Page:Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (IA journalofstrait391903roya).pdf/210

 these towns according to Da Cunha (4), part 1, p. 273; part 3 p. 202; part 4, p. 21.

Finally the letter A which is found on some coins, is sup- posed to stand for 'Asia' (see Da Cunha, part 1, p. 271), but 'Albuquerque' has also been suggested.

Da Cunha, the first authority on this subject, alludes to the many difficulties which the study of the coins issued by these mints presents, he states that the coins were issued by the viceroys or even by the officers of the mint in the most capricious fashion, that they frequently bore effigies and legends which had no con- nection whatever with the reigning monarchs of the periods when they were issued, that some of them were struck years after the kings, whose busts they bore, had ceased to live (4, part I, p. 267). Da Cunha continues: "But these difficulties are increased tenfold by an absolute want of examples of the early periods of the Portuguese rule in India, their place being but inefficiently supplied by some written official reports and private memoirs. The coins of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are not only scarce, but even the written documents relating to them are rare or deficient." To Valentyn (16) they seem to have been entirely unknown. Millies (12), p. 140, says: "Un des monuments même de la victoire du grand Alfonso d' Albuquer- que, la monnaie qu'il fit frapper à Malaka, a tellement disparu, que nous n'avons nullepart pu en decouvrir un exemplaire." Birch (2), in a foot note to Albuquerque's Commentaries,' Vol. II, p. 130, refers for descriptions of the earliest Portuguese coins to the works of De Faria (6) and Fernandes (8) and states that the coins themselves are so rare that they may almost be described as no longer extant," and that those writers had not figured any of them. I have not been able to see the works of De Faria and Fernandes, but I am glad to say that the collec- tion unearthed in Malacca does contain some of those earliest Jour, Straits Branch