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Here, however, at last, we find something to justify Marco Polo in regard to the position in which he introduces the kingdom of Coilon. For, after speaking of Coulam on the Malabar coast, Barbosa goes forward to Cape Comorin, where he says the country of Malabar indeed terminates, but the “aforesaid kingdom of Coulam” still goes on and comes to an end at the city of Cail, where the King of Coulam made his continual residence. So also the “Summary of kingdoms,” etc., in Ramusio, describes the kingdom of Colam as extending on both sides of Cape Comorin.

It is intelligible, therefore, that Marco, coming upon territory belonging to the kingdom of Coilon, before reaching Cape Comorin, should proceed to speak of the city of that name, though it lay upon the western coast. But there is in this no ground for asserting, as Mr. Murray does, that “the place of that name described by Marco and other early Europeans lay to the east of that great promontory.” We have seen that a regular catena of authorities, from the ninth to the sixteenth century, concurs in representing Coulam, Kulam, Coloen, Coilon (Quilon), on the coast of Malabar, as the great entrepôt of trade with east and west, and there can be no reasonable doubt that this is the Columbum which was the seat of our author’s mission.