,
and patiently expected, in the ports of Guzerat and Malabar, the annual
fleets of the West. [69] But the dangers of the desert were found less
intolerable than toil, hunger, and the loss of time; the attempt was
seldom renewed, and the only European who has passed that unfrequented
way, applauds his own diligence, that, in nine months after his
departure from Pekin, he reached the mouth of the Indus. The ocean,
however, was open to the free communication of mankind. From the great
river to the tropic of Cancer, the provinces of China were subdued and
civilized by the emperors of the North; they were filled about the time
of the Christian aera with cities and men, mulberry-trees and their
precious inhabitants; and if the Chinese, with the knowledge of the
compass, had possessed the genius of the Greeks or Phoenicians, they
might have spread their discoveries over the southern hemisphere. I
am not qualified to examine, and I am not disposed to believe, their
distant voyages to the Persian Gulf, or the Cape of Good Hope; but their
ancestors might equal the labors and success of the present race, and
the sphere of their navigation might extend from the Isles of Japan to
the Straits of Malacca, the pillars, if we may apply that name, of an
Oriental Hercules. [70] Without losing sight of land, they might sail
along the coast to the extreme promontory of Achin, which is annually
visited by ten or twelve ships laden with the productions, the
manufactures, and even the artificers of China; the Island of Sumatra
and the opposite peninsula are faintly delineated [71] as the regions
of gold and silver; and the trading cities named in the geography of
Ptolemy may indicate, that this wealth was not solely derived from the
mines. The direct interval between Sumatra and Ceylon is about three
hundred leagues: the Chinese and Indian navigators were conducted by the
flight of birds and periodical winds; and the ocean might be securely
traversed in square-built ships, which, instead of iron, were sewed
together with the strong thread of the cocoanut. Ceylon, Serendib,
or Taprobana, was divided between two hostile princes; one of whom
possessed the mountains, the elephants, and the luminous carbuncle, and
the other enjoyed the more solid riches of domestic industry, foreign
trade, and the capacious harbor of Trinquemale, which received and
dismissed the fleets of the East and West. In this hospitable isle, at
an equal distance (as it was c