Note 340 — APPENDIX B.

This information was apparently never asked for. The “strangers” were undoubtedly Chinese. Marco Polo (Yule, I, p. lxvi, and II, pp. 197, 327) already mentions their four-masted vessels. In his time, Chinese vessels regularly visited the west coast of India. The vizor in the guise of a mask, distinctly points to the Chinese, and the sword attached to a spear is a Chinese weapon. Up to the introduction of pig-tails by the Manju, in 1644, the Chinese wore their hair long. A punitive fleet of sixty-two Chinese vessels was sent to Ceylon in 1401. In 1417 an embassy was sent from Mu-ku-tu-su (Magadoxo) to China (Bretschneider, On the Knowledge possessed by the Ancient Chinese of the Arabs, London, 1871), and in 1431 Chinese junks might be seen at Jedda (Hirth, Verhandlungen, Berlin Geographical Society, 1889, p. 46).

During the second half of the fifteenth century the intercourse between China and Malabar seems to have become rare, until at last it ceased altogether (Richthofen, China, I, p. 10, 5).

Ramusio contemptuously suppresses the writer’s speculations about these curious strangers being Germans or Russians.