1868.] Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. 267 



Hindu temple. Some merchants got on a Tatar.* For nearly five 

 hours the waves remained agitated ; the lightning and the wind were 

 terrible ; houses and ships were destroyed ; only the Hindu temple 

 and the Talar escaped. About two hundred thousand souls perished 

 in this hurricane.' 



Abulfazl does not mention the northern boundary of the district of 

 Bagla ; but it cannot have come up as high as Calcutta, because 

 Calcutta, or the Mahall of Kallcattd, as it is spelt in the Am — very 

 likely the oldest book in which our Capital is mentioned — belonged, 

 at Akbar's time, to the Sarkar of Satganw, near which the Portuguese 

 had founded the town of Hugli (Hooghly), which name also occurs in 

 the Ain.f 



Now the Cyclone of 1585 could not have been the' cause of the 

 devastations in the Sundarban, because Abulfazl, eleven years later, 

 in 1596, mentions four towns as belonging to the Sarkar of Bagla, 

 viz., Isma'ilpur, commonly called BaglachinJ ; Srirampur ; Shahzadah- 

 pur ; 'Adilpuf. These four places must have been of some importance, 

 because the district then paid a revenue of nearly seventy lakhs of 

 dams, i. e , nearly 180,000 lis., and was besides liable to furnish 320 

 elephants, and 15,000 zamindari troops. It would be of interest to 

 know whether the Portuguese maps, alluded to by Mr. Long, or some 

 old East India Office Records, mention these four towns. De 

 Barros' Map, and Kennel's Map of . 1772, contain nothing; and we 

 may at present assume that the ruins of towns discovered in the 

 Sundarban, belong to some of the four towns. It is noticeable that 

 three out of the four towns have Muhammadan names. 



There is a difficulty connected with the name of Bagla. The 

 Manuscripts of the A'in which are in my hands, give a B as the first 

 letter of the name. But the author of the Shjar i Miotaalchkharin, 

 who copies the above record of the cyclone from the Am, has Sugld 

 ( SSyt ), instead of Bagla ( M£j ), and distinctly asserts that the 



* A wooden bouse built on 4 pillars, often erected near palaces and temples. 

 Tbe musicians used to play on it. 



f I mention this, because Stewart, in his History of Bengal, lays an undue 

 Btress on the fact that the name of Hugli does not occur in Faria de Soma's 

 History of the Portuguese in India (1695). The name occurs in the Ain (1596), 

 and several times in the Pddishdhndmah ; vide ed. Bibl. Inclica I, p. 433, 

 where the capture of Hugli by the Moguls, on the 12th June 1632, is described. 



X The last syllable of this name is somewhat doubtful. Several JVJSS. have 

 only Bagla. 



