A Relation of the Voyage to Siam, performed by six Jesuits sent by the French King to the Indies and China, in the year 1685.
London, J. Robinson 1688
pp. [i], 1-308 + index
Plate only with Durer-rhino, facing right, in landscape
Right upper corner, a flag with “Rhinoceros”
Right upper corner: “ Fig: VII”
[64]
Nine or ten leagues from the Cape Eastward there is a chain of Hills full of Lyons, Elephants, and Rhinoceroses of a prodigious bigness. Men of credit who have travelled there assured me that they had found the foot-trace of an Elephant two feet and a half in diameter,
[65]
and that they had seen several rhinoceroses as high and a sbig as an ordinary elephant. All that I can say as to that, is that I have seen the two horns which that Beast carries on its nose, fastened together as they are naturally, of a bigness and weight that inclined me to believe that what they told me of it was true. The Lieutenant of the Castle who went on that progress told me that the Rhinoceros being in rage runs his greatest horn into the ground and continues to run a kind of furrow with it, till he come up with him that has smitten him. The skin of that Beast is so hard, that it is musquet-proof, unless one takes his time to hit it, when it shews its flank, the only place of its body where fire-arms or halbards, that the Travellers carry, can wound it.
[75]
He [the Commander] had much ado to save himself from a rhinoceros of a huge bigness that was within three steps of him ready to tear him in pieces, had he not escaped it by flinging himself to one side, and getting out of sight of the beast, which sought about for him a long while to have rent him.
