the chief rendezvous for merchant vessels. A glance at the map will show that for this purpose Galle is eminently well placed.
Nor can the commercial reputation of Ceylon be said to have ever waned; for of this island alone it may be said that, during all the changes in the course of commerce, since the Phœnicians of Gerrha first, as we believe, explored the western shores of the Indian peninsula, Ceylon has maintained her natural position as the great maritime entrepôt between the East and the West. Here, doubtless, the voyagers from each distant land met, as it were, on neutral ground, none of them, perhaps, for many ages, extending their own commercial relations beyond it. We have also Pliny's statement that the Singhalese ambassadors to Rome, in the reign of Claudius,[1] asserted that their countrymen had reached China by an overland route through India and across the Himalaya, before ships had attempted the voyage thither; while it is further certain that Ceylon also reaped the full share of the advantages maritime adventure derived from the discovery of the monsoons, and that, during the period when Rome carried on, by way of the Red Sea, an extensive commercial intercourse with the East, this island was, as it had been for so long, the chief emporium of the far East.
Passing on to the time when the transfer of the seat of empire was made from Rome to Constantinople, and when the Persians vied with the merchants of Egypt and the ship-owners of Arabia to divert the course of the Oriental trade from the Red Sea and Alexandria to the Euphrates and the Persian Gulf, Ceylon con-*
- ↑ Pliny, vi. 88.
