[Footnote 1:  CESARE DE FREDERICI, a Venetian merchant, whose travels in India, A.D. 1563, have been translated by HICKOCKE, says of Zeilan, that, “they find there some rubies, but I have sold rubies well there that I brought with me from Pegu.”—­In Hakluyt, vol. i. p. 226.]

The residence of the King was at “Colmucho” (Colombo), whither vessels coming for elephants, cinnamon, and gems brought fine cloths from Cambay, together with saffron, coral, quicksilver, vermilion, and specie, and above all silver, which was more in demand than all the rest.

Such is the sum of intelligence concerning Ceylon recorded by the Genoese and Venetians during the three centuries in which they were conversant with the commerce of India.  Their interest in the island had been rendered paramount by the events of the first Crusades, but it was extinguished by the discovery of the passage round the Cape of Good Hope.  In the period which intervened the word traveller may be said to have been synonymous with merchant[1], and when the occupation of the latter was withdrawn, the adventures of the other were suspended.  The vessels of the strangers, in a very few years after their first appearance in the Indian seas, began to divert from its accustomed channel, the stream of commerce which for so many ages had flowed in the direction of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf; and the galleons of Portugal superseded the caravans of Arabia and the argosies of Venice.

[Footnote 1:  CAESAR, FREDERICK opens the account of his wanderings in India, A.D. 1563, as follows:—­“Having for the space of eighteen years continually coasted and travelled in many countries beyond the Indies, wherein I have had both good and ill success in my travels" &c.  He may be regarded as the last of the merchant voyagers of Venice, His book was translated into English almost simultaneously with its appearance in Italian, under the title of “The Voyages and Travaile of M. Caesar Fredrick, Merchant of Venice, into the East Indies, and beyond the Indies, written at sea, in the Hercules of London, the 25th March, 1588, and translated out of Italian by Mr. THOMAS HICKOCKE, Lond, 4to. 1588.”  The author, who left Venice in 1563, crossed over from Cape Comorin to Chilaw, to be present at the fishery of pearls, which he describes almost as it is practised at the present time.  The divers engaged in it were all Christians (see Christianity in Ceylon, ch. i. p. 11), under the care of friars of the order of St. Paul.  Colombo was then a hold of the Portuguese, but without “walles or enemies;” and thence “to see how they gather the sinnamon, or take it from the tree that it groweth on (because the time that I was there, was the season that they gather it, in the moneth of Aprill) I, to satisfie my desire, went into a wood three miles from the citie, although in great danger, the Portugals being in arms, and in the field with the king of the country.”  Here he gives with great accuracy the particulars of the process of peeling cinnamon, as it is still practised by the Chalias.]