sessed the genius of the Greeks or Phoenicians, they might have
spread their discoveries over the southern hemisphere. I am not
qualified to examine, and I am not disposed to believe, their distant
voyages to the Persian Gulf or the Cape of Good Hope; but their
ancestors might equal the labors and success of the present race, and
the sphere of their navigation might extend from the Isles of Japan to
the Straits of Malacca,--the pillars, if we may apply that name, of an
Oriental Hercules. Without losing sight of land, they might sail along
the coast to the extreme promontory of Achin, which is annually visited
by ten or twelve ships laden with the productions, the manufactures, and
even the artificers of China; the Island of Sumatra and the opposite
peninsula are faintly delineated as the regions of gold and silver; and
the trading cities named in the geography of Ptolemy may indicate that
this wealth was not solely derived from the mines. The direct interval
between Sumatra and Ceylon is about three hundred leagues: the Chinese
and Indian navigators were conducted by the flight of birds and
periodical winds; and the ocean might be securely traversed in
square-built ships, which instead of iron were sewed together with the
strong thread of the cocoanut. Ceylon, Serendib, or Taprobana, was
divided between two hostile princes; one of whom possessed the
mountains, the elephants, and the luminous carbuncle, and the other
enjoyed the more solid riches of domestic industry, foreign trade, and
the capacious harbor of Trinquemale, which received and dismissed the
fleets of the East and West. In this hospitable isle, at an equal
distance (as it was computed) from their respective countries, the silk
merchants of China, who had collected in their voyages aloes, cloves,
nutmeg, and sandal-wood, maintained a free and beneficial commerce with
the inhabitants of the Persian Gulf. The subjects of the great king
exalted, without a rival, his power and magnificence; and the Roman, who
confounded their vanity by comparing his paltry coin with a gold medal
of the Emperor Anastasius, had sailed to Ceylon in an AEthiopian ship as
a simple passenger.

As silk became of indispensable use, the Emperor Justinian saw with
concern that the Persians had occupied by land and sea the monopoly of
this important supply, and that the wealth of his subjects was
continually drained by a nation of enemies and idolaters. An active
government would have rest