Chapter CACOULI to CAFFER of C by The Hobson Jobson Dictionary

of the Talipot (q.v.) or of the Palmyra, prepared for writing on; and so a document written on such a strip. (See OLLAH.)

1707.—“The officer at the Bridge Gate bringing in this morning to the Governor a Cajan letter that he found hung upon a post near the Gate, which when translated seemed to be from a body of the Right Hand Caste.” —In Wheeler, ii. 78.

1716.—“The President acquaints the Board that he has intercepted a villainous letter or Cajan.”—Ibid. ii. 231.

1839.—“At Rajahmundry … the people used to sit in our reading room for hours, copying our books on their own little cadjan leaves.”—Letters from Madras, 275.

CADJOWA, s. [P. kajawah]. A kind of frame or pannier, of which a pair are slung across a camel, sometimes made like litters to carry women or sick persons, sometimes to contain sundries of camp equipage.

1645.—“He entered the town with 8 or 10 camels, the two Cajavas or Litters on each side of the Camel being close shut.… But instead of Women, he had put into every Cajava two Souldiers.”—Tavernier, E. T. ii. 61; [ed. Ball, i. 144].

1790.—“The camel appropriated to the accommodation of passengers, carries two persons, who are lodged in a kind of pannier, laid loosely on the back of the animal. This pannier, termed in the Persic Kidjahwah, is a wooden frame, with the sides and bottom of netted cords, of about 3 feet long and 2 broad, and 2 in depth … the journey being usually made in the night-time, it becomes the only place of his rest.… Had I been even much accustomed to this manner of travelling, it must have been irksome; but a total want of practice made it excessively grievous.”— Forster’s Journey, edition 1808, ii. 104-5.

CAEL, n.p. Properly Kayal [Tam. kayu, ‘to be hot’], ‘a lagoon’ or ‘backwater.’ Once a famous port near the extreme south of India at the mouth of the Tamraparni R., in the Gulf of Manaar, and on the coast of Tinnevelly, now long abandoned. Two or three miles higher up the river lies the site of Korkai or Kolkai, the [Greek Text] Kolcoi emporion of the Greeks, each port in succession having been destroyed by the retirement of the sea. Tutikorin, six miles N., may be considered the modern and humbler representative of those ancient marts; [see Stuart, Man. of Tinnevelly, 38 seqq.].

1298.—“Cail is a great and noble city. … It is at this city that all the ships touch that come from the west.”—Marco Polo, Bk. iii. ch. 21.

1442.—“The Coast, which includes Calicut with some neighbouring ports, and which extends as far as Kabel (read Kayel) a place situated opposite the Island of Serendib.…”—Abdurrazzak, in India in the XVth Cent., 19.

1444.—“Ultra eas urbs est Cahila, qui locus margaritas … producit.”—Conti, in Poggius, De Var. Fortunae.

1498.—“Another Kingdom, Caell, which has a Moorish King, whilst the people are Christian. It is ten days from Calecut by sea … here there be many pearls.”— Roteiro de V. da Gama, 108.

1514.—“Passando oltre al Cavo Comedi (C. Comorin), sono gentili; e intra esso e Gael è dove si pesca le perle.”—Giov. da Empoli, 79.

1516.—“Further along the coast is a city called Cael, which also belongs to the King of Coulam, peopled by Moors and Gentoos, great traders. It has a good harbour, whither come many ships of Malabar; others of Charamandel and Benguala.”—Barbosa, in Lisbon Coll., 357-8.

CAFFER, CAFFRE, COFFREE, &c., n.p. The word is properly the Ar. Kafir, pl. Kofra, ‘an infidel, an unbeliever in Islam.’ As the Arabs applied this to Pagan negroes, among others, the Portuguese at an early date took it up in this sense, and our countrymen from them. A further appropriation in one direction has since made the name specifically that of the black tribes of South Africa, whom we now call, or till recently did call, Caffres. It was also applied in the Philippine Islands to the Papuas of N. Guinea, and the Alfuras of the Moluccas, brought into the slave-market.

In another direction the word has become a quasi-proper name of the (more or less) fair, and non-Mahommedan, tribes of Hindu-Kush, sometimes called more specifically the Siahposh or ‘black-robed’ Cafirs.

The term is often applied malevolently by Mahommedans to Christians, and this is probably the origin of the mistake pervading some of the