Note 135 — V. HERE FOLLOWETH CONCERNING INDIA THE GREATER.

Barbosa says that the King of Quilacare (Coilacaud), a city near Cape Comorin, after reigning twelve years, always sacrificed himself to an idol. See also Odoricus, in Hakluyt, ii. 161. The singular narrative in the text reminds us of Sir Jonah Barrington’s story of the Irish mower, who, making a dig at a salmon in a pool with the butt end of his scythe, which was over his shoulder, dropt his own head into the water. There is a remarkably parallel story in Ibn Batuta. When he was at the court of the pagan king of Mul-Java (which is certainly not Java, as the editors make it, but, as I hope to show elsewhere, Cambodia, or some country on the main in that quarter), he says, “I one day saw, in the assembly of this prince, a man with a long knife in his hand, which he placed upon his own neck; he then made a long speech, not a word of which I could understand; he then firmly grasped the knife, and its sharpness, and the force with which he urged it, were such that he severed his head from his body, and it fell on the ground. I was wondering much at the circumstance, when the king said to me: ‘Does any one among you do such a thing as this?’ I answered, ‘I never saw one do so.’ He smiled, and said: ‘These, our servants, do so out of their love to us.’ One who had been present at the assembly, told me that the speech he made was a declaration of his love to the sultan, and that on this account he had killed himself, just as his father had done for the father of the present king, and his grandfather for the king’s grandfather.” (Lee’s Ibn Batuta, p. 205.) Also we are told by Abu Zaid al Hasan, in Reinaud’s Relation des Voyages faits par les Arabes, etc. (Paris, 1845), how a young man of India, tying his hair to a great elastic bamboo stem, which was pulled down to the ground, cut his own head off, telling his friends to watch that they might see and hear how the head would laugh, as it sprung aloft with the resilient bamboo (i. 124). I wish I could relate, with the interesting detail with which it was told to me, a narrative which I heard from my friend Lieut.-Colonel Keatinge, V.C., of the Bombay Artillery. When encamped near a certain sacred rock on the Nerbudda, in the province of Nimar which was under his charge, a stalwart young man was brought to him, who had come thither from a distance, for the purpose of sacrificing himself by casting himself from the cliff, in fulfilment of a vow made by his own mother before his birth, in case she should, after long sterility, have a living son. After long remonstrance Colonel Keatinge at last succeeded in convincing him that it would be quite lawful to sacrifice a goat instead, and this having been done he departed with a relieved mind.