No. 36.— 1888.] 



CAPTAIN JOAO KIBEIRO. 



277 



India " sapaon" andB. has"sa^a£"; curiously enough, L.A. 

 has the false reading " Saprao" We now come to the famous 

 statement of LeG. that "from the kingdom of Cotta alone 

 there are obtained yearly more than a thousand boat-loads, 

 of sixty tons each, of a certain sand which has a great sale 

 throughout the whole of India." Now there are two gross 

 errors here. In the first place, the boat-loads {champanas, 

 L.A.; chapanas, B.) were, according to Ribeiro (L.A. and B.), 

 sumacas of forty tons (quarenta toneladas) each; how 

 LeG. made this blunder I cannot imagine. But the other 

 error is far more serious, and for it not LeG. but B. 

 is responsible. The latter states that the article exported 

 from Cotta and so largely consumed in India was " area" 

 which LeG. naturally enough translated "sable" (sand). 

 Lee in his translation of LeG. appends a footnote to this 

 as follows : — "I cannot discover what this sand is — no article 

 of export of the kind is found now." If he had had the 

 Lisbon printed edition of Ribeiro before him, he would at 

 once have detected the error. It is noteworthy that Sir 

 Emerson Tennent, though he was not, when he wrote, aware 

 of the existence of this printed edition of Ribeiro, solved the 

 mystery. In a note on page 27 of vol. II. he says : — " A 

 passage in Ribeyro's account of the productions of Ceylon 

 has puzzled both his translators and readers, as it describes 

 the Island as despatching 'tous les ans, plus de mille bateaux, 

 chacun de soixante tonneaux, d'un certain sable, dont on 

 fait un tres-grand debit dans toutes les Indes.'—ch. iii. 

 Lee naively says that ' he cannot discover what this sand is.' 

 But as Le Grand made his French translation from the 

 Portuguese MS. of the author, it is probable that by a clerical 

 error the word arena may have been substituted for areca, the 

 restoration of which solves the mystery." There is a slight 

 error here, the Portuguese word for " sand " being area (mod. 

 areia), and not arena. Moreover, LeG. did not, as we 

 now know, make " his French translation from the Portu- 

 guese MS. of the author." Ribeiro further says that Ceylon 

 produces " also a large number of elephants, much pepper, 



