Title
A Voyage to the East Indies: Page 77
Description
get intoxicated. Small Vessels are built with its Timber, Fans are made with its Leaves, in short no Tree answers so great a Variety of Purposes. This Island is well stock’d with venomous Snakes Scorpions, Centipedes, large venemous Spiders, & a Sharp Tooth’d Animal with its Head like a Hog, & Body like a rat call’d a Bandicoot. they have likewise enormous Toads & other disagreeable Reptiles. Inhospitality holds her highest Court at Bombay, & has Envy, Slander and Malice for her three Favorites. . . The first European Power that possess’d the Coast of Malabar was the Portuguese who first settled at Goa, (which they now hold), but since they have dwindled away to the Insignificant Place they now hold in the system of Merit they have lost many Settlements. The English by possessing Bombay and Surat command the whole Coast. The Portuguese tho’ unable to prevent their Settlements from falling into the hands of Country Powers, and thereby not only injuring themselves, but other european Powers likewise and that very materially, look nevertheless with an insidious Eye on the English, who have rescued, and retain several of them. They will communicate no Insight of the interior Part of the Country and tho possest of Maps, and Charts deny them. The inner Part of the Country to the Northward manufacture, Cottons, & a Mixture of Silk and Cotton & many very curious things in that Line, which [end page 77]
