Page:Indian Shipping, a history of the sea-borne trade and maritime activity of the Indians from the earliest times.djvu/116

 Purāṇa mentions a childless merchant named Gokarṇa who embarked on a voyage for trading purposes but was overtaken by a storm on the sea and nearly shipwrecked. The same Purāṇa contains a passage which relates how a merchant embarked on a voyage in a sea-going vessel in quest of pearls with people who knew all about them. In the Mārkaṇdeya Purāṇa also there is a well-known passage repeated as mantram by thousands of Brahmans which refers as an illustration to the dangerous plight of the man sailing on the great ocean in a ship overtaken by a whirlwind.

But besides the religious works like the Vedas, the Epics, and the Sutras and Purāṇas, the secular works of Sanskrit poets and writers are also full of references to the use of the sea as the highway of commerce, to voyages, and naval fights. Thus in Kālidāsa's Raghuvańsa (canto 4, sloka 36) we find the defeat by Raghu of a strong naval