Marco Polo
translation: Henry Yule, Henri Cordier

THE TRAVELS OF MARCO POLO
Volume II.
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NICOBARS.

P. 307. No king or chief.—This is incorrect. They have distinct village communities, governed each by its own chief, with definite rules of property and succession and marriage. See Census Report pp. 214, 212.

Pp. 307-308, Note 1. For Pulo Gomez, see BOWREY, Countries Round the Bay of Bengal, ed. Temple, Hakluyt Society, p. 287 and footnote 4. Bowrey (c. 1675) calls it Pullo Gomus, and a marine journal of 1675 calls it Polo Gomos.

Origin of the name Nicobars.—On this point I quote my paragraph thereon on p. 185, Census Report.

"The situation of the Nicobars along the line of a very ancient trade has caused them to be reported by traders and sea-farers through all historical times. Gerini has fixed on Maniola for Car-Nicobar and Agathodaimonos for Great Nicobar as the right ascription of Ptolemy's island names for this region. This ascription agrees generally with the mediaeval editions of Ptolemy. Yule's guess that Ptolemy's Barussae is the Nicobars is corrected by Gerini's statement that it refers to Nias. In the 1490 edition of Ptolemy, the Satyrorum Insulae placed to the south-east of the Malay Peninsula, where the Anamba islands east of Singapore, also on the line of the old route to China, really are, have opposite them the remark:—qui has inhabitant caudas habere dicuntur—no doubt in confusion with the Nicobars. They are without doubt the Lankhabalus of the Arab Relations (851 A.D.), which term may be safely taken as a misapprehension or mistranscription of some form of Nicobar (through Nakkavar, Nankhabar), thus affording the earliest reference to the modern term. But there is an earlier mention of them by I-Tsing, the Chinese Buddhist monk, in his travels, 672 A.D., under the name of the Land of the Naked People (Lo-jen-kuo), and this seems to have been the recognised name for them in China at that time. 'Land of the Naked' translates Nakkavaram, the name by which the islands appear in the great Tanjore inscription of 1050. This name reappears in Marco Polo's Necuveran 1292, in Rashiduddin's Nakwaram 1300, and in Friar Odoric's Nicoveran 1322, which are the lineal ancestors of the 15th and 16th Century Portuguese Nacabar and Nicubar and the modern Nicobar. The name has been Nicobar since at least 1560. The fanciful story of the tails is repeated by the Swede Kjoeping as late as 1647."

Nicobar clearly means the Land of the Naked, but that does not correctly describe the people. I have never seen either a naked man or woman in the Nicobars. The men are nearly naked, but they wear a string round the waist with a very small loincloth. The string is so tied as to leave two long streamers behind, which have very much the appearance of a tail as the man walks along, and no doubt this gave rise to the idea that they were tailed men. The women wear a petticoat coming below the knees, generally red.

The Nicobarese are not (...)

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