The natives make incisions in the trees with a knife, and
the incense flows down. This incense is carefully watched, and can be
taken only to Dhafar, where the Sultan keeps the best part for himself;
the rest is made over to the people. But any one who should carry it
elsewhere than to Dhafar would be put to death."
The elder Niebuhr seems to have been the first to disparage the Arabian
produce of olibanum. He recognises indeed its ancient celebrity, and the
fact that it was still to some extent exported from Dhafar and other
places on this coast, but he says that the Arabs preferred foreign kinds
of incense, especially benzoin; and also repeatedly speaks of the
superiority of that from India (des Indes and de l'Inde), by which it
is probable that he meant the same thing - viz., benzoin from the Indian
Archipelago. Niebuhr did not himself visit Hadhramaut.
Thus the fame of Arabian olibanum was dying away, and so was our knowledge
of that and the opposite African coast, when Colebrooke (1807) published
his Essay on Olibanum, in which he showed that a gum-resin, identical as
he considered with frankincense, and so named (Kundur), was used in
India, and was the produce of an indigenous tree, Boswellia serrata of
Roxburgh, but thereafter known as B. thurifera. This discovery,
connecting itself, it may be supposed, with Niebuhr's statements about
Indian olibanum (though probably misunderstood), and with the older
tradition coming down from Dioscorides of a so-called Indian libanos
(supra p. 396), seems to have induced a hasty and general assumption
that the Indian resin was the olibanum of commerce; insomuch that the very
existence of Arabian olibanum came to be treated as a matter of doubt in
some respectable books, and that down to a very recent date.
In the Atlas to Bruce's Travels is figured a plant under the name of
Angoua, which the Abyssinians believed to produce true olibanum, and
which Bruce says did really produce a gum resembling it.
In 1837 Lieut. Cruttenden of the Indian Navy saw the frankincense tree of
Arabia on a journey inland from Merbat, and during the ensuing year the
trees of the Sumali country were seen, and partially described by
Kempthorne, and Vaughan of the same service, and by Cruttenden himself.
Captain Haines also in his report of the Survey of the Hadhramaut coast in
1843-1844[2] speaks, apparently as an eyewitness, of the frankincense
trees about Dhafar as extremely numerous, and adds that from 3000 to
10,000 maunds were annually exported "from Merbat and Dhafar." "3 to 10"
is vague enough; but as the kind of maund is not specified it is vaguer
still. Maunds differ as much as livres Francais and livres sterling.
In 1844 and 1846 Dr. Carter also had opportunities of examining olibanum
trees on this coast, which he turned to good account, sending to
Government cuttings, specimens, and drawings, and publishing a paper on
the subject in the Journal of the Bombay Branch of the R. As. Society
(1847).
[Illustration: The Harvest of Frankincense in Arabia. Facsimile of an
engraving in Thevet's Cosmographie Universelle (1575), reproduced from
the Bible Educator.[3]]
But neither Dr. Carter's paper and specimens, nor the previous looser
notices of the naval officers, seemed to attract any attention, and men of
no small repute went on repeating in their manuals the old story about
Indian olibanum. Dr. G. Birdwood however, at Bombay, in the years
following 1859, took up the subject with great zeal and intelligence,
procuring numerous specimens of the Sumali trees and products; and his
monograph of the genus Boswellia in the Linnaean Transactions (read
April 1869), to which this note is very greatly indebted, is a most
interesting paper, and may be looked on, I believe, as embodying the most
correct knowledge as yet attainable. The species as ranked in his table
are the following:
[Illustration: Boswellia Frereana (Birdw.).
1. Boswellia Carterii (Birdw.), including the Arabian tree of
Dhafar, and the larger variety called Mohr Madau by the Sumalis.
2. B. Bhau-dajiana (Birdw.), Mohr A'd of the Sumalis.
3. B. papyrifera (Richard). Abyssinian species.
4. B. thurifera (Colebr.), see p. 396 supra.
5. B. Frereana (Birdw.), Yegar of the Sumalis - named after
Mr. William Frere, Member of Council at Bombay. No. 2 was named from Bhau
Daji, a very eminent Hindu scholar and physician at Bombay (Birdw.).]
No. 1 produces the Arabian olibanum, and Nos. 1 and 2 together the bulk of
the olibanum exported from the Sumali coast under the name Luban-Shehri.
Both are said to give an inferior kind besides, called L. Bedawi. No. 3
is, according to Birdwood, the same as Bruce's Angoua. No. 5 is
distinctly a new species, and affords a highly fragrant resin sold under
the name of Luban Meti.
Bombay is now the great mart of frankincense. The quantity exported thence
in 1872-1873 was 25,000 cwt., of which nearly one quarter went to China.
Frankincense when it first exudes is milky white; whence the name "White
Incense" by which Polo speaks of it. And the Arabic name luban
apparently refers to milk. The Chinese have so translated, calling
Ju-siang or Milk-perfume.
Polo, we see, says the tree was like a fir tree; and it is remarkable that
a Chinese Pharmacology quoted by Bretschneider says the like, which looks
as if their information came from a common source. And yet I think Polo's
must have been oral. One of the meanings of Luban, from the Kamus, is
Pinus (Freytag). This may have to do with the error. Dr. Birdwood, in a
paper Cassells' Bible Educator, has given a copy of a remarkable wood
engraving from Thevet's Cosmographie Universelle (1575), representing
the collection of Arabian olibanum, and this through his kind intervention
I am able to reproduce here.
