blindly copying from Mawe,
who makes the remarkable statement at page 42 of his already quoted
work, that, " the ' Pitt' or ' Regent' diamond is said to have been
found in Malacca. It was purchased by Mr. Pitt, then Governor of
Bencoolen, for less than ^20,000." Here is another rich crop of errors,
for Mr. Pitt, that is Thomas Pitt, founder of the illustrious house of
that name, was Governor, not of Bencoolen, which lies in the south of
Sumatra, but of Madras, on the Coro-mandel or east coast of India. By
following up the scent from Mawe backwards to earlier accounts, each
embellished in the copying, it is ultimately found that Malacca gets
mixed up in the story by some incidental reference to Malachite,
confounded by some ignorant amanuensis with the geographical region in
question, which reminds one of the story of the Parliamentary reporter
who contrived to convert an interrogation about Cowes in the Isle of
Wight into an agricultural question. Take again the " Gani" mine, of
which we read so much in connection with the " Great Mogul,"
but which has really no existence at all. Tavernier tells us that this
mine was called " Gani" by' the natives, and Colare or Coulour by the
Persians, and, of course, the statement has been scrupulously reported
by all subsequent writers on the subject. But nobody has ever yet
succeeded in identifying such a place as " Gani," and the word would
appear to be simply a corruption, or possibly a collateral form of the
Dravidian Kan, which means not any particular mine, but a mine in
general. On the other hand Coulour seems undoubtedly to be, not the
Gan-i-Parteal, that is, the Parteal mine on the Kistna, as is
