Page:The history of silk, cotton, linen, wool, and other fibrous substances 2.djvu/375

 Tavernier, who, like Marco Polo, Barbosa, and Frederick, was a merchant as well as a traveller, and therefore accustomed to judge of the qualities of goods, and who travelled in the middle of the seventeenth century, says—"The white calicuts," (calicoes, or rather muslins, so called from the great commercial city of Calicut, whence the Portuguese and Dutch first brought them) "are woven in several places in Bengal and Mogulistan, and are carried to Raioxsary and Baroche to be whitened, because of the large meadows and plenty of lemons that grow thereabouts, for they are never so white as they should be till they are dipped in lemon-water. Some calicuts are made so fine, you can hardly feel them in your hand, and the thread, when spun, is scarce discernible ." The same writer says, "There is made at Seconge (in the province of Malwa) a sort of calicut so fine that when a man puts it on, his skin shall appear as plainly through it, as if he was quite naked; but the merchants are not permitted to transport it, for the governor is obliged to send it all to the Great Mogul's seraglio and the principal lords of the court, to make the sultanesses and noble-*men's wives shifts and garments for the hot weather; and the king and the lords take great pleasure to behold them in these shifts, and see them dance with nothing else upon them ." Speaking of the turbans of the Mohammedan Indians, Tavernier says, "The rich have them of so fine cloth, that twenty-*