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



289 



money that the viceroy sent in the ship 1 a general quarter's 

 pay was made , where by the fortress was very well provided , 

 excepting with men, of whom it had few. And with all these 

 anxieties the captain did not fail to go on fortifying where it 

 seemed to him most needed : and because the fortification 

 that, as we have said 2 , he had made from the bastion of Sao 

 Joao to the sea-shore appeared to him weak, he ordered to build 

 a thick mud- wall two fathoms in height on the inner side, with a 

 wooden couraca* on the sea-shore . and between it and the 

 bastion he made a watch-tower with its balconies for those 

 that might fight from it, and at this work even the monks of 

 St. Francis laboured, who were always the foremost in all 

 times of need. 



Raju forthwith took the field, and mustered all his troops 

 and his weapons and munitions of war, and found the follow- 

 ing 4 ; fighting men fifty thousand ; pioneers and servants 

 sixty thousand ; elephants, both for fighting and for service, 

 two thousand two hundred ; pieces of bronze artillery, between 

 large and small, one hundred and fifty ; oxen of burden forty 

 thousand ; axes ten thousand ; alavangas three thousand ; 

 billhooks twenty thousand ; pickaxes 5 (which in India are 

 called codells 6 ) two thousand ; mattocks six thousand ; many 



1 The money was sent by Tristao de Abreu and Pedro da Costa, who 

 left Goa in rowing boats after the departure of Simao Botelho, and 

 whose arrival at Columbo in May 1586 Couto records supra, p. 277. 

 The reference here, however, may be to the ship mentioned in 

 X. vni. xvii. (p. 288) ; and it is possible that in the passage referred 

 to in note 5 on p. 288 Couto has confused this ship with that of 

 Domingos de Aguiar. 



2 See supra, p. 282. 



3 A breast-work (lit., a cuirass). 



4 The numbers given by Couto must, of course, be taken as approxi- 

 mate, founded, doubtless, chiefly on the statements of escapees and 

 fugitives. The Rajavaliya gives no estimate of Raja Sinha's forces : 

 it simply says (90) : — " After this Raja Siuha issued pay to his troops ; 

 and being determined to expel the Portuguese of Colombo set out. with 

 a numerous army of elephants, a large force on the right and left wings, 

 and shield-bearers of Kottan Devale." 



5 The manuscript omits this word. 



tt The manuscript has " codeas." The Sanskrit word kudddla (spade 

 or hoe) is found in the different Aryan dialects of India under various 

 forms (see C. A. S. Jl. vii 24), and in Tamil and Malayalam as kodali 

 (which is probably the form Couto had in his mind). In Sinhalese, 

 through loss of the initial consonant, the word has become udalu, 

 udella. I have translated the Portuguese picoes by " pickaxes " ; but 

 the implements may have been mamoties. 



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