Page:Indian Shipping, a history of the sea-borne trade and maritime activity of the Indians from the earliest times.djvu/64

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

INDIAN SHIPPING

of absconding carpenters numbering a thousand who failed to deliver the goods (furniture, etc.) for which they had been paid in advance.[1] The ship in which the Punna brothers, merchants of Supparaka, sailed to the region of the red-sanders was so big that besides accommodating three hundred merchants, there was room left for the large cargo of that timber which they carried home.[2] The two Burmese merchant-brothers Tapoosa and Palekat crossed the Bay of Bengal in a ship that conveyed full five hundred cartloads of their own goods, besides whatever other cargo there may have been in it.[3] The ship in which was rescued from a watery grave the philanthropic Brahman of the Sāṅkha-Jātaka was 800 cubics in length, 600 cubits in width, and 20 fathoms in depth, and had three masts. The ship in which the prince of the Mahājanaka-Jātaka sailed with other traders from Chāmpā (modern Bhagalpur) for Suvarṇabhūmi (probably either Burma or the Golden Chersonese, or the whole Farther-Indian coast) had on board seven caravans with their beasts. Lastly, the Dāthā dhātu wanso, in relating the story of the conveyance of the Tooth-relic from Dantapura to Ceylon, gives an interesting description of a ship.

  1. "There stood near Benares a great town of carpenters containing a thousand families." (Cambridge translation of Jātakas.)
  2. Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, 57, 260.
  3. Bishop Bigandet's Life of Godama, 101.

30