356 COCHINCHINA. 
portion of Europe was yet in a state of barbarous ignorance, 
this extraordinary people was carrying on an extensive com- 
merce in the Eastern hemisphere, and navigating their ships 
far beyond the hmits within which modern Europeans would 
confine their voyages. By their early knowledge of the 
peculiar qualities of the magnet, and their apph cation of 
those qualities to the purposes of navigation, they possessed 
advantages which no other nation that we are acquainted 
with on the face of the globe had the good fortune to enjoy, 
till in later ages. When Vasco de Gama encountered the 
Mahommedans on the coast of Africa, who in those days 
were the most enlightened people in many of the sciences, 
they had their charts, and their astrolabes, and their astro- 
nomical tables ; but they had no compass. That the Arabs 
tiad it not at that time, and that it did not originate with 
themselves, nor was borrowed by them from any nation in 
the East, may almost safely be inferred from the name it still 
bears in their language. El Boiissola, and from its European 
form . It has appeared to many an extraordinary and an unac- 
countable circumstance that, if the Chinese, who are known 
to have traded v/ith. the Arabs, had been in the practice of 
using it, the latter should neglect availing themselves of an 
instrument which conferred on navigation such incalculable 
advantages. It is not, however, by any means impossible 
that the Arabians, learned and ingenious as they undoubtedly 
were, might have long continued a very intimate connection 
with the Chinese, without discovering the virtues of the mag- 
netic needle. In the first place, the Chinese are not a com- 
municative people : they carry with them their national 
contempt of foreigners wherever they go, avoiding all familiar 
7 
