Indian Antiquary Vol 52

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Stephen Meredyth Edwardes, Krishnaswami Aiyangar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 104

92
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[ May, 1923
in January 1922. And so I have made up my mind to put together here a somewhat enlarged edition of what I then wrote, as a memorial to one who first collaborated with me so long ago as 1883, and right up to his death was still a stand-by when certain questions of detail in research came up. Dames was a true scholar, never thinking of himself or his "reputation," content to forward knowledge at any and every opportunity and to take the help he could render others as the only reward of his erudition. Thus his notes, reviews and letters were very many and his books few. Fortunately he was induced, as I well recollect, to edit Barbosa for the Hakluyt Society and thus to leave behind him a monument to his Oriental acquirements that will last as long as the original text will be studied.
The book was published in two volumes of differing interest, and it will be convenient to divide the present comments thereon accordingly into those on vol. I and on vol. II.
Volume I.
-- I will commence my comments by saying that Dames' new edition of Barbosa is thoroughly justified by the accuracy of the translation and the great value of the numerous notes which illuminate the text in an extraordinary degree. The Oriental scholarship, the bigtorical, geographical, and numismatic knowledge displayed by him, taken with his power of patient research, make his work of the greatest value to all students of the doings of Europeans in India and the Nearer East in the earlier days of their excursions into Eastern lands. As a brother editor for the Hakluyt Society of records of the country following that in which Barbosa lived, I have some experience of the puzzles of all kinds that are before anyone who undertakes to edit the writings of the old travellers, if he would really elucidate the text before him, and I cannot help expressing my admiration of the manner in which Dames has faced and overcome those that confronted him in this work. When we consider that Barbosa wrote early in the sixteenth century, almost at the commencement of Portuguese enterprise in the East, that his book begins with a description of the east coast of Africa from the Cape to Suez, and proceeds down the Arabian side of the Red Sea, round to the Persian Gulf, up the Gulf and down again, and then round to the Indies, and thence onwards down the west coast of India to Mangalor in this first volume, one can grasp something of the variety of language, history, and geography that had to be encountered, and the vast range of the research necessary to explain properly the statements in the text with anything like scholarly, and therefore useful, accuracy. Dames has met all his difficulties in a way that has been of the highest service to myself at all events, and it is a matter of much regret to me that my own volume III, published in 1919, of Peter Mundy's travels in the early seventeenth century, covering a little of Barbosa's ground, was too far advanced in the press to enable me to utilize his notes.
From a very careful reading of the first volume from end to end, the first thing that strikes me is the closeness of comparison between Barbosa, the Portuguese traveller of the sixteenth century, and Peter Mundy, the English traveller of the seventeenth century. They had both the same spirit of travel, the same capacity for observation, the same cominand of the Oriental languages they met with, the same interest in the places they visited and the people among whom they were thrown, the same determination to record only what they saw and knew fairly, the same aloofness in their writings from current squabbles (and these were always in those days incessant and insistent), the same caution as to vouching for what they only heard, and, considering the times in which they lived and the people for whom they wrote, the same breadth of view. Both were, in fact, products of that spirit of enquiry into man and his ways that has produced the modern anthropologist. The result