As Sopater was the first traveller who described Ceylon from personal knowledge, I shall give his account of the island in the words of Cosmas, which have not before been presented in an English translation.  “It is,” he says, “a great island of the ocean lying in the Indian Sea, called Sielendib by the Indians, but Taprobane by the Greeks.  The stone, the hyacinth, is found in it; it lies beyond the pepper country.[1] Around it there are a multitude of exceedingly small islets[2], all containing fresh water and coco-nut palms[3]; these (islands) lie as close as possible together.  The great island itself, according to the accounts of its inhabitants, is 300 gaudia[4], or 900 miles long, and as many in breadth.  There are two kings ruling at opposite ends of the island[5], one of whom possesses the hyacinth[6], and the other the district, in which are the port and emporium[7], for the emporium in that place is the greatest in those parts.”

[Footnote 1:  Malabar or Narghyl Arabia.]

[Footnote 2:  The Maldive Islands.]

[Footnote 3:  [Greek:  Argellia] pro [Greek:  nargellia], from narikela, the Sanskrit, and narghyl, Arab, for the “coco-nut palm.”  GILDEMESTER, Script.  Arab. p. 36.]

[Footnote 4:  “[Greek:  Gaudia.”] It is very remarkable that this singular word gaou, in which Cosmas gives the dimensions of the island, is in use to the present day in Ceylon, and means the distance which a man can walk in an hour.  VINCENT, in his Commerce and Navigation of the Ancients, has noticed this passage (vol. ii, p. 506), and sayt, somewhat loosely, that the Singhalese gaou, which he spells “ghadia” is the same as the naligiae of the Tamils, and equal to three-eighths of a French league, or nearly one mile and a quarter English.  This is incorrect; a gaou in Ceylon expresses a somewhat indeterminate length, according to the nature of the ground to be traversed, a gaou across a mountainous country being less than one measured on level ground, and a gaou for a loaded cooley is also permitted to be shorter than for one unburthened, but on the whole the average may be taken under four miles.  This is worth remarking, because it brings the statement made to Sopater by the Singhalese in the sixth century into consistency with the representations of the ambassadors to the Emperor Claudius in the first, although both prove to be erroneous.  It is curious that FA HIAN, the Chinese traveller, whose zeal for Buddhism led him to visit India and Ceylon a century and a half before Cosmas, gives an area to the island which approaches very nearly to correctness; although he reverses the direction in which its length exceeds its breadth. Fo[)e]-kou[)e]-ki, c. xxxvii. p. 328.]

[Footnote 5:  [Greek:  “Enantioiallelon"].  This may also mean “at war with one another.”]