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SEPTEMBER, 1974.]
THE GEOGRAPHY OF IBN BATUTA'S TRAVELS.
243
Country could apply, so well, in the mouth of Malays.
The people are described as savages, and we do not suppose that the proper Peguans were 80. But these may easily have been a tribe of the wilder races, such as the Khyens of the Arakan Yoma mountains, of which range Negrais is the terminal spur.
After spending a fortnight at the court of the King of Samatra, where he found brethren of the law from nearly all parts of the Muhammadan world, Ibn Batuta obtained leave to proceed on his voyage to China, and the king provided him with a junk and all necessaries.
After sailing for twenty-one days along the coasts of the dominions of the orthodox Sultan of Sumatra, they arrived at Mul. Jawah. This was a region of pagans, which had an extent of two months' journey, and produced abundance of excellent aromatics, especially the aloes-wood of Kaķulah and Ka márah, places which were both in Mul-JA wa h. The port which they entered was that of Kaķula, a fine city with a wall of hewn stone wide enough to give passage to three elephants abreast. Elephants were employed for all kinds of purposes ; everybody kept them and every. body rode upon them. The first thing that he observed was a group of elephants carrying aloes-wood into the town to be used as fuel! This is a kind of formula, for he tells us the same of cinnamon and brazil wood in Malabar.t
All the commentators, professed and incidental, e.g. Lee, Dalaurier, Defréméry, Gildemeistor; Walckenaer, Reinaud, Lassen, assume this Mul-Java to be the island of Java. And the explanation given of the name is from the Sanskrit Müla =root or original. This word is used in Malay, and the derivation is of course possible. But as regards the identification, surely a little consideration might have satisfied any of these learned persons that if by Mul-Java, where elephants were kept by every petty shopkeeper, and where eagle-wood was used to light the kitchen fires, the Moorish traveller did mean. Java, then he lied so
• It is worth noticing, however, that just about the samu locus must probably be assigned to Ptolemy's Berabonna.
+ Compare the statement of a MusalmAn traveller, who murod us, the other day, that "in Burma the cultivators kept and bred elephants me the people here do oxen." --ED. I See Onward's Malay Dict.
So also Crawfurd includes the peninsula and coast of Siam in his admirable Descriptive Dictionary.
egregiously that it is not worth considering what he meant. There are no elephants in Java except the one or two that may be import. ed to swell the state of native courts; and there is no eagle-wood.
On the other hand, those two circumstances, of the excessive abundance of domesticated elephants, and the unusual abundance of aloeswood, are of themselves sufficient to indicate the true position of this country as being on the shore of the Gulf of Siam.
The shores of that sea are intimately connected with the great islands of the Archipelago by natural characteristics and by trade, and no. thing is more likely than that the Arab mariners who frequented those seas should have included them, with some distinctive sign, under the terms Jáwa, Jáwi, which they append to the Archipelago generally, and its products. This distinctive sign is more likely to have been Arabic than Sanskrit, and I believe that Capt. Burton has furnished us with the word, when he tells us that the Arabs, who now confine the name of Zanzibar to the island so called, distinguish the African mainland there' as Barr. el -MOLI, or the "Continent."|| Mul-Java would thus be continental Java.
Kakula is a name that has not survived It occurs in the chaos of Edrisi's chapters on Indo-China (I. 185, 191). It may have been a colony of one of the Sri Kâ kulas of the coast of Kalinga (one on the Krishna, the other, now Srika kol, further north). Kumâra, a name that has been a source of endless confusion, and in which Arabian geographers or European commentators have mixed up Madagascar, Cape Comorin(Kumari), and Assam, but which is almost always associated with aloes-wood, I believu to be connected with Khmer, the ancient native name of the kingdom of Kamboja. I
I know of only one other book in which Mul. Java occurs. This is the History of Wassaf, who states, in his usual rigmarole style, that in A. 1. 691 (A. D. 1292) Kublái Kaan sent a fleet to subdue the island of MulJÂva, one of the countries of Hind, which was
Jour. R. Geog. Soc. vol. XXIX. p. 80. Burton says the word moli, though common in Zanzibar Arabie, will not be found in dictionaries.
Ibn Khurd Abah places Komer three days west of Banfor Chant, i... Champs or Southern Cochin China Abulfeda puto but short day's voyage between the two countries. Mr. Lane, in his notes on Sindbad, puta Komar on the Gulf of Siam.
