My historian friend, Peter, has been in touch with me again as he is back at editing the Flemish merchant's text from around 1635. He apparently spoke Portuguese but is writing in Spanish so Peter thinks that the names may well be garbled but hopefully recognisable. Peter is an expert of European history and of the voyages of discovery into south east Asia. However, he is no textile expert!
The list of words which keep appearing in the text but are not in his vocabulary are, in alphabetical order:
Balacha
Caladaris
Cassa
Panos de gran
Sabane
Saranpura (Peter suspects this is the name of a city that produces a particular textile)
Sarassa and tapisarassa
You will find from the posts above that, amongst the help that Iain came up with last time was the suggestion that:
"cassa could be the same as cossae alternatively spelt khassa which was a very fine type of muslin produced in great quantities in India."
I had a stroke of luck when putting Indian textiles and V&A (London museum which has a leading collection of Indian textiles) into Google and came up with a super ID for Sarassa (and probably tapisarassa with 'tapi' or 'tapis' meaning textile and which I tend to think of in connection with textiles in Indonesia) with a reference to: 'Sarrasa: a group of nine Indian textiles made for export to Indonesia' and two images of very striking block printed textiles:
http://www.artfund.org.uk/artwork/5304/ ... -indonesia I hope that the V&A won't mind but I am going to attach one of the images below. A further hunt with this info took me to a blog
http://stylecourt.blogspot.com/2010/06/ ... dy_16.html – this has some Sarasa (not Sarassa or Sarrasa) wood block prints and also refers to the John Guy Book ‘Woven Cargoes’ Maa ceremonial banner, 14th-century, Gujarat for Indonesian market, cotton, block-printed mordant-dyed and block-printed painted resist-dyed from Woven Cargoes: Indian Textiles in the East. I was thinking when I saw the V&A photos that fine block printing from India could well come from Gujarat. The blog also refers to sarasa sent to Japan but in the 19th century and known as wasarasa. Also talks about sarasa made for Japan on the Coromandel coast. A nice definition on the blog: Sarasa is cotton cloth decorated with hand-painting or printing.
So, do join in the hunt!!! Peter and I would be very grateful for any further contributions for his list above.
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Pamela
http://www.tribaltextiles.infoon-line tribal textiles resource