A modern traveller was nearly wrecked on that sea, because the
two rudders were in the hands of two pilots who spoke different languages,
and did not understand each other!
(Besides the works quoted see Jal, Archeologie Navale, II. 437-438, and
Capmany, Memorias, III. 61.)
[Major Sykes remarks (Persia, ch. xxiii.): "Some unrecorded event,
probably the sight of the unseaworthy craft, which had not an ounce of
iron in their composition, made our travellers decide that the risks of
the sea were too great, so that we have the pleasure of accompanying them
back to Kerman and thence northwards to Khorasan." - H. C.]
NOTE 4. - So also at Bander Abbasi Tavernier says it was so unhealthy that
foreigners could not stop there beyond March; everybody left it in April.
Not a hundredth part of the population, says Kaempfer, remained in the
city. Not a beggar would stop for any reward! The rich went to the towns
of the interior or to the cool recesses of the mountains, the poor took
refuge in the palm-groves at the distance of a day or two from the city. A
place called 'Ishin, some 12 miles north of the city, was a favourite
resort of the European and Hindu merchants. Here were fine gardens,
spacious baths, and a rivulet of fresh and limpid water.
The custom of lying in water is mentioned also by Sir John Maundevile, and
it was adopted by the Portuguese when they occupied Insular Hormuz, as P.
della Valle and Linschoten relate. The custom is still common during great
heats, in Sind and Mekran (Sir B. F.).
An anonymous ancient geography (Liber Junioris Philosophi) speaks of a
people in India who live in the Terrestrial Paradise, and lead the life of
the Golden Age.... The sun is so hot that they remain all day in the
river!
The heat in the Straits of Hormuz drove Abdurrazzak into an anticipation
of a verse familiar to English schoolboys: "Even the bird of rapid flight
was burnt up in the heights of heaven, as well as the fish in the depths
of the sea!" (Tavern. Bk. V. ch. xxiii.; Am. Exot. 716, 762; Mueller,
Geog. Gr. Min. II. 514; India in XV. Cent. p. 49.)
NOTE 5. - A like description of the effect of the Simum on the human body
is given by Ibn Batuta, Chardin, A. Hamilton, Tavernier, Thevenot, etc.;
and the first of these travellers speaks specially of its prevalence in
the desert near Hormuz, and of the many graves of its victims; but I have
met with no reasonable account of its poisonous action. I will quote
Chardin, already quoted at greater length by Marsden, as the most complete
parallel to the text: "The most surprising effect of the wind is not the
mere fact of its causing death, but its operation on the bodies of those
who are killed by it. It seems as if they became decomposed without losing
shape, so that you would think them to be merely asleep, when they are not
merely dead, but in such a state that if you take hold of any part of the
body it comes away in your hand.
