Note 272 — Extracts from “The Admirable Adventures and Strange Fortunes of Master Antonie Knivet, which went with Master Thomas Candish in his Second Voyage to the South Sea, 1591,” published in Purchas His Pilgrimes, Part IV, lib. vi, c. 7. London, 1625.

Earlier in his narrative he mentions having seen, at the Straits of Magellan, “a kind of beast bigger than horses; they have great eyes about a span long, and their tails are like the tail of a cow; these are very good: the Indians of Brazil call them tapetywason: of these beasts I saw in Ethiopia, in the Kingdom of Manicongo. The Portugals call them gombe” (marginal note by Purchas). The gombe (ngombe) of the Portugals is undoubtedly a cow, whilst the tapetywason, called “taparussu” in a Noticia de Brazil of 1589, and tapyra, in the language of the Tupi Indians, is applied to any large beast, and even to the oxen imported by the Portuguese, which they call tapyra sobay go ara, that is, “foreign beasts,” to distinguish them from their own tapyra caapora or “forest beast.”