Socotra, when he says that among the nations visited by the
missionary Theophilus, in the time of Constantius, were "the Assyrians on
the verge of the outer ocean towards the East ... whom Alexander the
Great, after driving them from Syria, sent thither to settle, and to this
day they keep their mother tongue, though all of the blackest, through the
power of the sun's rays." The Arab voyagers of the 9th century say that
the island was colonised with Greeks by Alexander the Great, in order to
promote the culture of the Socotrine aloes; when the other Greeks adopted
Christianity these did likewise, and they had continued to retain their
profession of it. The colonising by Alexander is probably a fable, but
invented to account for facts.
[Edrisi says (Jaubert's transl. pp. 47, seqq.) that the chief produce
of Socotra is aloes, and that most of the inhabitants of this island are
Christians; for this reason: when Alexander had subjugated Porus, his
master Aristotle gave him the advice to seek after the island producing
aloes; after his conquest of India, Alexander remembered the advice, and
on his return journey from the Sea of India to the Sea of Oman, he stopped
at Socotra, which he greatly admired for its fertility and the
pleasantness of its climate.
