m B, Maclag&n— On Early Asiatic Fire Weapons. r^ j 



bombardas, also other warlike implements adapted for besieging cities •"# 

 but this does not appear to receive support from the Indian historians. 

 Tavernier refers to a tradition of the early knowledge of powder and cannon 

 in Pegu, believed to have been obtained from Asam. Writing of the 

 attack at Asam by the " Grand Capitaine Mirgimola (Mir Jumlah) under 

 the orders of Aurangzib, in 1652, (to which, the traveller observes little 

 resistance was expected, the country having enjoyed peace for five or six 

 centuries, and the people having no experience of war), he says, "Ontient que 

 c'est ce meme peuple qui a trouve anciennement F invention de la poudre et 

 du canon, laquelle a passe d' Asem au Pegu et du Pegu a la Chine, ce qui 

 est cause que d' ordinaire on 1'attribue aux Chinois. ?? f We have seen that 

 in China, the petroleum of some of its western provinces is said to have 

 been used in old time for a kind of Greek Fire. % Asam also, it may be 

 observed, is a petroleum country. Perhaps this may confirm, in some mea- 

 sure, the above suggested explanation of the guns and muskets in Burma. 

 Colonel Symes, in his account of the Embassy to Ava in 1795, considers that 

 the Burmese learned the application of gunpowder from Europeans, though 

 the substance may have been known before. " The musket," he says, " was 

 first introduced into the Pegue and Ava countries by the Portuguese. "§ 

 JSTow-a-days Ava receives English muskets. || In the Note on the intercourse 

 of the Burmese countries with Western nations, in Chapter viii of Colonel 

 Yule's Narrative of the Mission to the Court of Ava in 1855, Portuguese 

 muskets in Burma are noticed in the early part of the 16th century. There 

 is no mention of artillery till 1658, when the guns on the ramparts of Ava, 

 directed against the Chinese invaders, were said to have been served by a 

 party of native Christians, under a foreigner who is, with some probability, 

 supposed to have been an Englishman.^" But the brief notices, in the 

 chapter referred to, of the narratives of old travellers, were not made with 

 a view to any special enquiry on this subject. 



To the Chinese has been attributed, in a more or less indefinite way, a 

 very early knowledge of gunpowder artillery. Gleig, in his " Sketch of the 

 Military History of Great Britain", says that " Pobert Norton, the author 

 of a treatise called The Gunner, which was published in 1664, # # * 

 quotes Uffano, an Italian traveller in the East, as proving that not only 

 gunpowder but cannon were used so early as the year 83 of our era by the 



* India in the 15th Century by P. H. Major. (HaMuyt Soc.J Travels of Nicolo 

 Conti, p. 31. 



f Voyages de J. B. Tavernier, II, 427. 



% D. F. Porter Smith, on the Oils of Chinese Pharmacy (quoted above). 



§ Embassy to the Kingdom of Ava in 1795, II, 60. 



|| Yule's Mission to the Court of Ava in 1855, p. 75. 



If Id., p. 215. 



