On the 21st of September we discovered the main land of India; and on the 22d had sight of Diu and Damaun, cities inhabited by the Portuguese.  The 25th we came safely to anchor in Swally roads, within the bay of Cambay, which is the harbour for our fleet while in this part of India, when we were visited by the merchants of the Surat factory, the principal of whom was Mr Thomas Kerridge.

Sec.2. Description of the Mogul Empire

Although this account of Hindoostan, or the Mogul empire in India, be very incorrect, and in some places hardly intelligible, it is here retained, as a curious record of the knowledge possessed on that subject by the English about 200 years ago.  We have two editions of this account in Purchas, one appended to his narrative of Sir Thomas Roe, and the other in this relation by Terry, which he acknowledges to be the most correct, and which therefore is alone retained.  On the present occasion, instead of encumbering the bottoms of our pages with the display of numerous explanatory notes on this topographical list of places and provinces, a running commentary has been introduced into the text, so far as seemed necessary, yet distinguished sufficiently from the original notices by Terry.  The observations, by way of commentary, are marked, as this paragraph.—­E.

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The large empire of the Great Mogul is bounded on the east by the kingdom of Maug;[229] on the west by Persia; on the north by the mountains of Caucasus [Hindoo-Kho] and Tartary; and on the south by the ocean, the Deccan, and the bay of Bengal.  The Deccan is divided among three Mahometan kings and some Indian rajahs.  This extensive monarchy of the Mogul is called, in the Persian language, by the Mahometan inhabitants, Indostan or Hindoostan, meaning the land of the Hindoos, and is divided into thirty-seven distinct and large provinces, which were anciently separate kingdoms.  Their several names, with their principal cities, their rivers, situations, and borders, together with their length and breadth, I shall now enumerate, beginning at the north-west.

[Footnote 229:  Meckely, now a province of the Birman empire; perhaps called Maug in the text, from a barbarous tribe called the Muggs, or Maugs, who inhabit, or did inhabit, the mountains east of Bengal, and who are said to have laid waste and depopulated the Sunderbunds, or Delta of the Ganges.—­E.] 1. Candahar, the chief city of which is of the same name, lies N.W. from the heart or centre of the Mogul territory, bordering upon Persia, of which kingdom it was formerly a province.

2. Cabul, with its chief city of the same name, lies in the extremest north-west corner of this empire, bordering to the north on Tartary for a great way.  The river Nilab takes its rise in this country, and runs to the southwards, till it discharges its waters into the Indus.—­This is a material error.  The Nilab is the main stream of the Indus, and rises far to the north in Little Thibet, a great way N.E. of Cabul.  The river of Cabul is the Kameh, which runs S.E. and joins the Nilab, Sinde, or Indus, a few miles above Attock.  Another river, in the south of Cabul, called the Cow, or Coumul, follows a similar direction, and falls into the western side of the Indus, about forty miles below the Kameh.—­E.