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The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation — Volume 10 - Asia, Part III by Richard Hakluyt
page 59 of 364 (16%)
haue great want of victuals. Their prouision of victuals commeth out of
Bengala euery yere. The king is called Raia, and is of great force: for he
commeth to Columbo, which is the place where the Portugals haue their fort,
with an hundred thousand men, and many elephants. But they be naked people
all of them; yet many of them be good with their pieces which be muskets.
When the king talketh with any man, he standeth vpon one legge, and setteth
the other foot vpon his knee with his sword in his hand: it is not their
order for the king to sit but to stand. His apparell is a fine painted
cloth made of cotton wooll about his middle: his haire is long and bound vp
with a little fine cloth about his head: all the rest of his body is naked.
His guard are a thousand men, which stand round about him, and he in the
middle; and when he marcheth, many of them goe before him, and the rest
come after him. They are of the race of the Chingalayes, which they say are
the best kinde of all the Malabars. Their eares are very large; for the
greater they are, the more honourable they are accounted. Some of them are
a spanne long. The wood which they burne is Cinamom wood, and it smelleth
very sweet. There is great store of rubies, saphires, and spinelles in this
Iland: the best kinde of all be here; but the king will not suffer the
inhabitants to digge for them, lest his enemies should know of them, and
make warres against him, and so driue him out of his countrey for them.
They haue no horses in all the countrey. The elephants be not so great as
those of Pegu, which be monstrous huge: but they say all other elephants do
feare them, and none dare fight with them, though they be very small. Their
women haue a cloth bound about them from their middle to their knee: and
all the rest is bare. All of them be blacke and but little, both men and
women. Their houses are very little, made of the branches of the palmer or
coco-tree, and couered with the leaues of the same tree.

The eleuenth of March we sailed from Ceylon, and so doubled the cape of
Comori. Not far from thence, betweene Ceylon and the maine land of
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