Page:Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (IA journalof535419091910roya).pdf/278

 The thanks of the Society are due to Mr. G. F. Warner, Keeper of Manuscripts, for permission to take a copy of this letter which is now for the first time published.

I have prepared some brief notes of the places, people and things specified in the letter. These are given in alphabetical order in an appendix.

This manuscript appears to me to be interesting in two respects; firstly not so much on account of its contents as for its purport to contain all that was then known in England of this part of the world. Indeed when one sees that the letter was written in 1614, more than a century after the Portuguese had been in occupation of Goa and Malacca, it seems astounding that the Directors of the East India Company (which had been founded some fourteen years before the date of this letter) should have so little information to give their principal agent in the East. The reason that there is no reference to Goa, Malacca or any other Portuguese possession is, of course, that the British could not trade there.

The document is interesting in a second respect as show- ing how small a place in the early aims of the Honourable East India Company, India itself occupied. In later years the Company so much confined itself to India that one is apt to think of India and the Company as co-extensive.

But India at one time stood for nearly everything outside Europe, Africa, and Asia Minor. Thus Marco Polo wrote (A. D. 1298). "India the greater is that which extends from: Maabar to Kesmacoran (i.e. from Coromandel to Mekran) and it contains thirteen great Kingdoms. In lia the Lesser extends from the province of Champa to Mutfili (i.e. from Cochin-China to the Kistna Delta). Abash (Abyssinia) is a very great province and you must know that it constitutes the Middle India."

To this day each country calls by the name of India that part of this vast area that it has acquired for itself: thus India to us means British India, to the French it means Pondicherry, to the Portuguese it means Goa, and to the Dutch it means the magnificent possession of Netherlands-India. The West Indies were so called because Columbus imagined that he had dis- covered a new route to the "Indias" by sailing West instead of