No. 60. — 1908.] couto : history of ceylon. 



115 



he had noted well many times, and that they did not appear to 

 him to have been made designedly 1 , and this we say of other 

 similar ones, which are to be found in the city of Maliapor, 

 where that apostle made his abode ; because although his 

 legend does not state that he visited that island, it is a thing 

 that might have been, since a record has not been made of all 

 the places that he visited, as I have already said, in the 

 first chapter of the tenth book of the Fourth Decade, of the 

 period when the Tartars and Mogores received the faith of 

 Christ. 



In a judicial inquiry that was held in the city of Maliapor 

 by order of the king Dom Manoel in the time of the governor 

 Dom Duarte de Meneses 2 regarding the body of the holy apostle, 

 a certain Diogo Fernandez, a Portuguese, testified that in the 

 year 1517 he went from Malaca, in company with one Bastiao 

 Fernandez and an Armenian called Coja Escander, to visit the 

 house of the saint, and that he was the first Portuguese that 

 had reached there ; and that on their all entering therein they 

 found it surrounded by jungle and ruined, and at the door of it 

 a very old Moor, who had the care of keeping alight a lamp by 

 order of the heathen (who always had much devotion for 

 that house) , and who related to them many things of the life 

 of the apostle, which they had not known or heard ; and that 

 he showed them a footprint stamped in a stone, as fresh as 

 if the foot had just been placed there in that very hour^ 

 and the stone had been clay ; and another stone in which was 

 the mark of a knee ; and that it was firmly held by the natives 

 that those two signs were left there by the holy apostle ; and 

 that when they killed him he knelt on that stone, and left in 

 it that mark 3 . He said also, that in the year 1519 there went 

 thither three Portuguese from Malaca, called Antonio Lobo 

 Falcao, Manoel 4 Falcao, and Joao Moreno, who took the stone 

 with the knee-mark, and broke it, and divided it between them , 

 carrying it off as a great relic ; and that afterwards they worked 

 many miracles, as we shall tell in another part 5 . 



1 They were probably water-hollowed marks. 



2 1521-4. King Manuel died 13 December 1521. What follows 

 is recounted more fully by Barros in III. vn. xi. On this inquiry see 

 Whiteway 203. (It was conducted by Miguel Ferreira, then captain of 

 Paleacate, whom we met with supra, in V. v. vi. and V. v. viii., 

 pp. 103-7). 



3 The next four paragraphs Valentyn omits. 



4 Barros (u.s.) has Joam. 



5 The reference seems to be to VII. x. v. , which chapter is devoted 

 to the house, stone $ &c. , of St. Thomas at Meliapor. 



I 2 



