Page:The history of silk, cotton, linen, wool, and other fibrous substances 2.djvu/374

 and almost incredible perfection in their fabrics of cotton. Indeed some of their muslins might be thought the work of fairies or insects, rather than of men; but these are produced in small quantities, and have seldom been exported. In the same province from which the ancient Greeks obtained the finest muslins then known, namely, the province of Bengal, these astonishing fabrics are manufactured to the present day.

We learn from two Arabian travellers of the ninth century, that "in this country (India) they make garments of such extraordinary perfection, that nowhere else are the like to be seen. These garments are for the most part round, and wove to that degree of fineness that they may be drawn through a ring of moderate size ." Marco Polo, in the thirteenth century, mentions the coast of Coromandel, and especially Masulipatam, as producing "the finest and most beautiful cottons that are to be found in any part of the world ;" and this is still the case as to the flowered and glazed cottons, called chintzes, though the muslins of the Coromandel coast are inferior to those of Bengal.

Odoardo Barbosa, one of the Portuguese adventurers who visited India immediately after the discovery of the passage by the Cape of Good Hope, celebrates "the great quantities of cotton cloths admirably painted, also some white and some striped, held in the highest estimation," which were made in Bengal. Cæsar Frederick, a Venetian merchant, who travelled in India in 1563, and whose narrative is translated by Hakluyt, describes the extensive traffic carried on between St. Thomé (a port 150 miles from Negapatam) and Pegu, in "bumbast (cotton) cloth of every sort, painted, which is a rare thing, because this kind of cloths show as if they were gilded with divers colors, and the more they are washed, the livelier the colors will become; and there is made such account of this kind of cloth, that a small bale of it will cost 1000 or 2000 ducats ."