Note 160 — VI. HERE FOLLOWETH CONCERNING INDIA TERTIA.[150]

This is probably a legendary notice of the Andaman islanders, whom Polo represents as “having a head, teeth, and jaws like those of a mastiff dog” (iii. c. 16). And Ibn Batuta, describing the people of “Barahnakár” (under which name he seems to have mixed up the stories of the Andamans which he had heard, with his experience of some port on the main at which he had touched on his way from Bengal to Sumatra), says, “Their men are of the same form with ourselves, except that their mouths are like those of dogs; but the women have mouths like other folks” (Lee’s Trans., p. 198). The stories of the Andaman islanders are as old as Ptolemy, whose Agmatæ (compare Polo’s Angaman) and adjacent islands, they doubtless are. Till Dr. Mouat’s account, just published, we had little more knowledge of them than these 1800-year-old legends gave us, and even now we do not know much, near as they are to Calcutta.